Performing Contested Lands: Conservation and the Conflictive Enactments of Indigenous Territoriality in Lowland Ecuador

Abstract

Through four tableaux, this article explores the historical efforts of the Siekopai (Secoya) people to claim territorial rights over Pëekë'ya—an area of black water lagoons and flooded forests on the border between Peru and Ecuador—and unfolds their various enactments of land through performative acts of contestation and collaboration. By emulating shamanic thoughts about the wetland as a transition zone between villages and worlds, the tableaux as form represent a rethinking of land as multiple and partially overlapping realities where shifting territorial and conservation management regimes never result in stable environmental subjectivities.