Amid industrial pressure and legal rollbacks, a grassroots women’s network fights for ancestral marine rights and cultural survival in Chile.
‘If they take the sea from us,’ says Mapuche-Huilliche spokeswoman Ingrid Echeverría Huequelef, ‘they kill us culturally. Without it, we are shells – empty, without a soul.’
Along Chile’s vast coastline, Indigenous women are fighting to protect more than marine ecosystems. They’re defending a way of life that’s deeply rooted in spiritual ties to the sea from disappearing due to extractive industries, port construction, and legislative threats. This is not only a story of resistance, it’s one of revival, led by a tide of women whose power lies in memory, spirituality and presence.
The sea is a living being, not a resource
At 6,435km long, Chile’s coast is one of the most extensive in the world. But for the Diaguita, Chango, Mapuche Lafkenche-Huilliche, Kawésqar, and Yagán peoples, the ocean is more than just geography. It is kin, healer, and provider. Indigenous women along the length of Chile’s coast have long been the stewards of this relationship, harvesting seaweed, gathering shellfish, and preserving marine foods – knowledge passed from generation to generation.
Many of these women are also lawentuchefe (they make natural medicines) and machi (they cure illnesses through spiritual means) who braid together marine medicine, ceremony, and spiritual guidance. The water itself is central to their spirituality: they use seawater in healing ceremonies, to cleanse the body and spirit and to make medicines for themselves and others. Their hands remember the importance of the seaweed, the rhythm and timing of tides, and the ceremonies held at the ocean’s edge, where personal and collective emotional offerings are given to the waves.
But this intimacy with the sea is under siege. The expansion of the country’s industrial salmon farming industry – thought to now be the second largest in the world –, alongside port construction and speculative land development, has not only degraded ecosystems but also severed communities from their ancestral coastlines. Access to beaches for fishing, gathering, and spiritual practices is increasingly restricted, the sea is polluted and unsafe, and the rich biodiversity that once thrived in these waters is rapidly disappearing.
The breakneck expansion of industrial salmon farming and other forms of aquaculture, particularly across southern Chile, has led to numerous negative environmental impacts, including coastal waters being polluted with antibiotics, excess feed, and waste, fuelling harmful algal blooms and oxygen-depleted zones that harm small-scale fisheries. A report from the Danish Institute for Human Rights highlights that the industry has also destroyed sacred sites, contaminated resources vital to Indigenous communities, and excluded them from meaningful participation, while many workers – especially women and migrants – face low pay and unsafe conditions. Heavy industry around ports has also created so-called ‘sacrifice zones’ with polluted air and water, while real estate projects have caused beaches to recede and displaced traditional ancestral economic activities.
Photos: Gracie Escorza P
The damage is not only environmental but also spiritual, social, and cultural. When ceremonial sites are polluted or restricted, it cuts the line to people’s ancestral roots. Clean seawater is essential for preparing traditional lawen (natural medicines). Seaweed, shells, and marine species are not commodities – they are beings carrying memories and also healing powers.
A network of women emerges
This ongoing rupture, however, sparked something powerful. Across territories, women began gathering in circles to share memories, make offerings to the sea, and renew their spiritual and territorial bonds.
Between 2021 and 2022, the Chilean NGO Observatorio Ciudadano began documenting Indigenous women’s work tied to the sea. Carrying out interviews with 10 women leaders from different communities and territories, they uncovered a quiet but widespread movement: women across the coast were defending the sea in similar ways, often unaware of one another.
Observatorio Ciudadano ultimately produced a book Mujeres del mar: Aproximación a los Espacios Costeros Marinos de Pueblos Originarios, uniting the voices of these Mapuche Lafkenche-Huilliche, Kawésqar, and Yagán women. They realised many of them were doing the same work – spiritual, cultural, ancestral, economic, and legislative – but hadn’t met. Out of this realization, a network of women emerged, La Red de Mujeres Originarias por la Defensa del Mar (The Network of Indigenous Women Defending the Sea).
Industrial expansion severs memory
Ingrid Echeverría Huequelef, of the Mapuche Huilliche people, is one of the coordinators of the network and a Werkén (spokesperson) of the Lafken Mapu community from Quellón in the south of Chiloé island. She herself worked temporarily in the salmon farming industry during a period of scarcity while she was raising her children on her own. ‘I earned money, yes,’ she reflects, ‘but I lost part of our culture. I couldn’t attend school meetings or ceremonies. I couldn’t teach my daughter our practices.’ Working in the salmon industry as a mother was also a challenge, as there was little to no empathy for parents needing time off for sick children or school obligations, and requesting such leave risked her chances of securing a permanent contract.
The growth of the sector has also affected small-scale fishers. With industrial activity depleting nearby marine ecosystems, traditional fishers are now forced to travel longer distances to sustain their livelihoods. Fishing trips that once took a few hours now require journeys of 10 to 12 hours offshore, often without communication, as phone coverage is no longer secured that far out at sea. This reality increases danger and weakens the transmission of ancestral knowledge. What was once communal knowledge, carried on the tide, is now at risk of disappearing.
A law born from ceremony
The women’s gatherings are ceremonies blending presence, ancestral memory, and healing – but the group also defends territory through law. Women in the network help each other apply for certification to protect their coast. The Lafkenche Law (Law 20.249 of 2008) is a legal mechanism created by the Mapuche people to protect coastal areas in Indigenous territories, by designating these zones as ECMPOs – Espacios Costeros Marinos de Pueblos Originarios (Indigenous Peoples’ Marine Coastal Spaces). The law recognizes Indigenous communities’ territorial-use rights to manage ancestral coastal zones in accordance with their worldview – not just as resources, but as living beings. ‘It was born from spirituality, not policy,’ says Ingrid.
The Lafkenche Law arose from decades of organizing, community meetings, and rogativas (ceremonies). ‘We’re not just protecting resources – we’re protecting ngen (guiding, protective spirits of nature) who have voice and presence,’ Ingrid adds. This law protects not only the sea and its uses, but the spiritual beings that inhabit it. As Ingrid explains, ‘There isn’t a word we can use to explain to a senator that we need a law to defend these spirits… but they speak through us.’
Today, that law is under threat. In 2024, new ECMPO applications were frozen – a move ruled unconstitutional but still damaging. Just recently, in July 2025, the Chilean Senate debated reforms to Law 20.249 without consulting Indigenous peoples, in violation of ILO Convention 169. Proposed changes would shift control from Indigenous peoples to state bodies, impose restrictive deadlines, demand formal proof of representation, and block ECMPOs where artisanal fishing already occurs.
They want to turn our law into a permit system. They don’t understand its heart, its spirit. For them, bureaucracy matters more than our relationship with the land and our ancestral roots.
The push for reform has been fueled by a misinformation campaign backed by industrial interests and some legislators, according to the network. ‘They want to turn our law into a permit system,’ Ingrid says. ‘They don’t understand its heart, its spirit. For them, bureaucracy matters more than our relationship with the land and our ancestral roots.’
According to official government statistics, as of August 2025, only a quarter of over 100 ECMPO applications have been approved, covering around 2,247 square kilometers; even fewer are operational. Even those that have gained recognition remain under pressure, caught in the slow pace of the legal process and struggling to safeguard the rights that have been officially acknowledged. An additional 80 applications are still pending. The reforms represent not just technical changes, but a rollback of Indigenous governance and cultural survival.
These measures benefit powerful actors: extractive industries, private port developers, tourism consortiums, and foreign investors – who often see Chile’s coastline not as sacred territory but as exploitable commodity and who feel that allowing Indigenous communities to protect and manage coastal areas is an obstacle to the country’s, and their businesses’, economic progress. The two sides remain at loggerheads.
We don’t count, we gather
While the network’s core is deliberately women-only, the goal isn’t to exclude – it is to create spaces of safety, strength, and shared experience. Many women in the network are mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and caregivers. They say that in mixed-gender spaces they’ve been in, it’s often harder to express pain or vulnerability and many have found their voices were softened or ignored. ‘Being all women gives us the space to speak without armour,’ Ingrid explains. ‘We don’t have to come protected. We can simply be.’ That ‘being’ is part of the resistance. It allows them to name pain and transform it, together.
‘If one of us breaks down while speaking, we know another woman will understand, not judge,’ says Ingrid. ‘We’ve long needed this space where we can be who we are – emotionally, spiritually, politically – without having to defend those things.’ The group also reflects on how gendered roles have shaped their environmental work. Women have often been the ones to care for food systems, family health, spiritual well-being, and thus, for the ocean. Their connection to the sea is physical, emotional, and inherited.
The network’s structure resists Western models. Asked how many women are involved, Ingrid laughs: ‘We haven’t counted. Because counting isn’t our practice. That’s a very Western way of seeing things. We belong to the territory. Some are always present, others join when they can.’ The network moves like the tide: expansive, cyclical, and interconnected. It includes seaweed harvesters, teachers, mothers, elders. Their gatherings include shared meals, memory mapping, and ceremonies at the tide’s edge.
These women do not see themselves as activists but as caretakers of practices inherited through generations. Many also engage in community agriculture, weaving, and healing – all intertwined with the ocean. While patriarchal and extractive norms dominate official spaces, this all-women network offers a space of mutual care and emotional honesty.
Resistance reaches beyond borders
Though grounded in Chile, the network is weaving ties across Latin America. At COP16 in Cali in 2024, they met fisherwomen from Brazil, Colombia, and beyond, who are also resisting displacement, pollution, and state neglect. Many were inspired by Chile’s ECMPO system and spoke of the need to bring similar protections to their own territories. These cross-border ties strengthen collective strategy and also point to a growing awareness in Brazil and elsewhere that Chile’s Law 20.249, despite its current threats, represents a model of marine protection rooted in Indigenous rights that others want to emulate.
This contradiction was laid bare at the third UN Ocean Conference (UNOC3) in Nice in June 2025, where, while Chile promoted itself as a global leader in ocean conservation, several women from the network attended and denounced the country’s rollback of the very law held up internationally as a model of marine protection. They highlighted that the Law 20.249, born from spiritual and territorial struggle, is now under threat from industrial and political interests at home. In a formal declaration from the network, their message was clear: genuine marine protection must include the voices and rights of the communities who live with and care for the ocean.
More than biodiversity
In 2025, during a national gathering in Buill, Chaitén women from 11 territories convened to reaffirm their collective demand: a full and faithful implementation of the law, grounded in the spiritual and cultural practices that birthed it. Along Buill’s coastline, Ingrid and her daughter found navajuelas (razor clams) in the sand, a species that no longer exists where they live. ‘I hadn’t been able to show her before,’ Ingrid says. ‘That day, she learned. We reconnected. And I cried.’
This was not nostalgia; it was recovery. They recovered hope for a future where young people learn to fish, heal, and connect spiritually with their elders. For a world where laws protect relationships, not just boundaries. Where spirituality is recognized, not dismissed. And where the concept of itrofil mogen – recognition and respect for all living things, all parts of life without exception – is lived in practice. The stakes are high. Without access to the sea, they say, their culture ceases to exist. As Ingrid puts it, ‘We are women. We are a people. We are the sea.’
These women’s resistance is not just to protect biodiversity. It is memory made active and law made sacred. It is a movement grounded in connection – fighting not only to protect ecosystems but to keep the ocean alive for every generation to come.
Header image: Part of the network looking at stone corrals, structures traditionally used in coastal or river areas to trap or concentrate fish and shellfish as the tides rise and fall. This is an ancestral fishing technique used by many Indigenous peoples and coastal communities. Photo: Gracie Escorza P
