WATERS-AS-TERRITORIES: A feminist situated perspective to understand current hydrosocial struggles in Chiloé (and beyond)

Abstract

In Latin America, organizations, movements, and alliances led by Indigenous, peasant, afro-descendant, and mestizo women are particularly important in resisting extractivist activities as well as in coproducing concepts, methods, and praxis that invite us to do politics otherwise. Building on our work with/within the Asamblea de Mujeres Insulares por las Aguas (AMIPA) – a women's organization in defense of waters in the Chiloé archipelago (southern Chile) – we examine the resistance to energy-related conflicts by engaging with and expanding the Riverhood framework from a situated feminist perspective. Particularly, we will examine how the Riverhood framework (and its four ontologies/dimensions) relate, take different forms, and extend when considering AMIPA and allies’ recent turn to defend the Mawida Piwchen (Cordillera del Piuchén). We explore how this ‘new wave’ of (green) extractivism, focused on the Cordillera, represents a broader political-ontological struggle over waters and territories, from which the Piwchen – a multifaceted aqueous/territorial (more-than-human) being – is entering into politics. We highlight the role of women as key political articulators across organizations when analyzing how multiple ways of worlding – such as scientific knowledges, Indigenous cosmologies, and diverse feminisms – connect at the confluence of multiple (energy, land, and water) struggles. We argue that these connections not only express ‘epistemic interfaces’ but are also embodied-territorial intra/interconnections with multiple water bodies and watery beings. We suggest that these (feminist situated) articulations facilitated by AMIPA and allies offer a grounded and expansive expression of the ontology of “rivers-as-territories” and materialize other Riverhood ontologies, particularly when Chiloé's hydrosocial territory is re-imagined through hydro(geo-eco)-logic, hydro-cosmological, and (as we suggest) ‘hydrocorporeal’ dimensions. As a grounded contribution to the Riverhood framework, we conceptualize this comprehensive ontology as ‘Waters-as-Territories’ (both in capital letters and plural terms), which offer alternative ways of living, relating, and being with plural/territorialized waters.