Environmental for Food Justice

Indigenous protest, Quito, March 2012, after a 15-day march demanding an end to open pit mining and new oil concessions. Photo credit: Links Journal      Moderator’s Note: Over the years I have covered local and global struggles against extractive industries because these represent one of the most destructive forces of environmental violence on the planet. This violence is the result of colluding forces involving corrupt neoliberal states and their brutally efficient corporate partners. On occasion our coverage of indigenous struggles against extractive colonialism invites a thoughtful theoretical intervention and so I present the work of Manuela Picq, a Latin Americanist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, who presents a compelling argument for the privileging of Indigeneity as a category for the articulation of human and ecosystem rights. Her principal argument is that indigenous resistance is a threat to the established Westphalian order that is the basi...