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Ulloa-A- 2017-Perspectives of Environmental Justice from Indigenous Peoples

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 ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Volume 10, Number 6, 2017 Original Articles
ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
DOI: 10.1089/env.2017.0017

Perspectives of Environmental Justice

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

Astrid Ulloa

ABSTRACT
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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 situa-
tions 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 indig-
enous 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 envi-
ronmental justice, which involves expanding our notions of environmental justice.

Keywords: Latin America, indigenous peoples, climate justice, environmental self-determination, rela-
tional indigenous environmental justice

INTRODUCTION situations have led indigenous peoples to propose new

demands and rights, which call for a cultural vision of

I n 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 discursive, symbolic, and de facto appro-
priation of their bodies, territories, and natures. The
current dynamics related with scenarios of creation,
appropriation, and globalization of natures, led by states
and other actors, have caused in indigenous territories
transformations in identity (gender and ethnicity),
global–local economic relationships, internal and ex-
ternal territorial order, new environmental conditions,
state’s policies, and armed conflict and violence. These
Dr. Astrid Ulloa is Full Professor at Department of Geography,
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia.
environmental justice that includes indigenous peoples’
rights and nonhumans’ rights under their own concep-
tions of ancestral law and justice. In this sense, what is
understood as environmental self-determination refers
to indigenous notions of justice that are based on a sense
of responsibility and reciprocity with humans and
nonhumans and therefore imply specific actions and
practices that imply interactions of the diverse actors
with superimposed territorialities. Under these per-
spectives, environmental justice should be understood
as an ethical, political, territorial, and reciprocal action
with the nonhumans from indigenous territorial and
cultural principles. Building on indigenous peoples’
identity and political dynamics leads to what I call a
relational indigenous environmental justice, which ex-
pands our notions and understandings of environmental
justice.

175
 176
Thus, indigenous peoples propose a notion of justice,
which could be considered environmental justice as es-
tablished, but is in fact based on other valuations and
rights that involve territory, culture, and nonhumans. In
fact, indigenous peoples’ perspective differs from main-
stream environmental justice debates related to recogni-
tion of rights, distribution, participation and capabilities,
environmental injustices, environmental conflicts, social
movements, and local confrontations.1 However, the in-
digenous movements have made connections and artic-
ulations with these concepts but simultaneously drawing
upon their own different and distinctive perspectives.
For these reasons, rather than presenting the similari-
ties and/or distinctions with the different approaches of
environmental justice, I will present indigenous peoples’
proposals that look for justice for their territories, hu-
mans, and nonhumans. Indigenous peoples’ perceptions
of justice are based on the following notions and de-
mands: putting relational ontologies at the center of a
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rights-based approach to consider nonhumans’ rights,
including to not forget the implications of epistemic vi-
olence and ethno- and ecocide generated by the current
global environmental geopolitics of knowledge and
economic dynamics; proposing other notions of justice
by including territory and ‘‘nature’’ as ‘‘victims’’ of
processes of extractions and destruction of environment;
considering historical inequalities that were respondent
to modern dual conceptions, which were implemented
since the conquest and colonial processes; confronting
the extractivist processes that erased legal, environmen-
tal, and cultural rights previously recognized; and de-
manding other perspectives of environmental justice in
which humans, nonhumans, and the territory are included
as living beings and as political actors.
In Latin America, there are *45,000,000 persons who
belong to 826 indigenous peoples.2 In this context and
given the cultural and historical diversity, the idea of
environmental justice from indigenous perspectives is
difficult to generalize. Nevertheless, there are crosscut-
ting debates, to which I will refer, that have emerged in
my experience of over 30 years of working with indig-
enous peoples in Colombia and in other parts of Latin
America, which can be considered a general demand of
environmental justice to confront extractivisms. Arising
1 3
David Schlosberg. Defining Environmental Justice: The-
ories, Movements and Nature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007); David Schlosberg. ‘‘Theorising Environmental Justice:
The Expanding Sphere of a Discourse.’’ Environmental Politics
22 (2013): 37–55; Ryan Holifield. ‘‘Environmental Justice and
Political Ecology.’’ In Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James
McCarthy (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology.
(London: Routledge, 2015), 585–597; Philippe Le Billion.
‘‘Environmental Conflict.’’ In Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and
James McCarthy (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Political
Ecology.. (London: Routledge, 2015), 598–608; Arturo Escobar.
‘‘Territorios de diferencia: la ontologı́a polı́tica de los ‘‘derechos
al territorio’’. Desenvolvimento e meio ambiente 35 (2015): 89–
100; among others.
2
CEPAL. Los pueblos indı́genas en América Latina. Avances
en el último decenio y retos pendientes para la garantı́a de los
derechos. (Santiago de Chile: Naciones Unidas, 2014).
ULLOA
from my ethnographic experience and in dialogue with
indigenous peoples’ leaders and intellectuals, as well as
theoretical perspectives from Latin America, I propose
the conceptualization of relational indigenous environ-
mental justice as a way to put in discussion indigenous
peoples’ perspectives with general visions of environ-
mental justice. To do that I will develop the implications
of extractivisms and the political and environmental re-
sponses of indigenous peoples, as well as their proposals
around environmental justice.
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATIONS
VERSUS LOCAL RESPONSES
In Latin America, debates on transformations and en-
vironmental crises have been related to environmental
inequalities and extraction processes initiated since
the conquest and colonial period. Current debates on
extractive processes have become important given the
increase of them, with the following implications: pro-
cesses that involve territorial control, appropriation of
local resources, displacement of people out of their ter-
ritories, land and green grabbing, and violent conflict,
among others. This culminates in what can be termed
extractivisms, which are associated with programs re-
lated to climate change3 and extraction processes linked
to mining, hydrocarbons, water, or agribusinesses, among
others, resulting in environmental degradation and other
sociopolitical and cultural impacts and constructing what
I call scenarios of environmental and territorial appro-
priation, dispossession, and confrontation.4 These prac-
tices are also linked to cultural and social implications,
leading to increased socioenvironmental inequalities.
Processes related to climate change (green markets),
mining, and water imply a complex relationship between
extractivisms and indigenous peoples. Similarly, there
are increasingly more conflicts and mobilizations around
deforestation, illegal mining, and biodiversity loss, and
the effects of climate variability in indigenous peoples’
territories.
These scenarios transform and reconfigure indigenous
peoples’ territorial, cultural, identity and environmental,
as well as, economic dynamics. Meanwhile, the state (as
a political actor that has differentiate presence and
The climate change policies and their implementation can be
considered an extractivism, because the effects of climate
change on territories and resources are effectively refiguring
local indigenous dynamics. Included among the many changes
in indigenous life are the ways that transnational forces are
commodifying the climate and incorporating indigenous terri-
tories into green markets through programs such as the initiative
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation
(REDD). In the same way, the global climate change policies
imposed policies and programs without local participation and in
this way there is an appropriation of local territories.
4
Astrid Ulloa. ‘‘Escenarios de creación, extracción, apropia-
ción y globalización de las naturalezas: emergencia de desi-
gualdades socioambientales.’’ In de Barbara Göbel, Manuel
Góngora-Mera, and Astrid Ulloa (eds). Desigualdades socio-
ambientales en América Latina. (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional
de Colombia—Iberoamerikanisches Institut, 2014), 139–166.
 ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE FROM INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVES
actions according to each country), is a principal actor in
constructing ideas of territory and nature, and in gener-
ating territorial confrontations.5 It is related to transfor-
mations of legal conceptions of property, rights, and
frontiers of local and transnational actors, affecting in-
digenous rights and territories. Similarly, these scenarios
overlap with indigenous territories, creating multiple
territorialities with the resulting of diverse ideas of con-
trol and ownership of land and natures.
However, these dynamics have as a counterpart the
confrontations and collective resistance of indigenous
peoples who demand justice in the struggle for the rec-
ognition of their rights and change the social and envi-
ronmental inequalities. In these contexts, the demands of
environmental self-determination of indigenous peoples
enter into a discussion with extractivisms and all the
forms of appropriation of their territories.
For example, for the Misak people,6 their own justice
and the exercise of their rights are an integral part of their
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autonomy, hence they affirm a nonaccess to their [‘‘na-
ture’’] and territories. The Misak people demand recog-
nition of their rights by the Derecho mayor (Ancestral
Law or their Own Law), and being a nation with their own
ancestral authorities. In a cultural declaration, they state
that their demand of autonomy and self-determination is to
‘‘to guarantee our existence, develop our autonomy, re-
cover and strengthen our cultural identity, recover and
expand our ancestral territory, [and] to defend with honor
and dignity [nature].’’7
Regarding climate change policies, in particular
and environmental ones in general, indigenous peoples
have demanded recognition of their ways of thinking
about environmental issues and their rights. They are
demanding the recognition of other ways of producing
knowledge based on their ontologies. There are relational
ontologies in which ‘‘humans and non-humans (the or-
ganic, the non-organic, and the supernatural or spiritual)
are integral part of these worlds in their multiples inter-
relations.’’8 These imply to recognize that there are other
conceptions of rights for nonhumans that include terri-
tory and all beings.
Indigenous peoples demand for environmental self-
determination, this implies raising new demands of
rights, cultural, territorial, and environmental confronta-
tions, that call for a cultural vision of environmental
justice, including the rights of indigenous peoples and the
nonhumans, under their conceptions of ancestral law and
5
In Bolivia and Ecuador where the political constitutions rec-
ognize the rights of nature, their economic processes that generate
confrontations among indigenous peoples and states policies,
such as in TIPNIS and Sarayaku territories, respectively.
6
The Misak people (*25,000 persons) live principally in the
Departments of Cauca and Valle del Cauca, and other depart-
ments and cities of Colombia.
7
Pueblo misak-misak–guambiano. Autoridades ancestrales del
pueblo nam misak. Mandato de vida y permanencia misak misak 1
(Colombia, Territorio Guambiano: Piendamo Kauka), 2005.
8
Arturo Escobar. ‘‘Territorios de diferencia: la ontologı́a po-
lı́tica de los ‘derechos al territorio’,’’ Desenvolvimento e meio
ambiente 35 (2015): 89–100, 98.
177
justice. In this sense, environmental self-determination
refers to indigenous notions of environmental justice that
come from a sense of responsibility and interrelations
between human and nonhumans; therefore, they involve
specific actions and practices in specific areas in coor-
dination with various actors with overlap territorialities.
Thus, indigenous peoples propose an environmental
justice based on other valuations and rights relating to
territory, culture, and the nonhumans.
These perspectives are very different from the main-
stream concepts of environmental justice. In fact, since
the 1970s, environmental justice movements have
generated diverse perspectives in their analysis of envi-
ronmental inequalities related to distribution, access,
control, rights, and decision making according to class,
race, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the causes and
environmental effects of, for example, contamination and
commodification of nature, due to global and national
economic relationships and broader structural processes.
In the same way, environmental justice has put in the
center of the discussion the cause of these inequalities
and the way to confront them. The principal causes for
the social inequalities imply to expand the conceptions
of justice and the process of recognition of rights to in-
clude environmental differences. In the same way, some
scholars called the attention of necessity of expanding the
notion of environmental inequalities to include not only
historical environmental inequalities9 but also cultural,
territorial, and epistemological differences.10 Likewise,
other scholars claim to expand the notion of justice to an
ethical perspective with the environment.11
However, most of these debates relating to socio-
environmental inequalities are constructed from the point
of view of dual western ontology relating to notions of
justice, individual rights, and social and cultural rights,
and also include a singular understanding of nature or the
environment, as well as a territorial dimension, and from
specific geopolitics of knowledge that legitimates explicit
historical productions and trajectories. In relation to no-
tions of nature, they seem to be considered as a part of
human realm. Moreover, the notion that interrelated the
causes and effects of environmental inequalities is based
on a specific notion of territory (nation-state, which is
and sometimes expanded to a global notion or a planetary
based on the interconnection or scales ranging local–
national–global), but it is thought in one dimension:
9
Joan Martı́nez-Alier. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A
Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. (Cheltenham: Ed-
ward Elgar, 2002).
10
Arturo Escobar. ‘‘Una ecologı́a de la diferencia: Igualdad y
conflicto en un mundo glocalizado.’’ In Arturo Escobar (ed).
Más allá del tercer mundo. Globalización y diferencia. (Bogotá:
ICANH-Universidad del Cauca, 2005), 123–144.
11
Enrique Leff. La ecologı́a polı́tica en América Latina. Un
campo en construcción. (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2003); Dale
Jamieson. ‘‘Justice: The Heart of Environmentalism.’’ In Ronald
Sandler and Phaedra Pezzullo (eds). Environmental Justice and
Environmentalism. The Social Justice Challenge to the En-
vironmental Movement. (Cambridge-London: The MIT Press,
2007), 85–101.
 178
horizontal, and sometimes vertical, when power is im-
posed (control of space o frontiers or the extraction of
resources from subsoil as legitimate power of the state).12
These imply the idea of absolute territoriality.13
These situations imply considering historical inequal-
ities that were imposed on indigenous peoples, re-
spondent to modern dual conceptions. In fact, unequal
relationships based on dual categories were imposed
since the conquest and colonial processes. These dual
categories and their consequent relationships of power
have been confronted by decolonial scholars14 and in-
digenous intellectuals.15
In the case of extractivisms, as we saw before, indig-
enous conceptions are not considered or included gen-
erating an epistemic violence against them. However, at
the same time, there is violence against the nonhumans
and their lives. These situations allow indigenous peoples
to propose other notions of justice by including territory
and nature as ‘‘victims’’ of process of extractions and
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destruction of environment. They are also confronting the
current extractivist processes related to climate change,
water, or mining. These economic processes misrecognized
legal, environmental, and cultural rights previously recog-
nized by national and international policies and declarations
such as the Convention concerning Indigenous and Tribal
Peoples in Independent Countries -169, 1989, and the
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples, 2007. This misrecognition allows international
economic actors the appropriation of, symbolic and de
facto, indigenous territories.
In other contexts, some authors have been questioning
the implications of climate change and are reflected on
the meaning of environmental justice to indigenous
peoples, as Tsosie states16 ‘‘justice can only be achieved
12
Stuart Elden. ‘‘Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and
the Depth of Power,’’ Political Geography 34 (2013): 35–51.
13
Rogério Haesbaert. ‘‘Del mito de la desterritorialización a la
multiterritorialidad,’’ Cultura y representaciones sociales 8
(2013): 9–42.
14
Javier Medina. La comprensión indı́gena de la buena vida.
(La Paz: PADEPGTZ, 2001); Javier Medina. Suma qamaña,
vivir bien y de vita beata. Una cartografı́a boliviana. 2011. <http://
lareciprocidad.blogspot.com.co/; Marı́a Lugones. ‘‘Colonialidad y
género,’’ Tabula Rasa 9 (2008): 73–101; Rita Segato. ‘‘Género y
colonialidad: en busca de claves de lectura y de un vocabulario
estratégico descolonial.’’ In Karina Bidaseca and Vanesa Vázquez
Laba (eds). Feminismos y poscolonialidad. Descolonizando el
feminismo desde y en América Latina. (Buenos Aires: Ediciones
Godot, 2011).
15
Julieta Paredes. Hilando fino desde el feminismo comuni-
tario. (México: El Rebozo, Zapateándole, Lente Flotante, 2014).
16
Rebecca Tsosie. ‘‘Indigenous People and Environmental
Justice: The Impact of Climate Change,’’ University of Colorado
Law Review 78 (2007): 1625–1677, 1676.
17
Enrique Leff. La ecologı́a polı́tica en América Latina. Un
campo en construcción. (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2003); Astrid
Ulloa. ‘‘Environment and Development: Reflections from Latin
America.’’ In Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James
McCarthy (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology.
(London: Routledge, 2015), 320–331; Arturo Escobar. ‘‘Terri-
torios de diferencia: la ontologı́a polı́tica de los ‘derechos al
territorio’,’’ Desenvolvimento e meio ambiente 35 (2015): 89–
100.
ULLOA
by an affirmative commitment to protect indigenous
peoples within their traditional lands. This is the type of
justice envisioned by advocates of an indigenous right to
environmental self-determination.’’
In a similar way, there are dissenting voices among the
scientific experts, which suggest other positions on cli-
mate change, extractivisms, and local developments,17
and question extractivisms and their generation of in-
equalities. In the same way, local social movements have
some local proposals, such as indigenous peoples, that
give rise to demands for other relationships with nature,
and other visions of environmental justice.
For these reasons, social, environmental, and justice
movements from Latin America, called the environ-
mentalism of the poor,18 have been demanding the rec-
ognition of historical inequalities. Specifically, indigenous
peoples’ movements demand the recognition of their
rights and position other notions of environmental justice.
They arise from other ontologies, notions of nature, jus-
tice, and rights, and conceptions of territory.
I want to highlight here how from the perspectives of
indigenous peoples from Latin America, it is necessary to
rethink the meaning of environmental justice and to ex-
pand the notions to include new approaches to under-
stand not only historical socioenvironmental inequalities
but also the relationship among humans and nonhumans
and territory. The proposals of indigenous peoples are
based on self-determination, autonomy, and cultural
governability, understood as a political strategy. These
are also tied to particular knowledges and environmental
management strategies, such as the recovery of seeds,
food sovereignty, and territorial control, as well as their
own economic production, all as strategies of cultural
resistance and recuperation of the practices. All this helps
to position local knowledges and legitimize them as en-
vironmental authorities in collective territories. Thus,
their demands are related to territories, specific locations,
and localized knowledges, based on other perspectives on
nonhumans and on spatialities, due to the fact that they
not only address access, control, and effects on territory
but also other ways of being and living in different
scales, following their notions of justice.
CONCLUSION
Indigenous peoples confront and oppose projects and
programs, which establish inequalities and exclusions,
according to their view of environmental issues, through
actions and demonstrations that tend to dismantle these
projects. Similarly, there are resistances, proposals, and
alternative forms of relationships with the nonhumans in
their territories, which focus on life and the right to be
and to live in their territories. Thus, they are based on the
positioning of the relationships between the territory and
the nonhuman, under the vision of environmental,
18
Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martı́nez-Alier. Varieties of
Environmentalism: Essays North and South. (London: Earth-
scan, 1997); Joan Martı́nez-Alier. The Environmentalism of the
Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. (Chel-
tenham: Edward Elgar, 2002).
 ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE FROM INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVES
territorial, and political self-determination against the
(national and international) attempts of appropriation and
dispossession.19
An example is the ways in which indigenous peoples
construct other worlds based on various relationships
between humans and between them and nonhumans.20
The perspectives of indigenous peoples provide a
standpoint that allows both the critiques of development
and proposals from local processes of interaction with
the nonhumans, which have some peculiarities in terms
of spatial and temporal processes. On the contrary, what
is understood by nature is redefined especially in con-
texts where the material (land, forests, species) is co-
produced; new analytical processes are generated. For
indigenous peoples, articulations and connections be-
tween humans and nonhumans are thought to be a
continuous process with no separation. For some cul-
tures, it is a permanent transformation from one to an-
other, and all beings have a point of view,21 and
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according to this, different connotations. They are also
beings that transmute and transform. Everything hap-
pens in a space, but it itself changes, since there is a
vertical and horizontal geopolitics of what is conceived
as territory. Under these perspectives, the territory is
alive, and although the control can be vertical or hori-
zontal, beings are in constant interaction in temporal
dimensions.
In this contentious cultural and political arena, indig-
enous strategies for environmental and climate justice
have emerged. They propose spatial, environmental, and
territorial alternatives based on cultural principles around
five axes: the positioning of other relationships with the
nonhuman (relational natures), horizontal and vertical
territorial politics (relational spacialities), relationships
between men and women under other categories of
gender, life practices based on their knowledge, and en-
vironmental autonomy and self-determination.
19
Astrid Ulloa. ‘‘Escenarios de creación, extracción, apro-
piación y globalización de las naturalezas: emergencia de desi-
gualdades socioambientales.’’ In Barbara Göbel, Manuel
Góngora-Mera, and Astrid Ulloa (eds). Desigualdades socio-
ambientales en América Latina. (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional
de Colombia—Iberoamerikanisches Institut, 2014), 139–166;
Astrid Ulloa. ‘‘Geopolı́ticas del desarrollo y la confrontación
extractivista minera: elementos para el análisis en territorios
indı́genas.’’ In Barbara Göbel, Manuel Góngora-Mera, and As-
trid Ulloa (eds). Extractivismo minero en Colombia y América
Latina. (Bogotá: Universidad nacional de Colombia-Ibero-
Amerikanisches Institut, 2014), 425–458.
20
Arturo Escobar. ‘‘Territorios de diferencia: la ontologı́a polı́-
tica de los ‘derechos al territorio’,’’ Desenvolvimento e meio am-
biente 35 (2015): 89–100; Marisol De la Cadena. Earth Beings.
Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. (Durham and Lon-
don: Duke University Press, 2015). Philippe Descola. Más allá de
naturaleza y cultura. (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2012).
21
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. ‘‘Perspectivismo e multi-
naturalismo na América indı́gena.’’ In Adolfo Chaparro and
Christian Schumacher (eds). Racionalidad y discurso mı́tico.
(Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario—Instituto Colombiano de
Antropologı́a e Historia, 2003), 225–233; Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro. ‘‘Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnol-
ogy,’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 179–200.
179
To rethink environmental justice, as well as its rela-
tionship with indigenous peoples, it becomes vital to re-
consider the global economic, environmental, political,
legal, and cultural dimensions in local contexts, and their
interrelationship with the global–local transformations.
Similarly, rethinking environmental geopolitics is neces-
sary: knowledges, representations, and relationships with
the nonhumans. Therefore, in the reconfiguration of the
perspectives of environmental justice, four dimensions of
analysis are proposed: reversing inequalities based on the
dual notions of culture and nature; rethinking global en-
vironmental and climate change policies; reframing legal
issues and rights recognized in international and local–
national contexts to include all beings, and inclusion of
cultural demands and diverse perspectives.
All the above dimensions lead us to the recognition of
environmental self-determination, based on the demands
for autonomy and cultural governability. Such recognition
is linked to knowledges and environmental local manage-
ment strategies that position indigenous knowledges and
legitimize them as environmental authorities in collective
territories. Thus, environmental justice is related to terri-
tories, specific locations, and localized knowledge.
Indigenous peoples’ proposals are based on the con-
cept of circulation of life, which means the continuity of
life related to their territories. As a central axis, they posit
the defense of life, starting from its practices and male–
female relationships, and the relationships between hu-
man and nonhumans. Similarly, they propose the defense
of their everyday subsistence activities, of food sover-
eignty, and of their livelihoods.
Under these perspectives, environmental justice
should be understood as an ethical, political, territorial,
and reciprocal action with the nonhumans from indig-
enous territorial and cultural principles. All this ac-
cording to their identity and political dynamics, so that
it leads to what I call a relational indigenous environ-
mental justice, which involves expanding our notions
of environmental justice. According to this perspective,
the territory enters into the dynamics of interaction as a
living entity, as well as the nonhumans. For all beings
have to be recognized, their rights to be and to exist,
and in relation to the human, which allows the circu-
lation of life.
In this way, indigenous peoples are putting their no-
tions within global political arenas, based on relational
ontologies, as a basic premise to understand the reci-
procity, complementarity, and connections among all
beings. This perspective implies also another conception
of rights to consider nonhumans’ rights. This right im-
plies notions of being, existence, and feeling, which ex-
pand the idea of recognition and participation by
including nonhumans and the territory as living beings
with feeling, emotions, and as political agents.
Based on all their cultural perspectives, indigenous
peoples are demanding not only recognition, participation,
and historical reparation of their cultural, environmental,
and legal misrecognition of their rights, and also to posi-
tion other knowledges and notions of territory, but also the
responsibility of all humans for the circulation of life,
 180 ULLOA

which allows the continuity of spirituality and materiality AUTHOR DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
and guaranties the humans’ and nonhumans’ existence.
No competing financial interests exist.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Address correspondence to:
I thank the comments of Iokiñe Rodrı́guez and Saskia
Astrid Ulloa
Vermeylen, and Naira Bonilla for support with the
Department of Geography
translation.
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
cra. 30#45-03, edif. 212, oficina 135
FUNDING Ciudad Universitaria,
Bogotá, 11321
This article is based on work supported by the Uni- Colombia
versidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias
Humanas, Grant Orlando Fals Borda 2016, No.33931. E-mail: eaulloac@unal.edu.co
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