Presentation short abstract

Waimiri Atroari People territorial governance shows a case in Brazilian Amazonia that generate political ecology in motion, challenging colonial development and conservation concepts and advancing pluriversal alternatives grounded in reparation, relational justice and multispecies coexistence.

Presentation long abstract

The experience of the Waimiri Atroari (WA) People in the Brazilian Amazon illustrates how Latin American political ecology emerges from long-standing territorial struggles against colonial violence, extractivist development, and environmental destruction. The national highway imposed through their territory during Brazil’s military dictatorship, an emblematic project of authoritarian modernization, continues to shape WA landscapes, lifeways, and multispecies relations. Yet WA responses move far beyond resistance: they enact autonomous forms of governance grounded in relational justice, memory, and multispecies coexistence, challenging technocratic conservation and top-down development models that historically marginalize Indigenous authority.

Using participatory and community-driven methods: storytelling, interviews, drawing workshops, GIS, and archival research - this work foregrounds WA conceptualizations of territory exceed legal demarcation, presenting territory as a dynamic and relational process that weaves together landscape transformation, historical memory, and interdependence among human and non-human beings. Their governance reframes infrastructure as a contested site where coexistence and restorative presents are still disputed rather than exclusively spaces of extraction.

By situating WA governance within broader Latin American traditions of political ecology - rooted in Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant – or territorialized communities - struggles for autonomy and justice, this research highlights how environmental (in)justice has always been foundational to political ecological thought in the region. It contributes to contracolonial debates on sovereignty, justice, and sustainability by showing how theory and praxis emerge directly from the territories themselves, offering grounded alternatives to dominant development paradigms and expanding what political ecology can be and do.