Glossary

Abya Yala is the name the Cuna Indians (Panama) have given to the American continent. Its means “land in full maturity”. Using the term Abya Yala instead of Latin America indicates recognition of indigenous peoples and support for indigenous rights.

Carbon colonialism refers to the privatization and commodification of land and forests for the purpose of carbon offsetting, a method of climate change mitigation and energy transition that rich countries have developed. It entails the rupture of historic land use and constrains local community usufruct rights, putting at threat their cultural survival and livelihood.

The Word cosmovision is composed of the parts ‘cosmos’ (world or universe) and ‘vision’ (view or sight). It refers to particular ways of seeing and interpreting the world that societies or cultures have developed. A cosmovision includes specific relationships between humans, nonhumans and the earth.

Some critics have raised the need to speak of ontologies to account for other worlds, arguing that the notion of cosmovision, due to its colonial origin, fixes, essentializes and simplifies. At the same time, it has been critically suggested that cosmovision focuses on vision as the only possible sense of interpretation.

You might find many diverging definitions of care. In this context, we refer to care as all activities to maintain, continue and repair a complex network that supports life. Such an understanding of care recognizes the inevitable interdependence that exists between humans, nonhumans and the natural world.

Co-resistance refers to the development of relationships of reciprocity and construction of alternatives with communities that share Indigenous ethical practices and connections with land. The term has been coined by Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and academic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in her book As We Have Always Done (University of Minnesota Press).

The term ‘death culture’ commonly refers to ‘Western’ or ‘Euro-American’ culture that is built on offsetting the negative impacts of own ways of living onto populations in other geographic regions or future populations, destroying their ecosystems and livelihoods.

The term refers to a notion of human development that originates in a European thought tradition. It assumes human development to emerge linearly from rural/agriculture based/simple to urban/industrialized/complex societies that strive for the accumulation of material and monetary wealth. Such a understanding of development is based on the extraction of natural resources, requiring alienation from the natural environment and other living species. Social movements and intellectuals from the global South have criticized this notion of development as a continuation of colonialism, as it implies the systematic devaluation of indigenous world views, political systems and economic practices as “underdeveloped.”

Extractivism describes a type of natural resource extraction. It refers to processes of resource extraction that (1.) are based on large-scale operations, (2.) generate environmental degradation or (3.) are destined to exportation of raw materials, not benefitting local populations.

The idea of “good living” suggests a collective model of life that is in harmony with others and the natural world, based on ethical values that contrast with the dominant development model that emphasises a singular, linear pathway of human development, directed towards the accumulation of material wealth and individual self-realization. The idea of good living is most prominent in Andean philosophy (‘Sumak Kawsay’ in quechua/ Ecuador; ‘Sumaq Qamaña’ in aymara/ Bolivia), but we find variations of it across Abya Yala.

Green washing is the use of environmental initiatives to legitimize and justify extractive activities. Suggesting benefits for nature and sustainability, green washing is frequently operationalised by governments and companies alike as a means of constructing social consent and silencing opponents.

Indigenous resurgence refers to collective processes and actions that work towards achieving freedom for indigenous peoples and creating a social, economic, political, artistic, spiritual, and physical space for them to generate self-determined futures and be on their land without being harassed or deterred.

The term infrastructure refers to the built network that allows goods, people, energy and knowledge to circulate over geographic space. Infrastructures do not simply facilitate flows of materials and persons, however, they simultaneously bring about certain social worlds or ways of life.

The term life project refers to an idea or plan of a collective life, based on own priorities, values and expectations of people, who are able to determine their own destiny together and decide how they want to live. A life project is directly linked to happiness and based on the premise that humans strive to live lives of joy, togetherness and harmony.

Pluriversalism refers to the utopian project of generating a world in which multiple and diverse ethical-political life projects can exist simultaneously and even in shared geographical space, and in which horizontal dialogue among the peoples of the world can happen. To achieve this, it is necessary to overcome the current system of domination and exploitation that is based on colonial, patriarchal and racist patterns of power.

The notion of pollution colonialism emphasises that the contamination of land and water systems is not just a by-product or symptom of contemporary capitalism, but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.

‘World’ refers to specific relational conditions of being together. The idea of reworlding suggests that our contemporary ‘world’ – or ways of being together with human and nonhuman others on earth – is not a predetermined condition, but rather an outcome of power-charged negotiations, enmeshments and disruptions. The suggestion that world-making practices are heterogeneous, enables other worlds to emerge and co-exist, eventually creating ‘a world into which many worlds fit’ (Zapatista insurgent movement / Mexico).

ReXistance is a compound word and play with the terms resistance, existence and re-existence. It highlights that for colonized, exploited and dominated peoples the mere act of existence is always simultaneously an act of resistance. It also draws attention to the necessity of continuous re-enactment and re-creation of those communities that historically have been opposed to processes of violent dispossession and erasure.

The term securitization has been coined to account for various phenomena. The use that we are giving it here refers to the increase in recent years in the deployment of military forces for preventive and security tasks. This process implied that public security, understood in a broad sense, passed into the hands of the military forces. By securitization of development we refer to all the technologies and the military deployment related to so-called development projects, in which what is secured and protected does not have so much to do with safeguarding people’s lives, but with protecting capital from possible resistance.

In official definitions of security, the term encompasses economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security and political security. We propose a more expansive meaning of the term, emphasising that the different dimensions of security are interrelated. Security implies not just being safe from harm or injury, or able to live without fear and misery, but also to live with dignity and being able to thrive within a collective context.

Settler colonialism is a distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with an invasive settler society that, over time, develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty. Settler colonial states include Canada, the United States, Australia, and South Africa, but also Argentina. Settler colonialism contrasts with exploitation or extractive colonialism, in which populations were conquered specifically for the purpose of exploiting their cheap or free labor and local natural resources.

The word tequio comes from Nahuatl and means work or tribute. It refers to an organized form of work for collective benefit. Members of a community contribute materials or their workforce to carry out or build a community work, for example a school, a well, a fence, or a path that is needed. Such an obligation to commit to community work, when necessary, exists in many cultures in Abya Yala, and we find words for this practice in different indigenous languages.

Territory, in the way we use the term, signifies a place or delimited area for which a group of people has constructed belonging over a historic process. Territories become established through acts of care of a geographic space, based on the creation of social norms and specific forms of organization. Over time, a group’s ways of being and living have become intertwined with the territory, which becomes part of their cultural identity.

Turtle Island is a name for North America that is used by some Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. It also means Earth. The term is popular among indigenous rights activists. Ultimately, it goes back to versions of the Turtle Island creation story from the Iroquois oral tradition, in which Sky Woman fell down to the earth when it was covered with water, generating life on the back of a turtle.