Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes indigenous people's contribution to healing blue Patagonia in Chile through the Indigenous Marine Areas (IMAs). IMAs safeguard customary uses, sacred places, and multiple biodiversity hotspots, and they are based on a broad care strategy of humans and other-than-human.

Paper long abstract:

The Chilean blue Patagonia is an essential ecosystem for marine life, a hot spot for biodiversity, a climate refuge, and a global center of the aquaculture industry. However, over the last years, environmental crises and social injustices have increased, turning visible the cumulative impacts of salmon farms over the marine habitats and indigenous people's livelihoods. Marine pollution, coastal litter, harmful algal blooms, and fish epidemics are some of the environmental problems which affect water quality, species conservation, and small-scale fisheries economies.

To face this critical scenario, indigenous communities have created Marine Indigenous Areas (IMAS, or ECMPOS in Spanish) to safeguard their livelihoods and conserve the ecological system that sustains them. IMAs protect indigenous customary uses, sacred places, and biodiversity hotspots. They are based on the daily lives relationship between humans and other-than-human and express a broad care strategy to safeguard marine socio-ecological dynamics.

Based on ethnographic information collected over the last three years in the coastal zone of Hualaihué, Chaitén, Quellón y Puyuhuapi, the paper analyze the IMA's care practices focusing on: i) the other-than-human agency in the production of care narratives and behaviors; ii) the role of women in the reproduction of the customary uses and the social organization; iii) the reuse of salmon litter to re-construct coastal environments; iv) the political outcomes of IMAS in the re-appropriation of the oceans commons.

Finally, the paper contributes to the current discussion about blue Anthropocene, showing how indigenous communities have acted at the frontline to heal blue Patagonia.