NEWS

Since the long sixteenth century, the organization of the world has found its hegemonic form in hierarchies of power and possession, between those who exploit and expropriate and those who are exploited and whose lives and lands and resources are expropriated. This is not the past, nor a function of ideology only. If the projected supremacy of one form of life over all others is only made possible by manifold forms of violence, one of these forms remains the invention (and constant reinvention) of nature by colonial cultures. This invention rests on an idea of progress in which nature is construed as what one emerges from. Indigenous ancestral epistemologies hold a different understanding of the real, though. «The land owns us,» Aboriginal Australians might say. Or, as Ailton Krenak, the Brazilian Indigenous writer, thinker, and Krenak leader notes: «It is only possible to imagine nature if you are outside of it. How could a baby that is inside its mother’s uterus imagine the mother? How could a seed imagine the fruit? It is from outside that one imagines the inside.»