Perspectives of Environmental Justice from Indigenous Peoples of Latin America: A Relational Indigenous Environmental Justice

In Latin America, indigenous peoples' demands have revolved around political and territorial autonomy and self-determination. However, these have recently evolved to demands for environmental self-determination, due to processes of extractivism and global environmental transformations. These situations have led indigenous peoples to propose new demands and rights, which call for a cultural vision of environmental justice that includes indigenous peoples' rights and nonhumans' and territorial rights under their own conceptions of ancestral law and justice. Under these perspectives, environmental justice should be understood as an ethical, political, territorial, and reciprocal action with the nonhumans from indigenous territorial and cultural principles. These have emerged as part of spatial, environmental, and territorial alternatives incorporating cultural principles centered around five axes: the positioning of other relationships with the nonhumans (relational natures), horizontal and vertical territorial politics (relational spacialities), relationship between men and women under other categories of gender, life practices based on their knowledge, and environmental autonomy and self-determination. All this, according to their identity and political dynamics, so that it leads to what can be termed as a relational indigenous environmental justice, which involves expanding our notions of environmental justice.