500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017) is the final installment in Pamela Yates's documentary saga about Guatemala. It covers the 2013–2014 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide as well as the 2015–2016 Maya and peasant uprising. Based on Indigenous and Maya Kaqchikel concepts by Emma Chirix (body/land/cosmos) and Aura Cumes (Indigenous women epistemic authority), this essay analyzes recent events as a disruption of the heteropatriarchal-colonial economic system in Guatemala. Perspectives from Transnational Feminism, Ecofeminism, and Indigenous Feminist and Queer Theories are weighed against the principal question of this research: What is the relationship between violence against Indigenous women and violence against the land? Following Theodor Roszak's (1992) concern with humanity's sanity and “environmental neurosis,” this question is proposed as a bridge between Native Science (Cajete, 2000) and Ecopsychology.
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