When the Territory Spoke Back

I traveled to Temuco to speak about listening to Indigenous territories. Wallmapu asked whether academia was prepared to listen in return.

Marcos Colón

September 11, 2026

I arrived in Temuco, Chile, carrying the Amazon with me.

At the annual conference of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), I was scheduled to present Other Possibles: The Whispers of the Pan-Amazon, a reflection on my documentary film Stepping Softly on the Earth. I had come to speak about Indigenous knowledge, the relationship between human and more-than-human life, and the need to imagine ways of inhabiting the Earth that do not begin with extraction.

My presentation revolved around the idea of listening.

I have spent much of my professional life thinking about what happens when journalists, filmmakers, and scholars enter Indigenous territories. Too often, we arrive already carrying the story we expect to find. We collect testimony, translate it into the language of our institutions, and leave. The territory becomes material; experience becomes evidence; people become sources.

My work has tried to resist that habit. I have called for a practice of remaining long enough for the territory to disturb the assumptions we bring with us. I went to Temuco prepared to speak about this kind of listening.

Then Wallmapu spoke back.

While I was there, I read an open letter addressed to NAISA by the Coordinación Territorial Mapuche Wallmapu. Its message was respectful, but not comfortable. It welcomed those gathered for the conference, yet reminded us that we were not meeting in neutral territory.

NAISA had not simply come to Temuco, a city in southern Chile; it had entered Wallmapu, the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people.

Beyond the conference rooms, the letter said, Mapuche families continued to live with racism, militarization, imprisonment, the criminalization of their territorial claims, and the persistent loss of their lands. Its authors asked whether an international gathering of Indigenous intellectuals could come to Wallmapu without taking an ethical and political position on the conditions experienced by the people whose territory was hosting them.

This question did not allow the conference to remain simply a conference.

It did not allow me to remain simply a presenter.

A group of professors attends the opening ceremony of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) symposium at the North Campus of the Universidad Católica de Temuco. Temuko, Wallmapu, Chile, July 2026. Photo: Marcos Colón.

The language inside the room

The conference program was rich with the language of resistance. There were conversations about Mapuche media and the right to one’s own words and gaze; about urban expansion, dispossession in Temuco, and Indigenous incarceration in Chile; about extractivism and territorial defense; and about ancestral memory and the possibility of creating more ethical Indigenous academic spaces.

These were not superficial discussions. They brought together people whose research, art, and political commitments have challenged colonial institutions for decades. Many of the participants were Indigenous scholars carrying their own histories of dispossession and struggle.

The contradiction was therefore not between a conference that cared and a territory that suffered.

It was more difficult to pinpoint.

The tension, I began to realize, was between the depth of what could be said inside the conference and the harder question of what responsibilities, if any, should an institution bear once the gathering it initiated has ended? We could analyze colonial violence, territorial sovereignty, Indigenous imprisonment, and decolonization with great precision and discuss these subjects in great depth. But what did these words require of us once the panel dispersed?

The open letter warned that intellectual work, regardless of how sophisticated it might appear, would have little power against denial and colonialism unless it was connected to political responsibility. Academic knowledge, the writers suggested, could become alienating and sterile when separated from the collective life of the people whose histories and struggles make that knowledge possible.

This forced me to confront one question in particular: What is the point of Indigenous studies without the transformation of the institutions that produce and govern knowledge?

Aerial view from the Salto La China area in Palguín Alto, with the waterfall in the foreground and Quetrupillán Volcano in the background, in the southern Araucanía Region, part of the ancestral Mapuche territory (Wallmapu). Chile, July 2026. Photo: Marcos Colón.

A territory is not a backdrop

Temuco could easily be treated as the location printed beneath the name of the conference: a destination, a campus, a temporary gathering place.

But Wallmapu is not a backdrop.

A territory is not only an area contained by borders. It is memory, language, water, burial ground, food, kinship, and the possibility of a collective future. It contains the living and the dead. It cannot be reduced to property without losing the relationships that give it meaning.

This distinction is at the center of the current struggle over Mapuche lands.

In June, the Autonomous Community of Temucuicui responded to proposed changes to Chile’s Indigenous Law. The government presented the changes as a way to provide Indigenous people with greater freedom and economic opportunities in the use of their lands. Temucuicui interpreted the legal language differently. It warned that allowing protected lands to be leased, mortgaged, or treated more like individual commercial property could expose collective territories to the world of banks, businesses, and debt, and a renewed process of dispossession.

This dispute, then, is not simply about the technical management of land. It concerns two fundamentally different understandings of what land is.

For the market, land can be divided, valued, exchanged, and used as collateral. For the Mapuche voices represented in these documents, territory is inseparable from collective history and the continuity of life. Temucuicui invokes itxofil mogen, the diversity and interdependence of living beings, to challenge the reduction of the living world to “natural resources.”

This is a language I recognized from the Amazon. In my article “Climate Carnival,” I wrote about the danger of turning the forest into a backdrop for the performance of an international climate conference while extraction continued behind the stage. Beneath that contradiction lies the same fundamental dispute over whether territory is a living relationship of memory and responsibility or an inventory of resources awaiting valuation.

Across the Pan-Amazon, Indigenous peoples have long insisted that a forest is not merely timber, a river is not simply water, and territory is not an inventory of resources waiting to be developed. The language changes from one people to another, but the confrontation is familiar: on one side, the world as relationship; on the other, the world as possession.

I had come to Temuco to speak about these questions in the Amazon. Wallmapu revealed that they were already there beneath my feet.

Opening ceremony of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) symposium at the North Campus of the Universidad Católica de Temuco. Temuko, Wallmapu, Chile, July 2026. Photo: Marcos Colón.

What could not end with the conference

Chile inherited an anti-terrorism law from the Pinochet dictatorship that long outlived the regime that created it. In the 2000s, the law was used against Mapuche leaders and activists fighting to recover their ancestral territories. In 2014, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled against Chile in the case of eight people convicted under the law, finding that its application in cases involving Mapuche protests had resulted in multiple human rights violations.

The political reality surrounding us was neither distant nor historical.

Parts of southern Chile have remained under a state of emergency since 2022. Reporting from the region describes military patrols, police raids, confrontations, long prison sentences, attacks on property, and communities living within an intensifying cycle of resistance and repression. The same reporting also reveals a Mapuche movement that is not politically uniform: while some continue territorial occupations and direct confrontation, younger Mapuche are increasingly turning to the use of the law, academia, environmental campaigns, and other forms of advocacy.

There is no single Mapuche voice, just as there is no single Indigenous political strategy. But this complexity should not be used as an excuse for indifference.

A Mapuche-produced fanzine, for example, has identified more than one hundred people whom its authors consider political prisoners. It denounces the dispersal of Mapuche prisoners across different institutions, restrictions on collective organization and spiritual practices, and the placing of prisoners far from their families and communities. These claims offer a view of imprisonment from within the movement rather than through the language of the state.

The fanzine contains name after name, organized by prison and region. The visual effect is difficult to ignore. Before imprisonment becomes an argument, a policy, or a category of academic analysis, it is a list of human beings.

The conference itself did not ignore imprisonment. It included a roundtable on Indigenous incarceration and prison policy in Chile, and political imprisonment surfaced elsewhere in the gathering as well. That mattered. But the open letter pressed a different question: what would it mean for those names to become more than the subject of academic discussion? What, if anything, should remain once the conference had ended?

The writers did not ask the foreign delegates gathered in Wallmapu to march to Santiago or to resolve the Mapuche struggle. Their request was more modest, yet in some ways more demanding. They wanted us to acknowledge the institutional violence and racism that they see behind the treatment of Mapuche communities and defendants. They asked us to take an ethical position. Neutrality, in such a context, is not the absence of politics, but a political decision.

The Mapuche voice was never absent. But the question remains: what do institutions allow themselves to hear? And does even this fade to a whisper once the gathering moves on?

The question turned toward me

NAISA created a space in which many of these questions could be articulated. Its conference brought Indigenous intellectuals, artists, students, and community members into conversation across continents. These encounters matter, especially at a time when universities, governments, and markets continue to diminish Indigenous sovereignty.

But the open letter made me realize that the question went beyond inclusion, and even beyond the demand for a response. The question was whether a gathering like this could transform, however partially, the institutions that made it possible.

The harder question was no longer whether Mapuche people had been included. They clearly had been. Nor was it whether the conference had addressed colonialism, dispossession, incarceration, or territory. It had. What I could not determine was whether listening to those demands could produce any transformation beyond the gathering itself –– in the relationships the institution sustained, in the obligations it recognized, and perhaps in how it understood its own role after leaving Wallmapu.

The letter therefore raised a question not only for NAISA, but for every university, journal, foundation, museum, and conference that invokes decolonization: What happens when responding is not enough? Can what has been heard also transform the institution that is listening?

After returning from Temuco, I put a version of that question directly to NAISA’s leadership. I asked whether the association had taken specific steps before or after the gathering to address Mapuche struggles and whether any institutional commitment would continue beyond the conference.

NAISA president Luis Cárcamo-Huechante offered a clear answer. He told me that the association had completed its task by making the conference a space open to NAISA members and Mapuche communities. More specific collaborations, he said, would now be up to individual members, and he expected many relationships formed in Wallmapu to continue beyond the gathering.

His response complicated my question rather than resolving it. Perhaps the issue was not whether NAISA had listened. The conference offered substantial evidence that it had. The more difficult question was where the responsibility for what had been heard should reside: with the institution, with individual scholars, or with the relationships formed among them.

In a post-conference account shared with me, Cárcamo-Huechante also emphasized the need to continue the conversations begun in Wallmapu and to connect Indigenous voices and experiences across territories and continents. Perhaps, then, the unresolved question is not whether continuity matters, but what kind of continuity an association can, and should, claim as its own.

The responses did not resolve the question; they shifted it. Perhaps I had been thinking too narrowly in terms of inclusion and responsibility: who had been invited, who had listened, who was expected to respond afterward. But responding is not the same as being transformed. An institution can listen, answer, and even build new relationships without changing the structures through which it produces knowledge, sets priorities, or determines where its obligations end.

The harder question Wallmapu was leaving me with was this: What would have to change within an institution for what it hears to be capable of transforming it?

The question also returned to me personally. What Wallmapu asked of me, and perhaps of everyone gathered there, was not to accept blame, but to reckon with what our presence had created, and what it now owed.

I am not Mapuche. I cannot speak from within their collective history, nor can a few days in Temuco grant me authority over their struggle. My legitimacy does not come from claiming proximity to suffering. It comes, if it comes at all, from being honest about the limits of my position and from allowing what I encountered to change the questions I ask.

Listening also meant allowing the institution’s response to disturb the argument I had begun forming, rather than seeking that response only to confirm a conclusion already reached.

I arrived prepared to speak about the Amazon. I had spent years learning from Indigenous and traditional communities whose lives are threatened by extractive economies, state abandonment, violence, and the persistent conversion of territories into commodities.

But perhaps familiarity can also become a danger. We begin to recognize patterns so quickly that we stop attending to difference. We see “another Indigenous struggle,” “another conflict over land,” “another case of criminalization.” Recognition can become its own form of distance.

Slow Seeing, the practice I propose in my work, asks something more of me — and of us. It asks us to remain silent awhile before naming, to listen before translating, and to resist turning another people’s reality into confirmation of what we already believe.

In Temuco, this meant understanding that Wallmapu was not an illustration of an argument I had brought from the Amazon. It was making its own demands.

Lonko Héctor Aillapan Ñanculef in front of the Mapuche ruka at the North Campus of the Universidad Católica de Temuco. Temuko, Wallmapu, Chile, July 2026. Photo: Marcos Colón.

What should remain after we leave?

An academic conference cannot resolve a territorial conflict that has developed across generations or speak for communities that do not share a single voice. Nor should scholars make declarations without listening carefully to those who will live with the consequences.

But those limitations do not eliminate a more difficult question: How should the informaton that an institution has chosen to listen to transform the institution itself?

The Temuco gathering demonstrates that participation, territorial visits, and dialogue are possible. The question is what comes next. An association can create mechanisms through which communities identify what forms of continued engagement would actually be useful. It can support translation, local media, archives, public forums, travel, legal defense, or other priorities when those priorities are articulated by the people concerned. It can also return publicly to the commitments and relationships generated by the gathering and ask what, if anything, endured.

Most importantly, the relationship should not disappear simply because the visitors do.

Too often, academic presence is temporary while the extraction of knowledge is permanent. We arrive, learn, cite, publish, and move on. The community receives recognition but not necessarily reciprocity.

There is a resemblance here to the journalism I have criticized throughout my career. Journalism has often entered the Amazon during catastrophe: a fire, a murder, an invasion, an election, a climate summit. Reporters collect the visible evidence of a crisis and leave before understanding the relationships that produced it.

Academia can follow the same pattern at a slower speed.

Time alone does not decolonize a practice. A conference can last several days and still fail to remain. A research project can continue for years and still treat a community simply as material. The essential question is not only how long we stay, but what relationships and obligations survive our departure.

Aerial view from the Salto La China area in Palguín Alto, with the waterfall in the foreground and Quetrupillán Volcano in the background, in the southern part of the La Araucanía region—ancestral Mapuche territory (Wallmapu). Chile, July 2026. Photo: Marcos Colón.

The territory remains

When the final panel ends, a conference begins to disappear. The rooms empty. Name badges are removed. Suitcases close. Visitors carry books, photographs, contacts, and ideas toward airports and bus stations. What felt like a self-contained intellectual world dissolves back into the routines of universities and homes elsewhere.

Wallmapu does not disappear with us.

Its rivers remain. Its forests remain. Its communities, prisons, memories, disagreements, ceremonies, and demands remain. The struggle over what land means continues long after the academic language of territory has left.

I went to Temuco to speak about “other possibles.” I believed these possibilities might be found in the knowledge carried by Amazonian peoples: in their relationships with forests and rivers, and in their refusal to accept extraction as the only available future.

I still believe that.

But Wallmapu taught me that “other possibles” cannot exist only as ideas. They must become relationships, choices, and forms of responsibility. Without that continuing responsibility, even the language of decolonization risks becoming another possession: something institutions carry away from Indigenous territories without accepting the obligations those territories may place upon them.

I arrived prepared to speak about listening.

I left asking whether we are willing to be changed by what we then hear. Listening is insufficient if the encounter does not transform the listener, or the institution through which that listening takes place.

MARCOS COLÓN is the Southwest Borderlands Initiative Assistant Professor of Media and Indigenous Communities at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His work moves between the Amazon and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, studying Brazilian literary and cultural production, Indigenous studies, and representations of nature/culture in documentary film and world cinema. He has directed two feature documentaries on humanity's entanglement with the natural world, Beyond Fordlândia (2018) and Stepping Softly on the Earth (2022), and is the author of The Amazon in Times of War (Practical Action Publishing & Latin America Bureau, 2024, published in Spanish as La Amazonía en tiempos de guerra, Planeta, 2025); and organizer of Utopias Amazônicas (Ateliê, 2025).

Text and photos: Marcos Colón
Editing: Marcos Colón
Photo editing: Fabrício Vinhas
Fact-checking: Juliana Carvalho
Spanish translation: Merixtell Almarza
Editorial workflow coordination: Marcos Colón
Editorial direction: Marcos Colón