LAB author and film-maker Marcos Colón travelled to Temuco to speak about listening to Indigenous knowledge. The conference listened. But Wallmapu asked whether listening is enough, whether reporting is extraction, whether audiences and their institutions are changed, and where commitment and responsibilities should lie. This is a shortened version of a longer article.

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.

Too often, when journalists, filmmakers and scholars enter Indigenous territories, 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 argued for remaining long enough for the territory to disturb the assumptions we bring with us.

Then Wallmapu spoke back.

While in Temuco, I read an open letter addressed to NAISA by the Coordinación Territorial Mapuche Wallmapu. Its message was respectful, but uncomfortable. It welcomed those gathered for the conference while reminding us that we were not meeting on 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, Mapuche families continued to live with racism, militarization, imprisonment, criminalization of their territorial claims and the loss of their lands. The letter 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.

The question did not allow the conference to remain simply a conference. It did not allow me to remain simply a presenter.

The language inside the room

The conference programme was rich with discussions of Mapuche media, dispossession, Indigenous incarceration, extractivism and territorial defence.

But what did these words require of us once the panel dispersed?

The open letter warned that intellectual work, however sophisticated, would have little power against denial and colonialism unless connected to political responsibility. This forced me to confront a question: What is the point of Indigenous studies without the transformation of the institutions that produce and govern knowledge?

A territory is not…

A territory is not simply 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 lies at the centre 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 providing Indigenous people with greater freedom and economic opportunities in the use of their lands. Temucuicui interpreted them differently, warning that allowing protected lands to be leased, mortgaged or treated more like individual commercial property could expose collective territories to banks, businesses and debt—and thus a renewed process of dispossession.

The dispute 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’.

Indigenous peoples across the Pan-Amazon 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.

‘Neutrality’ is a political decision

Chile inherited an anti-terrorism law from the Pinochet dictatorship that was used in the 2000s against Mapuche leaders and activists fighting to recover 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.

Parts of southern Chile have remained under a state of emergency since 2022, amid military patrols, police raids, confrontations, long prison sentences, and communities living within an intensifying cycle of resistance and repression.

The Mapuche movement itself is not politically uniform. Some continue territorial occupations and direct confrontation; others, particularly younger Mapuche, increasingly use 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 that complexity should not become an excuse for indifference.

A Mapuche-produced fanzine, for example, identifies more than one hundred people whom its authors consider political prisoners. But 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 these realities; it included a roundtable on Indigenous incarceration and prison policy. But the open letter pressed a different question: what would it mean for those names to become more than subjects of academic discussion? What should remain once the conference ended?

The writers did not ask foreign delegates to resolve the Mapuche struggle. Rather they asked us to acknowledge the institutional violence and racism they see behind the treatment of Mapuche communities and defendants, and to take an ethical position.

Neutrality, in such a context, is not the absence of politics. It is a political decision.

Questioning myself

After returning from Temuco, I put the question directly to NAISA’s leadership. Had the association taken specific steps before or after the gathering to address Mapuche struggles? Would any institutional commitment continue beyond the conference?

NAISA president Luis Cárcamo-Huechante told me that the association had fulfilled its task by making the conference a space open to NAISA members and Mapuche communities. More specific collaborations, he said, would be up to individual members.

His response complicated my question rather than resolving it.

Perhaps the issue was not whether NAISA had listened. The conference offered evidence that it had. The harder question was where responsibility for what had been heard should reside: with the institution, with individual scholars, or with the relationships formed among them.

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 allowing what I encountered to change the questions I ask.

I also had to allow the response from NAISA to disturb the argument I had begun forming, rather than simply confirm what I already believed. I arrived prepared to speak about the Amazon. 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.

Listening is not enough

An academic conference cannot resolve a territorial conflict that has developed across generations, nor should scholars make declarations without listening to those who will live with the consequences.

But those limitations do not eliminate the question of what institutions owe to the communities whose territories they enter.

An association can create mechanisms through which communities identify forms of continued engagement that would actually be useful—supporting translation, local media, archives, public forums, legal defence or other priorities identified by the people concerned. It can return to the commitments generated by a gathering and ask what 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 criticised throughout my career. Journalism often enters the Amazon during catastrophe—a fire, a murder, an invasion, an election, a climate summit—and leaves 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.

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 towards 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, forests, communities, prisons, memories, disagreements, ceremonies and demands all 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 still believe those possibilities can be found in Indigenous knowledge – in relationships with forests and rivers, and in the refusal to accept extraction as the only available future.

But Wallmapu taught me that ‘other possibles’ cannot exist only as ideas. They must become relationships, choices and forms of responsibility.

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.