Paper short abstract:

I detail local forms of conservation from the Maya Ixil, embedded in linguistic and cultural practices and inherited from ancestral knowledge systems as they generate in-situ, decolonized forms of biodiversity conservation transposed upon the landscape in their co-produced food system, the milpa.

Paper long abstract:

A grassroots movement, identified as ‘buen vivir’ from Latin America and ‘living well’ from the Anglophone world, depicts Indigenous lifeways combating capitalist commodification of life through the performance of Indigenous identity with pre-Columbian origins. Decolonizing and revitalizing more-than-human health through these expressions, this paper draws upon translations of the larger buen vivir movement as they appear situated in the expressions of Maya Ixil culture and ontological perspectives. Through an engagement with the terms ‘tiichajil’, and ‘txaa’, an Ixil term for ancestrally-linked and culturally-Ixil organization of community norms, the paper seeks to understand and demonstrate how one Indigenous people regulate biodiversity conservation and its practice beyond hierarchies of oppression as they provide alternative lifeways that include and design for a more-than-human world. Conservation by design, this cosmologically-embedded and performed spiritual practice centers reciprocity as Maya Ixil identities are transposed onto the landscape in the form of the milpa food system. One actor in the multispecies assemblage of place, here Maya Ixil understandings of the human diverge from Cartesian divisions that lend easily to colonial capture and control, instead defining biodiversity conservation according to Indigenous epistemological understandings of agency where the human is equal to all other beings through the shared role of ‘caretaker’ and ‘nurturer’. I argue that the form of biodiversity conservation practiced by the Maya Ixil and other Indigenous caretakers collectively compose a decolonized, rights-based, feminist tool for imagining and creating a pathway toward a future beyond 7 generations by designing equality and justice for all of life’s forms.