The right to be, to feel and to exist: Indigenous lawyers and strategic litigation over Indigenous territories in Guatemala

Abstract

Indigenous communities around the globe increasingly resort to courts to seek protection for their individual and collective rights. Not only has the use of strategic litigation by Indigenous peoples to defend their human rights been underexplored but the role of Indigenous lawyers and experts is also a blind spot. Drawing on interdisciplinary, qualitative and collaborative research with Indigenous lawyers, experts and legal activists who are involved in the legal defence of the rights of Indigenous peoples in Guatemala, we foreground a complex legal ethnographic landscape regarding their intergenerational legal-political battle in a society facing transition from recent mass violence and the imposition of extractive economies. This article explores how their Indigenous lawyering is rooted in their Indigenous being and embedded in Indigenous water and land ontologies. We demonstrate how these Indigenous litigators are advancing through counter-hegemonic legal practice that goes beyond dominant Euro-Western and colonial legal positivistic assumptions about human-water-life relationships embedded in a racialised neoliberal legal structure. We argue that in contrast to human rights activist lawyers, they are occupying and exercising a differentiated role, through their positionality and their non-conventional practices, as transformative connectors of worlds before the courts or political ontological knowledge brokers, without falling into romanticism.