The Exile of Juyá: Decolonial Geonarratives of Water

Abstract

The anthropocene and its contemporary environmental crisis are symptomatic of an exhausted phase and space of modern rhetoric regarding a nature/culture dichotomy. Its consequences are especially evident in indigenous territories, where it imposes a hegemonic vision of nature as an object of conquest; it affects ways of being, knowing, and existing with(in) the territory, and justifies ecocide and epistemicide. Other epistemologies and geonarratives are timely needed in the transit from the anthropoce towards an imaged new epoche of conviviality between humans (indigenous and non-indigenous) and more-than human species. This work addresses that challenge from a decolonial and transdisciplinary perspective based on Wayúu indigenous knowledge and their relationship with the hydrosocial territory in the Venezuelan Guajira. Wayúu geonarratives, based on the memory of their elders, are applied to reconstruct the climate calendar and the transformations it has undergone. These geonarratives of water trace a path toward knowledge that contributes to the design of pluriverses articulated from the edges of modernity across indigenous perspectives.