The Media & Cultural Studies Department

Barbara Galindo

Screening Dispossession as Orphanization: Collaborative Filmmaking and Indigenous Resistance to Lithium Mining in the Andes

The Andean salt flats in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia are becoming critical sites for mining in the global race toward energy transition. This region has attracted the attention of transnational corporations vying for lithium, a crucial mineral needed for electric storage batteries and promoted as essential for a hydrocarbon-free future. However, companies often target Indigenous and Maroon peoples’ lands to extract lithium through methods that can lead to water depletion and pollution, exposing mining as a settler colonial genocidal technology of dispossession. In this talk, I will discuss how the Kolla and Atacama Indigenous peoples of northern Argentina use collaborative film and video to resist lithium mining. By focusing on the unique aspects of lithium extraction in the salt flats, I place the Kolla and Atacama’s cultural activism within the broader context of other marginalized communities facing similar challenges in the expanding lithium rush across South America. I argue that Indigenous cosmopolitics plays a crucial role in audiovisual narratives that aim to decolonize modern Western mining practices and defend Indigenous sovereignty in Latin America/Abya Yala. I draw on these narratives, the works of Abya-Yalan Indigenous thinkers (Fasabi, 2021; Kopenawa, 2013; Krenak, 2020), and Native scholars’ critique of settler colonialism (Whyte, 2016; Speed, 2017; Gilio-Whitaker, 2019) to propose the concept of orphanization of life. This concept reframes dispossession as an assault that extends beyond materialistic and anthropocentric perspectives. My work contributes to debates that emphasize the mine’s historical significance as one of the primary forms of territorial occupation, alongside the plantation, within the modern/colonial world system (Robins, 2011; Gómez-Barris, 2017; Aráoz, 2018, 2023).