Over the last two decades, Latin America has witnessed a massive expansion of resource extraction. One of the most significant countermovements to emerge out of this context in Ecuador features a strong base and leadership of indigenous women from the Amazon. In their collective effort to resist extractivism, Amazonian women have drawn from elements of ecofeminist discourse and, in the process, situated their own claims within the broader indigenous territorial struggle. Ecofeminism has been transformed through this allyship as well, becoming more inclusive of indigenous women's perspectives. To shed light on these complex relationships, this article applies the framework of “partial connection” from feminist anthropology. It shows how postcolonial encounters between the state, missionaries, environmental activists, and indigenous communities in the Amazon carved out unique spaces for indigenous self-organization and politics. The historical analysis of such spaces, I argue, is crucial for grasping the allyship between Amazonian women and ecofeminists today. Rooted in a combination of positions that are partially, asymmetrically, and ambiguously connected, the allyship between Amazonian women and ecofeminists is best understood as a form of partially connected relationship.

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Weaving Solidarity (2022) by Sebastian Garbe is a novel and potent contribution to debates on international solidarity and decoloniality. The thread that connects the book’s different chapters is the author’s examination of how the Mapuche, as a transnational and collective actor composed by the Mapuche living in the Indigenous territory of Wallmapuand the Mapuche diaspora living in Europe, produce their own network of solidarity. Contrary to analyses that interpret relations of solidarity in a humanitarian key, i.e. analyses that make a clear distinction between passive receivers of support who are affected by a particular conflict and active agents (external to the conflict) whose moral imperative is to give support, Garbe shows how the Mapuche are not mere receptors of solidarity. On the contrary, the Mapuche themselves have created a design of transnational solidarity since the 1970s, which has neither been fully determined by non-Indigenous givers of support located in the global north, nor fully occupied or saturated by “the conflict” with the Chilean state.

En octubre de 2013, un grupo de lideresas indígenas de la Amazonía ecuatoriana inició la “Marcha por la Vida” en rechazo a la expansión de proyectos petroleros en sus territorios. Desde entonces, las Mujeres Amazónicas han continuado organizándose como una red y han visibilizado sus propuestas dentro del amplio espectro de movimientos antiextractivistas, como la de declarar a la Amazonía como “Selva Viviente”. Partiendo de mi etnografía de co-labor con cinco integrantes de esta red, este artículo examina las prácticas concretas que hacen de la Amazonía una selva viviente y que sostienen la lucha territorial de las Mujeres Amazónicas. Cultivar la tierra o cantar con propósito son prácticas que constantemente reconocen, se relacionan y hacen de la selva una entidad viviente. Al mismo tiempo, estas “prácticas de hacer-selva” nutren las estrategias y el discurso político de las Mujeres Amazónicas frente al Estado y las empresas petroleras.

This article is the result of the dialogue started in the symposium "Decolonizing the Global North: Afro-Latin America, the Caribbean and Abya Yala in Diaspora" during the International Congress of Americanists (56th ICA 2018). Written by eight hands in the format of a conversation, this text aims to expose the conditions of oppression experienced by indigenous and Afro-Latinx peoples from two positionalities. The first is the voice of researchers immersed in their given settings. This is followed by the comments of peer researchers addressing issues related to institutional racism, the exploitation and use of land, and the construction of identities and queer spaces from a decolonial perspective. This dialogue attempts to point toward possible horizons of liberation from exchanges that can build networks of solidarity.