ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Dyn.
Sec. Environment, Politics and Society
This article is part of the Research TopicCollective Action, Governance and Environmental Policies: Transboundary and Multidimensional PerspectivesView all 7 articles
We still live among you: Colonial Continuities, Biocultural Resistance, and the Struggle for Environmental Justice in Upushwea, the territory of the last Yaghan people
Provisionally accepted
- 1Cape Horn International Center for Global Change Studies and Biocultural Conservation (CHIC), Puerto Williams, Chile
- 2Universidad Católica de Temuco, Chile, Temuco, Chile
- 3Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, UC Language Center Lecturer, Santiago, Chile
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The article explores the old and the contemporary struggles of the ancestral inhabitants (Yaghan, Kawéskar, and Selkham peoples) of Upushea (Puerto Williams), in Chile. A historiographical account of European settlers’ colonization is enriched with a critical analysis of new post-colonial dispossession through neoliberal policies embedded in capitalist expansion into the reserves of the Navarino island and the home of ancestral lives. This article argues that enduring colonial logics persist through marine privatization, thus creating epistemic erasure and providing evidence of ongoing colonial epistemic genocide. The article highlights an indigenous grandmother’s resistance rising as a custodian of the memory and relational knowledge of her ancestors, and it calls for epistemic reparations in line with the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Chilean law. Recognition of epistemic genocide should inform the adoption of a commons-based governance and protection of the biocultural heritage of indigenous peoples in Upuswhea.
Keywords: settler colonialism, political ecology, Yaghan, commons, Biocultural Heritage, epistemic genocide, UNESCO
Received: 22 Mar 2025; Accepted: 02 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mansilla Sepúlveda and Soza. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Juan Mansilla Sepúlveda
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