Abstract
In this article, I examine how hydropower projects in Mapuche territory both form part of internationally recognized approaches to develop renewable energy and also anchor colonial relations in rivers. In pursuit of energy development, water and ancestral cultural practices of the Mapuche Pueblo are being seized by a nexus of state laws and informal practices of private sector actors. Concurrently, Mapuche people assert their jurisdictions and experience resurgence of Indigenous lifeways through defending their waterways. Drawing on collaborative research guided by the Alianza Territorial Puelwillimapu, a Mapuche-Williche alliance convoked by ancestral leaders, I provide a methodological contribution to legal geography’s analysis of Indigenous rights. Bringing a legal geography approach to dispossession, I explain how collaborative mapmaking and systematizing the “layers of dispossession” provides a methodological approach to consider structural limitations to environmental justice on Indigenous lands. Overall, this case contributes to how we conceive of spatial justice in legal geography and in renewable energy development.
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