Storytelling dreams and life: Traveling across worlds in the Amazon of Ecuador

Abstract

In response to the expansion of the mining frontier in the Ecuadorian Amazon, rural and Indigenous women are leading processes that resist mining-related violence while reconfiguring colonial power dynamics. Although women's efforts have become visible through regional grassroots organizing, public protests, marches, political manifestos, and bodily organized resistance to mining, little is written about the long-term processes, social relations, and epistemologies women use to contest power. This article illuminates “Storytelling Dreams and Life,” a Kichwa epistemology aimed at communicating and networking across colonial differences while building support networks across scales. It relies on dreams and testimonies that speak of women's relationships with the forest, including more than humans: animals, insects, and bodies of water. Women understand their bodies and livelihoods as intrinsically tied to the forest. Defense struggles are about upholding relational forest interdependences and politicizing domestic and reproductive care practices that make life possible. Women's storytelling provides us with an epistemology and a decolonial and communications methodology that requires sharing intimate accounts of mining-related violence and resistance. The sharing is emotional and vivid as it aims at bringing interlocutors as close as possible to the teller's experience. I argue women's epistemic practices enable intersubjective understandings of each other's experiences and, therefore, a way to travel into each other's worlds across bodies while furthering women's support networks across scales. Women's storytelling adds to Communitarian Feminisms and its efforts to decolonize hierarchization in organized struggles, and it adds to Body-Territory epistemology by specifying how knowledge and struggles both shaped and are shaped by forest relational worldviews.