From Berta Zúñiga Cáceres, the daughter of Honduran community organizer Berta Caceres who, in Spring 2016, was murdered by the national and local Honduran government and a multinational dam company, with at least the tacit support of the US. This is from a ¡Berta Vive! series of interviews. Caceres is asked about the broader vision of her mother’s organization COPINH:

It’s a very rich vision and one that exists among many indigenous peoples. It has to do with building a logic that’s completely opposed to the hegemonic way of thinking that we’re always taught. The vision and proposals are defiant, totally different than the academic, patriarchal, racist, positivist vision of the world. They include relations between people that are much more communitarian and collective, and that also have a strong relationship to the global commons and to nature, defying the dominant anthropocentric vision. They relate to spirituality and the relationships we have with all living beings – a holistic vision of life.

Indigenous people find themselves battling extractivism, companies, mining, because that’s the battleground where these different ways of knowing, of feeling, of cosmovision play out.

This is the wealth of indigenous peoples. But it also represents a threat for the economic model that’s based on profits and money, and that’s developed through repression and exclusion.