Extractivism underpins the material reality of neoliberal modernity---results in constant anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence

Extractivismo, as extractive capitalism is known in the Américas, indicates an economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro-descendent territories. As I attend to in the introduction, a burgeoning literature on extractivismo has emerged in South America that describes the claim to resources by global capital in the face of increased protests about the importance of local resource sovereignty. Since dense genetic plant life and natural resource regions often overlap with Indigenous territories, then we must work to analyze how Native peoples are both constructed by the state and corporate entities as obstructions to the expansion of extractive capitalism and literally block its reach. The Sioux and trans-confederation struggle contesting the Dakota pipeline is only one example of continual Indigenous land defense in the Américas. Therefore, throughout this book I show how the embodied activities that reject colonialism continue to alter and expand how we see and what we know about Indigenous spaces especially within the extractive zone. While racial capitalism refers to the processes that historically subordinated African and Indigenous populations, extractivism references the dramatic material change to social and ecological life that underpin this arrangement.7 Furthermore, the racial logics of South American states are expanded through new forms of extractive capitalism.8 Even as new progressive states such as those in Ecuador and Bolivia propose policies to legalize Native peoples’ rights, they enable and normalize resource exploitation that ends up perpetuating anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism. Further, as The Feminist Constitution that I examine in chapter five makes apparent, redistributive states that do not broadly consider intersectional histories fail to address the needs and perspectives of female, gender-nonconforming, working class, and “cuir” populations even despite new legislative gains.9 I address how extractive capitalism dramatically divides nature and culture through new forms of race, gender, and sexual exclusions.10 One of today’s central modes of perpetuating racial capitalism in the Global South, in addition to expanding prisons and security regimes, is in fact mega-extractive projects, such as large dams and mines, which re- quire huge technological and resource feats as well as what Enrique Dussel refers to as the “developmentalist fallacy,” or the imposition of modernity as a universalized mode of governance.11 State and corporate-designed mega-development projects operate through an economic rationale without calibrating for the life forms that exist beneath the gaze of such grand schemes. Extractivism functions within what Anibal Quijano first coined as the colonial matrix of power,12 where corporate entities and states are indistinguishable in their economic interests and activities; states act on behalf of corporations, and corporate entities hire security forces to control and suppress anti-extractivist organizing. Extractive capitalism, then, violently reorganizes territories as well as continually perpetuates dramatic social and economic inequalities that delimit Indigenous sovereignty and national autonomy. As the Uruguayan economist and executive secretary of the Latin American Center for Social Ecology, Eduardo Gudynas, explains, “Under neo-extractivism, the objective of national development, as ‘endogenous development,’ is lost; autonomy in relation to global markets vanishes. National industries do not recover, in some cases they are reduced.”13 Gudynas rightly identifies how developmentalism continues to set the agenda and structure conditions of South America’s place within a colonial world system, further diminishing the possibility of state independence in relation to the global economy. Yet we must also critique the world system that reproduces nationalism at the expense of the sovereignty of Indigenous territories. Genealogies of critical theories from the South (including dependency theory and decolonial theory) have importantly attended to the persistence of this colonial condition that produces regional asymmetries and an uneven distribution of resource control. My project builds on these insights to unpack a dual analysis of power: I analyze extractive capitalism’s techniques of domination, showing how it expands through a series of legal, rhetorical, economic, and political contortions that both draw from and erase Indigenous peoples in their territories. The material and affective production of extractive capitalism crushes vernacular life and its embodiment, enclosing it within the leveling technologies of globalization. In relation to schemes of mega-development, large-scale extractivism assaults peripheral spaces, inflicting uneven pain upon regions where Indigenous majority communities continue to organize life and proliferate it, even in sites of extreme pressure and violence. This book lifts and names these sub- merged social ecologies. And the “extractive zone” names the violence that capitalism does to reduce, constrain, and convert life into commodities, as well as the epistemological violence of training our academic vision to reduce life to systems. Nonindigenous scholars have cautioned against “romanticizing native peoples,”14 however, some of that work does not centrally engage with the current dangers in the reduction of biodiversity and the genocidal practices that Native peoples face. In the case studies that I elaborate upon, all take place in the so-called peripheries of late capitalist activity, and Indigenous peoples are directly affected by neoliberal, economic, and cultural conditions that predetermine these spaces as colonial contact zones.15 It is often in the heart of resource-rich territories that Indigenous peoples exist in complex tension with extractive capitalism and land defense. In these geographies, Indigenous peoples often multiply rather than reduce life possibilities, protecting land and each other at often extremely high personal and communal cost. For instance, a global map of recent ecocides, or the murder of land defenders, shows an acute rise in Latin America and the Asian Pacific, geographies that overlap with new social movements that organize against extractive encroachment.16 The organization Global Witness documents a three hundred percent increase in the murders of ordinary people defending natural resources from mining, hydroelectric dams, conservation, and pollution. Throughout the world, Indigenous peoples are also often at the forefront of defending lands in regions that are continually extracted for their biodiversity.17 In the Américas, we see the complicity among state, police, and corporate actors in their attempts to violently shut down these land defenders, such as the case of attack dogs and pepper spray used against Indigenous protestors and their allies as they blocked the Dakota oil pipe. In resource-rich Ecuador, anti-extractive activists report that their emails are regularly hacked, that they are followed and intimidated, and, most notably, that the police and military rove Indigenous territories, facilitating the work of national and multinational capitalist enterprises.18 Lenca activist Berta Cáceres, who was murdered in 2014, founded the Council of Indigenous peoples in part to oppose mega-projects and resource extraction in Honduras.19 As critical Indigenous studies have shown, colonial capitalism often expands its control over Native territories by legitimizing the neoliberal multicultural state.20 And it is here that the exercise of autonomy matters. In each chapter, I ask, how can we differently apprehend not only the experience of and resistance to extractive colonialism, but also its generative capacity to see and activate beyond the colonial divide? As I elaborate, Indigenous territories often overlap with the geographies that constitute the Earth’s highest biodiversity, and which extractive capitalism continually earmarks and occupies for commodity conversion, mapped through increasingly fine-tuned technologies. In zones of continual extractivism, what responses, engagements, and viewpoints emerge that do not exhaust difference but instead proliferate it?21 How do Native and African-descendent populations have perspectives on the natural world that engage it, rather than just take from it? And, to reach further into the work of decolonization, can feminist and queer interventions pose a challenge to patriarchal logics, monoculture, and extractive capitalism? Can we differently attend to Andean, Amazonian, Native life and the complex of senses never fully subsumed within the European colonial order? What cultural and intellectual production makes us see, hear, and intimate the land differently? What do we really know about the invisible, the inanimate, and the nonhuman forms that creatively reside as afterlives of the colonial encounter? The map I produce is not connected through linear histories or Eurocentric expeditions, nor do I enter the colonial archive to read alongside it, even while I have learned much from some of these methodologies.22 Instead, the map I draw is one of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous spaces across the Andes, Southern Chile, and into the Andean Amazonia as continually occupied, either by colonists, settlers, or multinational corporations, where histories of decolonization arise within the violent condition of extractive capitalism. A disciplinary rationale inevitably fails for all the sites, texts, and geographies that I transverse with epistemological excess. In other words, rather than pursue one disciplinary frame, I engage standpoint and decolonial theory, regional histories, and relational critique to attend to several scenes of extractivism within South America. A decolonial entry into the extractive zone, then, reveals a differently perceivable world, an intangible space of emergence, where rivers converge into the flow and the muck of life otherwise.