Krell, Ignacio

Given calls to decolonise engagement with Indigenous communities, this article explores how allied researchers can participate in self-determined learning with Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on over a decade of experience within an action-research collective in a Mapuche context, the authors suggest that allied researchers can accompany Indigenous-led co-design in a manner that not only strengthens genuine Indigenous participation but also fosters mutual and collective learning from within the co-creative processes themselves. Lake Budi, a biocultural hotspot in the Pacific coast of Northern Patagonia, Chile, is a coastal wetland habitat for hundreds of endemic and migratory species and the ancestral homeland for the Mapuche-Lafkenche (∼15,000) who, through grassroots learning, are determining practical steps towards restoring their territory, its commons and their self-governance for kvmemongen. This Mapuche concept refers broadly to enacting forms of living well together, humans and non-humans. As allied participants in a Mapuche-led codesign collective since 2013, in this paper, we focus on exploring key “moments of mutual learning” within this longer-than-usual co-design process towards land-based community-based economic and environmental governance tools. Each of these moments involved collective learning that required interaction and feedback loops across diverse areas of expertise, made possible over longer and flexible rhythms and periods. Tools, protocols, and methods gradually take shape in such a process through mutual learning opportunities provided by relationship building, cultural immersion, community-led protocols, decision-making, and evaluation mechanisms. This work suggests a new understanding of the involvement of allied researchers in Indigenous-led co-design as an emerging and increasingly relevant form of grassroots mutual learning toward indigenous climate resilience through self-governed regenerative economies.

Biocultural restoration as a response to climate change from within Indigenous Peoples' territories, requires an intercultural-critical understanding of the past and present dynamics of degradation and fragmentation affecting them, as well as those of self-governance and recovery of social-ecological systems, in their heterogeneous and complex interactions with one another. Based on demand from the Ayllarewe Budi, a Mapuche-Lafkenche ancestral territory and biocultural refuge extending over hundres of miles of coastal marshlands south of the Nahuelbuta mountain range in Southern Chile, this collaborative research project is being codesigned and conducted adaptively, at the intersection of micro-historical reconstruction, the analysis of environmental governance, and decolonizing environmental knowledge through ontological dialogues with territorial knowledge agents. The temporal-spatial focus of this project, the Ayllarewe Budi, as well as the broader Mapuche territory, Wallmapu, were self-sufficient and self-governed until the late 19th century. A century and a half of radical transformations in the land, brought about by the imposition of internal colonialism and then modernization, were responded to, not only by resistance against being incorporated into modern-colonial ontology, but also by a resurgent and creative Mapuche world in ongoing recomposition. The environmental dimension of these processes, in the case of Budi, is reflected through a wealth of historic and environmental sources, as well as its still-living oral history, that are yet to be integrated in a micro-historical narrative. This research, although historical in perspective, it is also prospective, as it aims to identify commons as “objects” for biocultural restoration, on the basis of historical-environmental dialogue of knowledge, and position them from within, as social-ecological restoration objects towards emerging polycentric environmental governance, led by the Ayllarewe Budi and other vulnerable coastal areas of the Global South. However, such co-production also involves continuous inter-reflexion on the coloniality of environmental knowledge, through a genuinely horizontal dialogue that recognizes the radical diversity, and at the same time, equal standing, of indigenous knowledge systems.