A Radical Journal of Geography Gendered Geographies of Elimination: Decolonial Feminist Geographies in Latin American Settler Contexts Sofia Zaragocin Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador; sofia.zaragocin@gmail.com Abstract: Gendered geographies of elimination further settler colonialism’s influence on conceptual discussions in human geography on contemporary forms of the placebased death of indigenous peoples. Through work stemming from scholarship on the gendering of settler colonialism, this paper adds to narratives on place annihilation and dispossession of indigenous territory tied to the slow death of racialised, gendered and sexualised populations. Building on incipient reflections in geography with settler colonialism, I explore the geographic implications from the perspective of Epera women, indigenous women belonging to a trinational ethnicity experiencing elimination along the Ecuador–Colombia borderland from the perspective of decolonial feminist geography frameworks. I claim that attrition implied in settler colonialism’s logic of elimination is a territorial project demonstrated in place-based elimination and gendered embodied elimination. Keywords: settler colonialism, logic of elimination, decolonial feminist geography, Indigenous women, cultural amalgamation Introduction Along the Ecuador–Colombia borderland, the indigenous settlements of Epera (or Eperara Siapidaara) are acutely aware of the risk that they are under the threat of disappearance as a distinctive ethnocultural group. This paper explores how slow attrition in the numbers and embodied-cultural distinctiveness of Epera people arises in contexts of sustained encroachment on their territory, environmental degradation and state abandonment. The paper particularly focuses on how these forms of structural everyday violence are experienced in the spaces and bodies of indigenous women, who experience multiple levels of violence. Epera women’s everyday experiences and voices point to the idea of place-based elimination and embodied amalgamation and are the basis for the ideas developed in this paper. To depict the elimination and disappearance of the Epera, settler colonial studies and decolonial feminist geography frameworks are used to examine how the Epera are subjected to ethnic elimination, triggered by settler colonial dynamics, which represent a structure and not an event (Morgensen 2011; Wolfe 1994, 1999). In this paper, the term ethnic elimination is drawn from Patrick Wolfe’s logic of elimination to focus on the Eperara Siapidaara’s ethnic experience of Antipode Vol. 0 No. 0 2018 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 1–20 ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. doi: 10.1111/anti.12454 2 Antipode elimination on both physical and cultural registrars and the implications for a body-territory experience of the collective processes of slow death. Specifically, I contend that elimination is a process whereby parts of invasion as a structure are place based and other aspects that comprise elimination, such as cultural amalgamation, re-scale attrition. The embodiment of elimination is lived through different scales of place, complicating narratives on indigenous dispossession of land and contemporary forms of indigenous collective death. After a brief description of the methodology used, this paper first situates settler colonialism as a colonial analytic for Latin American geographies and then outlines geographies of elimination through place-based elimination and gendered embodied elimination. The processes of Indigenous elimination cause particular consequences for, and response from, indigenous women that can only be addressed from their own reflections. Hence, this paper is based on 12 months of ethnographic field work along the Ecuador–Colombia borderland carried out from the perspective of a decolonial feminist methodological framework, developed in conjunction with the Epera women’s association, emphasising participatory action research and the use of geographical feminist methods. As Kate Coddington (2017) has argued, the voice in feminist geography must be situated within the colonial frameworks of social sciences. Strong reflexivity was invoked throughout the entire research process, whereby Epera women’s voices were the deciding force behind the methods and theories used to comprehend ideas of cultural amalgamation and collective death. Hence, the two maps presented in this paper were decided, drawn and revised by the Epera women’s association. For scholars such as Audra Simpson (2014), decolonised methodologies resonate with sovereignty as a method and representation, whereby there is an ethnographic calculus of what the reader needs to know and what the researcher refuses to write about when considering the sovereignty of indigenous populations in danger of continued dispossession. Two conditions were placed on the research. First, the Taichi Nawe (the Epera spiritual leader) gave her blessing but prohibited the study of Epera spirituality and medicine. Second, the community requested that the research contribute to strengthening the women’s groups, via production of a women’s political agenda. It is in the development of the Epera women’s political agenda that the issue of physical and cultural elimination was prioritised as the most pressing issue for the community. Settler Colonialism as a Colonial Analytic for Latin American Geography Settler colonialism has been theorised in Native American studies as the “social processes and narratives that displace Native people while granting settlers belonging to Native land and settler society” (Morgensen 2010:117). Central to these discussions is the notion of displacement of an indigenous population and its relation to the settler processes of native disappearance through mass killings, forced cultural assimilation and dispossession of territory (Bergland 2000; Cox 2006; Morgensen 2010) while making native land into the settler’s home (Elkins and Pedersen 2005). This paper builds on settler colonial studies in human ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Gendered Geographies of Elimination 3 geography by bringing them into conversation with geographical concepts such as territory, imaginative geographies, and feminist corporeal geographies in a Latin American context. Converging settler colonial studies with these geographic themes results in gendered geographies of elimination, adding to emerging literature on settler colonialism in critical geography that has addressed racialised geographies and white supremacy (Bonds and Inwood 2016), white heterosettler masculinity (Gahman 2015), indigeneity (Radcliffe 2015), non-native settler relations (Pulido 2017) and decolonialism (Radcliffe 2017; Zaragocin 2018). This paper focuses on one key aspect of settler colonial theory, namely, the logic of elimination that is understood to comprise the core organising principle of settler society. According to this body of thinking, the logic of elimination is a distinct category of genocide. Not all forms of elimination are genocide, but all genocides arguably have been a form of the logic of elimination (Wolfe 2006). “Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariable genocidal” (Wolfe 2006:387). That distinction is particularly pertinent in parts of the world where contemporary indigenous struggles are organised around the refusal to be eliminated (Simpson 2014). In these politics, the settler expectation of elimination of indigenous peoples is contested by indigenous self-determination efforts to resist and refuse attrition (Simpson 2014). Audra Simpson documents the Mohawk’s refusal to disappear, “a refusal to be on the other end of Patrick Wolfe’s critical, comparative history—to be ‘eliminated’. In refusing to go away, to cease to be ...” (2014:22). For native and scholars in settler colonial studies, the process of elimination is a territorial project in that space that is produced by settler colonialism between natives and non-natives (Morgensen 2011). Spatial themes in settler colonial literature include dispossession of territory, embedded in contemporary forms of attrition (Coulthard 2014); replacement of territory (Morgensen 2011; Wolfe 2008); and contentious debates on sovereignty and self-determination in settler states (Barker 2017; Morgensen 2011; Rifkin 2009). Important theoretical discussions within settler colonialism on indigenous claims to territory have been analysed in relation to sovereignty and self-determination and understood as processes that both seek and refuse state recognition (Povinelli 2002; Simpson 2014). Native studies and scholars in settler colonial studies have focused on the tense relationship between sovereignty and indigenous notions of space-membership, elaborating on concepts such as the third space of sovereignty (Bruyneel 2007) and indigenous political space (Biolsi 2005), making the case for the indigenous use of place that challenges the imposition of colonial rule from the boundaries of the American political system. This has resulted in conceptualisations around settler colonial biopower (Morgensen 2011), the relation between geopolitics and settler colonialism by way of bare-habitance (Rifkin 2009) and, most significantly for this paper, the gendered, racialised and sexualised land-based project of settler colonialism (Arvin et al. 2013; Barker 2017; Coulthard 2014; Goeman 2013, 2017; Morgensen 2011, 2012; Rifkin 2009). Contemporary attrition of indigenous peoples is a highly territorialised project that is embedded in bodies and spaces, with the coloniality of gender, sexuality and racialisation process at its core (Arvin et al. 2013; Barker 2017; Morgensen ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. 4 Antipode 2012; Simpson 2014; Smith 2005). Native feminist theories and indigenous studies scholarship have focused on racialised, sexualised and gendered territorial configurations in settler societies from gendered and sex-land-based epistemologies (Barker 2017; Morgensen 2011). For many critical indigenous, feminist and queer scholars, heteronormative patriarchy is a result of settler colonialism, the regulation of space and bodies, which are intimately linked (Arvin et al. 2013; Smith 2005). Spatial elements of elimination have been analysed regarding the relationship between indigenous nationhood, settler government and indigenous–queer alliances against racialised sexism and homophobia of settler politics (Barker 2017). Not only has settler colonialism as an analytic brought colonial invasion as a structure to the forefront, but it has also placed the coloniality of gender’s centrality in settler colonialism’s analysis through the intellectual work done by indigenous, feminist and native studies. Emerging literature that places the coloniality of gender in contexts of indigenous elimination in settler states mirrors both a decolonial experience in knowledge production and an undoing of certain key conceptual experiences of coloniality in the place (Zaragocin 2018). This paper adds to recent literature that extends settler colonialism as a framework for understanding the experience of indigenous peoples in Latin America and indigenous Latinx in the United States (Castellanos 2017; Loperena 2017; Speed 2017). Scholars committed to bringing a settler colonial analytic to Latin America are profoundly aware of the dearth of North–South conceptual dialogues between indigenous, feminist and colonial theories across the Americas, as well as the complexity involved in translating this framework to linguistic, cultural and historical terms (Castellanos 2017; Speed 2017). Emerging analysis of settler colonialism for the Latin American context points to contemporary understandings of mestizaje that suggest mestizos as settlers, challenging mestizaje’s only role as a nationalist whitening project for the region (Castellanos 2017). Other analyses point to new ways that settler colonial logic brings understanding indigenous dispossession and extermination, when considering Latin American states as settler states (Speed 2017). My own positionality as a transloca (Alvarez 2014; Zaragocin forthcoming b), meaning someone who embodies the travel of theoretical praxis across the Americas, disrupting the geographical fixity of feminist theory, is key in understanding the mobility with which I move between theoretical frameworks for this paper. From this position, I am acutely aware of implementing a decolonial focus on knowledge construction whereby epistemologies of the South are possible, invoking the notion that the South is also present in the North (Santos 2011). In this sense, and for this paper, the conceptual theories produced by indigenous and Black scholarship in the global North are linked with decolonial Latin American feminist frameworks. This also follows recent critiques on the masculinism of the region’s MCD (Modernity, Coloniality and Decoloniality) framework (Ramirez 2018) that has occluded indigenous and Black feminist decolonial ~ osa et al. 2014). As I have developed elsewhere, Latin scholarship (Espinosa-Min American decolonial feminism provides immense potential for decolonising geographical knowledge because its very framework depends on bridging different scholarly critics of coloniality, promoting a plurality of epistemologies, political alliances and embodied ontologies (Zaragocin 2017, 2018). Epera women’s ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Gendered Geographies of Elimination 5 conceptions of gender-based elimination, central to this paper, can evolve within this theoretical dialogue, something restricted under an MCD framework. Furthermore, gendered Latin American discussions on contemporary forms of indigenous territorial dispossession are discussed regarding extractivism (oil and large-scale mining) (Colectivo Miradas Cr!ıticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2014; Ulloa 2016), and recently under post-recognition racism (Novo and Shlossberg 2018). Meanwhile, contemporary discussions on genocide, ethnocide and elimination regarding place are limited. There is a need, then, to reconsider mass elimination of indigenous communities under other colonial analytics such as settler colonialism (Castellanos 2017), in ways that bring together racialised and gendered components of extractive activity and dispossession under settler colonial logic. In this paper, a gendered geographies of elimination specifically brings together the settler colonialism’s logic of elimination with feminist geographies of indigenous women undergoing elimination. Geographies of Elimination: Place-Based Elimination Geographies of elimination are different from geographies of genocide (Pulido 2017) in that they emphasise the permanence of invasion of the structure as racialised, gendered and sexualised features of the state (Barker 2017) through territorial replacement and cultural amalgamation (Wolfe 2006). In scenarios where environmental racism and racialised capitalism can tell parts of the story, geographies of elimination based on the settler colonialism’s logic of elimination allow for the structure of invasion to be embedded in the territory and for the territorial narrative to be determined by how collective death unfolds in place. A plurality of scenes of dispossession “instruct those in settler colonial nation-states to forget the persistent presence and value of Indigenous life, the imbrication of Indigenous life and land, and the persistent presence of Black geographic life” (Rowe and Tuck 2017:7). Elimination takes on various facets along the Ecuador–Colombia borderland, to be described in turn. Colonial and postcolonial histories of settlement in Epera lands by Afro-Ecuadorian and Colom! bians, and by neighbouring indigenous groups such as the Chachi, make the Choco Pacific prone to normative preventable and premature death (Gilmore 2007) as well geographic management of race and racial differences (McKittrick 2011). Another facet of dispossession and elimination is the geopolitical location of the Epera settlement. Existing at the crossfire of geopolitical and non-state militarised disputes over territory and resources, the Eperara Siapidaara (Epera) live along the Ecuador–Colombia frontier, a highly complex area characterised by the “spill-over effects” of the long-standing Colombian conflict. A third facet comes about by the lack of state presence in border zones of the infrastructures that underpin life and social reproduction in other parts of the country. Although indigenous and rural areas are frequently underprovisioned in terms of the number and quality of infrastructures of energy, water, sewerage and public services, the territory inhabited by the Epera within Ecuador experiences a particularly virulent absence of such provisions. In what follows, I draw on three scenes of dispossession to showcase what geographies of elimination enfold, exploring place-based elimination in the Epera territory and riverways, followed by an embodied account of cultural amalgamation. ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. 6 Antipode Elimination through Territorialisation by Militarised and Illegal Activities One of the most salient characteristics of the northern Ecuador and southern Colombia regions is their significant levels of insecurity, which are linked to, but not solely attributable to, the drug war. Insecurity is also manifested through the rise in organised crime since 2000 (Idler 2013). Organised crime in Ecuador is related to the Colombian conflict, which was relocated to the country’s borders with Ecuador and Venezuela in 2012 under the Colombian government’s military ~o strategy, named Plan Espada de Honor (Idler 2013). One hot spot is the Narin region, which borders Ecuador. Colombian’s largest cocaine plantations are in ~ o, two of the three provinces that border Ecuador. Prior to Putumayo and Narin the Colombian Peace accords in 2016, several FARC camps were found along the border provinces, making the effects of the drug trafficking route particularly potent. From the onset of Plan Colombia in 2000, a US initiative aimed at combating Colombian drug cartels, killings among paramilitaries and FARC guerrillas have taken place in the northern border region, which is believed to have heightened civilian criminal activity (Jaskoski 2012). Paramilitary and guerrilla groups compete among themselves to control the riverine and air routes to traffic drugs to the Pacific, routes that also constantly are contested by organised crime. Mangrove swamp areas near the Pacific coastal towns of San Lorenzo and Borbon, the cities closest to Santa Rosa de los Epera, are particularly crucial for the circulation of drugs (INREDH 2008), yet the cocaine trade also affects the highland Andean border zones, due to their key role as sites for cocaine processing (Idler 2013:4). Related to these activities, Ecuador has become an important site for money laundering as well as the provision of chemicals for processing coca leaves (ibid.). Recent studies indicate that the routes used for drug trade are also used by the arms trade and for human trafficking, mainly of women for sexual purposes (FOSIN 2012). Intense militarisation of the border area by Ecuadorian and Colombian armed forces followed the kidnapping and killing of three Ecuadorian journalists belonging to the most influential national newspaper (El Comercio) by dissident FARC groups in April 2018. Agricultural Settler Colonists and the Elimination of the Epera The principal settlement of the Epera nationality is Santa Rosa de los Epera, found on the banks of the River Cayapas. Territory surrounding Santa Rosa de los Epera consists of African palm plantations or is cleared for grazing livestock, each having highly dangerous consequences for the mangrove forests that characterise this region. Deforestation, oil processing and mining are common activities for land use in northern Esmeraldas, where Santa Rosa de los Epera is situated. On the contrary, Epera have prioritised their territory as a reserve for animals and fauna, antagonistic to the perspective of their neighbours who view territory in terms of economic productivity. As a result, the Ecuadorian settlers (colonos) who have come into Epera territory claim that they have a right to it because they are making the land productive whereas the Epera are not. Originally from the Manabi province (southern coast) of Ecuador, settlers constantly threaten the Epera with ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Gendered Geographies of Elimination 7 taking over what they consider as underutilised agricultural land. In comparison with Epera land use, the settlers consider themselves to be introducing more intensive and hence productive forms of agriculture. Such viewpoints are characteristic of settler colonialism, according to Tuck and Yang (2012:6), in which the settler “can only make his [sic] identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because ‘civilization’ is defined as production in excess of the ‘natural world’”. Colonos seek to expand their agricultural frontier, thereby placing pressure on Epera land. Despite this potential for encroachment, settler settlements have been stopped at the territorial limits of Santa Rosa’s communal legalised territory. Yet to repel settler colonial expansionism requires the Epera to engage in constant negotiations with local authorities to keep the settlers at bay. Territorialisation of settler colonialism in the region is also undertaken by stakeholders in an expanding economy of extractivism, focused on mining, timber and African palm. Extractive activity in the region seeks to expand operations through direct market relations with local residents, as has occurred with the Epera. The community was visited in 2005 by African palm oil plantation owners, who arrived upriver with two large bags holding an estimated US$70,000 to offer to the Epera in exchange for land and thereby extend the production of African palm into Santa Rosa. The Epera were visited later in 2007 by a mining company seeking to prospect for minerals such as gold. Both offerings were turned down after discussion in communal assemblies, where extractivism was correlated with destruction of territory, and for Epera, this also put their physical and cultural continuance in grave danger. Nevertheless, pressures for the dispossession of Epera from their territory occur through direct efforts to buy land, invasion from settlers, and from the destruction of the environment, making Santa Rosa de los Epera difficult to inhabit. Slow Violence: Environmental Degradation and Ethnic Elimination The deterioration of the environment in Esmeraldas province profoundly affects the Epera everyday experience. Agro-industries such as mono-cropping of African palm trees combined with deforestation, oil processing, large-scale and local mining activities surround Santa Rosa de los Epera. While these activities do not occur within Epera territory itself, the combined environmental effects continue to pollute the soil and rivers heavily (Carrasco 2010; Epera Siapidaara 2014). Residues from fertilisers and pesticides used in the African palm plantations cause soil erosion as well as air and water contamination that seep into Epera farming land and water sources. Governmental sources highlight the effects of small-scale mining and logging companies in the deforestation of the northern area of the Esmeraldas province (PDOT 2012:8). The River Cayapas has been designated by the state indigenous development council as unsuitable for human consumption due to its poor quality (CODENPE 2013). The abandonment by the state of the northern border region in Esmeraldas province results in the lack of sewerage infrastructures in Santa Rosa. The lack of adequate sewage systems in Santa Rosa de los Epera and neighbouring farms requires the Epera to live on top of human, animal ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Antipode 8 (livestock) and industry waste. Historic underfunding of rural and indigenous people’s territories is not just experienced by the Epera as the concentration of Ecuador’s public facilities is in large cities and provincial capitals. Nevertheless, according to indigenous representatives working in the state, the Epera face the most challenging circumstances among the different indigenous groups in Ecuador (Interview CODENPE 2014). Gendered Place-Based Elimination Research with Epera women stemmed from a decolonial feminist geographical perspective, meaning an emphasis on the everyday scale of ethnic elimination evidenced in the spaces and bodies of Epera women in Santa Rosa de los Epera and the River Cayapas from Latin American decolonial feminist perspectives (Espi~ osa et al. 2014; Zaragocin forthcoming a). Feminist geography undernosa-Min standings of the “everyday” prove useful for understanding Epera women’s context, while Latin American decolonial feminism’s emphasis on the coloniality of gender and race in place brought a multiscalar analysis together with other epistemological notions of gender and racialised spaces. Epera women spoke about the processes contributing to slow death in Santa Rosa through river transect flows, timelines, participatory diagramming, and drawings of everyday spaces (Alexander et al. 2007; Kesby 2000). A focus on the everyday life of women assures their visibility (Dyck 2005), yet everyday activities and routines reflect the power structures imposed on women (Rose 1993). Gendered everyday and structural factors are intertwined, embedded and produced through place (Nelson and Seager 2005). Epera slow death is evident by drawing out the complex web of factors (state abandonment, territorial replacement, cultural amalgamation and resulting insecurity) experienced by Epera women in their everyday spaces and experiences. Following decolonial Latin American feminist epistemo~ osa et al. 2014; Zaragocin logical and methodological perspectives (Espinosa-Min forthcoming b), this section is based on individual and group conversations, transect walks, participatory mapping and drawings. The illustration shown in Figure 1 is a result of the multiple drawings of everyday space mapped out by Epera women, where delinquency, extractive activity, contamination of aquatic and territorial space, health hazards and environmental degradation overlap, constituting place-based elimination. As Figure 1 demonstrates, hidden power relations of settler colonialism are found within Epera women’s everyday lives and space. As Neida commented while carrying out the mapping exercise: We are slowly disappearing, along with the destruction of forest and the pollution in the riverways. I can see it from the balcony of my house—how we live on top of waste, and how the contamination from palm, mining and logging is making us ill. It seeps into our homes and our children’s bodies. The replacement of territory includes the destruction of native forest and riverways caused by the surrounding African palm plantations and mining and timber industries in what constitutes, in part, an Epera collective sense of ethnic ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Gendered Geographies of Elimination Figure 1: 9 Elimination in place disappearance. As documented in the above section, Epera experience a combination of place-based threats to life and daily security, ranging from the escalation of criminalised activity to the contamination of riverways. The everyday lives of the Epera are characterised by these processes of settler colonialism as they pervade everyday and long-term indigenous lives in a form of slow violence (Nixon 2013) in which the continuing deterioration of the environment affects every aspect of daily life such as bathing and eating. As the president of the Epera women’s association, Florinda, commented: ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. 10 Antipode We are always sick, my mother has a parasite that is making her blind. She got that from the river. My [son is] constantly with diarrhoea because of the contaminated food—which is the only food I can give him. Why do I have to worry that he may die from diarrhoea? And I ask all of us women here—which one of us hasn’t been hospitalised? And how many of us simply don’t make it. Slow death occurs in these places not from dramatic one-off events but through the gradual pacing of ordinariness in daily life (Berlant 2007; Povinelli 2011). Here, women’s narratives provide insight into two core areas of concern, namely, environmental degradation and violent territorialisations. Women’s narratives vividly draw attention to the multifaceted forms of neglect and substandard state investments that together result in ill health and degraded environments in the settlement. Even the meagre state services in the settlement fail to provide sanitation; the primary school lacks a bathroom and water fountain, although the average daily temperature in Santa Rosa ranges from 30 to 40°C. Carmen, a primary school teacher in Santa Rosa de los Epera, emphasised that: Those who can afford bottled water are a bit better off, but our school can’t buy this. When it rains, we have rain water for the school’s bathrooms. During the dry season, we have an unbearable amount of flies and no bathroom for school children. Moreover, the lack of municipal rubbish collection (as occurs elsewhere in Ecuador) means that waste of various types has to be thrown onto the marsh land beneath the houses, which are built above flood levels on fragile wooden stilts. Everyday rubbish and human waste accumulates below the Epera houses and is grazed by domestic animals including pigs and chickens. The mix of waste seeps into houses during the rainy season. Thus, the lack of basic social services, such as waste collection, sanitation systems, and access to clean water, combine as facets of structural state abandonment of the Epera people in Santa Rosa. The processes of slow death also take place in relation to the river space that is central to Epera women’s lives and culture. As such, the geographies of elimination come to have a bearing on a central dimension of indigenous territoriality, namely, the aquatic spaces or agua-territorio (water-territory) (Colectivo de Geograf!ıa Cr!ıtica del Ecuador 2018) through which indigenous relations with ! region in Colombia, the water space and territory occur. Referring to the Choco geographer Ulrich Oslender highlights the significance of the river space within the socionatural arena of what he terms aquatic space. Aquatic space in his definition includes high levels of precipitation, large tidal ranges, intricate river networks, mangrove swamps and frequent inundations characteristic of the Pacific coast region (Oslender 2008:92) and equally characterises the Esmeraldas province in Ecuador, including Santa Rosa. Aquatic space to rural Black and indigenous inhabitants comprises “the underlying spatial ordering logic of everyday social interactions” (Oslender 2008:90). Within Santa Rosa, the River Cayapas constitutes the underlying spatial ordering of social life for the Epera as it permits contact with other, smaller Epera settlements along the riverway as well as the ! n and San Lorenzo (see Figure 2). towns of Borbo ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Gendered Geographies of Elimination Figure 2: 11 Riverscapes of elimination Epera women’s drawings and testimonies concerning the river raised issues on access to clean water, insecurity and the abandonment of the state in this process. Luzmari, a 17-year-old mother of four, mentioned that families who can ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. 12 Antipode afford it buy large containers of water for consumption purposes, whereas poorer families use rainwater or riverwater for cooking. Such inequalities were not so stark a few years ago when the community had access to municipal clean drinking water, supplied by the municipal government of Borbon. However, the water supply was cut in 2010, because the Epera could not afford to pay the $5 monthly bills. Lorena, a 34-year-old village leader, commented on how she voluntarily collected money from villagers to pay for the monthly water bills. After a $1000 debt was incurred, some women protested against the commodification of water, arguing that clean water came from rivers in Colombia and Ecuador, and so the government should clean up the river instead of making them pay. Furthermore, water facilities were not maintained by the local government. The second dimension highlighted in women’s critiques of everyday space and experience is the continuous form of insecurity caused by criminal activity and the spillover effects of the Colombian conflict nearby. To draw out women’s experiences of aquatic space along the River Cayapas connecting them to Colombia and the closest border towns, the Santa Rosa women developed a joint account of their perception of security and insecurity. Through their everyday lives, Epera women have gained deep and critical understandings of security issues along the aquatic space, as the river serves to connect the community with important educational and employment facilities on an everyday basis. Luzdary, during one of our river transect exercises, stated: the river is central to all our lives. We bathe, eat, shower from this space. It is also our only connection to the world outside Santa Rosa de los Eperas. I often wonder, how can a place so important for our lives, also cause illness, insecurity and death? According to the women’s accounts, the river is territorialised by powerful actors as an unsafe and unpredictable space for indigenous women. As demonstrated in Figure 2, bandits steal motorboats as well as passengers’ belongings !n and cash when they move through this space. On a canoe trip to Borbo together, we witnessed an illegal petro transaction when a large container ship going downriver was on its way to provide petrol to the drug traffickers in the area. The trafficking of petrol is one example of widespread illicit activities surrounding Santa Rosa de los Epera that are integrated deeply into legal activities such as African palm plantations and logging. Epera women point out three areas where insecurity in terms of violent attacks or robbery occur on a systematic basis (see Figure 2). The first is underneath the bridge, where the timber company operates; an easy place to attack because of the highway a few metres from the river’s edge that facilitates the bandits’ escape. The second place is on the outskirts of and within Borbon town, even in neighbourhoods where migrant Epera live. According to women’s accounts, violence occurs due to the presence of organised crime, money laundering and drug trafficking. The scenes of dispossession presented in this section of Epera territory and riverways tell how elimination is embedded in the everyday space, a place-based elimination. Throughout the 12 months of research, four children and two adults died of preventable diseases, while severe and prolonged illness was a common event. On the other side of the border, the Colombian constitution recognises the Epera ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Gendered Geographies of Elimination 13 as one of the country’s 25 indigenous groups in danger of cultural and social extinction caused by the internal armed conflict, and whose human rights have been put in grave danger. While there is no such legal recognition of elimination in Ecuador, according to the indigenous council CODENPE (2013), as in other low-income indigenous populations across Ecuador, the most common health problems are diarrhoea, fevers, stomach aches, headaches and sorcery practices. Epera women fear cultural amalgamation, territorial replacement and state abandonment, elements that constitute ethnic elimination and thus prompt the link between everyday fear and fear of structural elimination. According to Epera women’s testimonies, the contamination of the river and harvesting land cause chronic preventable diseases such as diarrhoea and anaemia. These speak partially to how elimination as a structure is determining the lived place on multiple scales from those who are experiencing it. For Ecuadorian-based Epera, despite the lack of state recognition, their subjection to processes of physical and cultural disappearance is paramount, determining women’s interpretation of border dynamics as well as communal regulations. In the last section, I examine how embodied elimination is understood by Epera women. Gendered Embodied Elimination: Re-Scaling Amalgamation A gendered account of settler colonialism requires an expanded sense of the processes through which elimination occurs and comes to be expressed through embodiment. The majority of Epera women agree that disappearance and ethnic survival are the paramount challenges that they currently face. However, discrepancies among women exist as to which causes of death are significant. Some Epera women attribute the decline in numbers of Epera (ethnic elimination) solely to cultural assimilation (cultural amalgamation on settler colonial theory’s terms), whereas other women consider territorial replacement in theoretical terms and state abandonment as constitutive and complementary causes. Within this account, there is a particular agency of the Epera women that I explore elsewhere (Zaragocin forthcoming a), where Epera women’s role in challenging traditional ethnic laws co-exists with upholding contentious corporal experiences and regulations. Epera women embody a very specific sense of empowerment in fending off place-based elimination that has resulted in female leadership roles, a feminist geopolitics of the uterus (Zaragocin forthcoming a) as well as in changing Epera gender relations, resulting in the abolition of particular forms of gender-based violence. For some women, bodies and biological reproduction are integral dynamics connected to the risks of Epera disappearance. Rather than solely attributing attrition in Epera numbers and culture to the threats associated with violence, environmental destruction and encroachment on territory (as documented in the above sections), there is also what they describe as the dilution of ethnic purity. The Epera have a rigid conception of ethno-racial relations in which “culturalpurity” is valued and mestizaje is considered to contribute to their physical and cultural disappearance. As such, the Epera have regulations on sexuality and ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. 14 Antipode marriage in which sanctions are enforced on members who partake in partnerships outside of the Epera ethnicity. According to these women’s accounts, Epera continuance is threatened by the presence of people with “no identity” who diverge from endogamous partnerships, referring to what the Epera leaders and communal statutes define as the offspring between a culturally pure Epera and a non-culturally pure Epera (Carrasco 2010). According to these codes, culturally pure Epera are defined as the offspring of a male and female Epera, whose ancestral ties to territory and ethnic identity can be traced back to the Saija River in Colombia. For Epera born in Colombia and now based in Ecuador, the imaginative geography of origin and ancestral aquatic space is powerful in ordering the logic of everyday social interactions and interpretations of risk. Rio Saija, a sacred river for Epera, located in the Cauca region of Colombia, is considered to be the origin place of Epera culture and identity, and as such, the Colombian Epera territory is perceived as more authentic than Ecuadorian populations. By this logic, the Colombia-centred imaginative geography influences the interpretation of daily life in Santa Rosa, including the conceptualisations and explanations offered for embodied death on the Ecuador side of the border. During my fieldwork, this dynamic became starkly evident when a spiritual leader called Taichinawe visited the Ecuadorian communities of Epera. During her visit, this most senior spiritual leader preached that if the Epera in Ecuador were to continue to have children with no identity, she would no longer consider them part of the Epera ethnic group and henceforth no longer visit them in Santa Rosa. The Taichinawe elaborated on her argument, saying that according to her authority, the use of the Spanish language, western music, food, and marriages taking place outside of the ethnic group are the prime reasons for the dying out of the Epera in Ecuador. While the majority of women in Santa Rosa support the Tiachinawe’s notion of cultural purity as a means to assure Epera future generations, some question it. Epera women are explicit in the promotion of purifying practices among Ecuadorian Epera and justify these practices as a way to safeguard Epera ethnicity in two fundamental ways. First, that doing what is done in Colombia is depicted as the way to practice cultural purity because Ecuadorian Epera are emulating a Colombian set of practices interpreted as originally and historically established. Second, “pure” Epera children are expected to result from these practices, with offspring considered the only way to combat the possibility of ethnic extinction. Epera women stressed that these regulations and practices have a disproportionately higher impact on women than on men because of their potential as mothers and as principal caretakers of children. Halting cultural amalgamation is a contentious issue among Epera women who either support or disagree with the measures taken against embodied elimination. Illustrative of gendered embodied elimination, the last scene of dispossession is Epera women’s everyday space depicting elimination inflicted on bodies. As part of the mentioned participatory methods, Alicia drew dots around her and her child’s body to represent, as she explained to me while doing the drawing, mal aire (bad air). According to widespread popular medical narratives, mal aire results from an act in which someone in the community sends negative energy to another member, causing illness and possibly death. Alicia drew a picture of mal ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Gendered Geographies of Elimination 15 aire following the preventable death of her son (from diarrhoea). In explaining her death and linking it to the drawing, Alicia contends that her own and her son’s non-identity ethnic embodiments, due to her partnership to a non-Epera male, make them prone to death and a target of mal aire from other Epera. In the logic expressed by Alicia and the Taichinawe, the embodiment of “Epera” themselves can threaten the continuation of culturally “pure” Epera. According to this logic, the threat comes from the unreliability of the body’s continuance and ability to generate the next generation, embodied in children. From this perspective, the everyday sustenance of the body (through food, sex, listening to music) can—under the conditions lived by Ecuadorian Epera—make those Epera persons prone to death. The social conditions of individual daily processes of embodiment result in this view in persons being not able bodied enough to withstand the hostility of everyday space and place-based elimination described in the previous sections. Not only is a woman’s body more susceptible to illness and death because of her ethnic non-identity, but furthermore, she embodies a threat of cultural dilution in her very non-identity. As noted in the North American context, “native women’s bodies also become the conduit of possible violence that reinforces settler structures of violence” (Goeman 2017:100). Such entanglements of women’s bodies in the processes of settler colonialism entail forms of sanction and violence against women who threaten the boundaries of ethnic groups (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989, 1993). Settler colonialism, exemplified in placebased elimination, has solidified Epera society as a heterosexual patriarchy in which everyday space is a site of colonial surveillance and control (Denetdale 2017). In Santa Rosa, it is women’s bodies who are subject to scrutiny and control, not those of men. Men do not embody the fear provoked by cultural amalgamation, yet they make up the governing bodies in charge of the communal statutes that sustain sanctions on women’s reproductive (ethnic and biological) functions. This ultimately exemplifies how settler spatial construction continues to have power over indigenous bodies and, in particular, over indigenous women’s bodies considered “dangerous because they produce knowledge and demand accountability, whether at the scale of their individual bodily integrity, of their communities’ ability to remain on their bodies of land and water ... “ (Goeman 2017:123). Epera women’s experience of elimination, on physical and cultural registrars, demonstrates how this is lived within the Epera community. In addition, these local interpretations of the violence of settler colonial cultural amalgamation weaken and undermine a collective indigenous response to the threat of disappearance. The Epera explanations of collective death linked to notions of individual responsibility for non-identity militates against a shared sense of grievance against the violence committed by settler colonialism. The causes of collective death further weaken a joint response against the numerous facets of settler colonial violence that together constitute the geographies of elimination (including, as documented above, state-abandonment, insecurity, territorial replacement and environmental destruction). The gendered discourses and material consequences of attributing death to individual embodiments creates divisions —not solidarity—between “pure” Epera and non-identity Epera, based on criteria of embodiment and daily behaviours. ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. 16 Antipode Pursuing this point further, we can suggest that elimination under this interpretation becomes re-scaled, placing the blame onto indigenous person(s), specifically women in charge of reproducing ethnic identity on physical and cultural registrars. Women who marry outside the ethnicity or do not feed their child traditional food or speak Epera indigenous language, overwhelmingly are blamed for the Epera collective disappearance. Under conditions of settler colonialism around the world, blame is distributed among indigenous peoples for being inauthentic or “not indigenous enough” (Povinelli 2002). Gendered embodied elimination distributes blame among Epera women, creating divisions and weakening social cohesion needed in the face of place-based elimination. As a result, the insecurity that arises from geopolitical-militarised border dynamics along the riverways is naturalised, in comparison to fighting ethnic elimination focused on the biophysical reproduction of “pure” Epera offspring. Finally, cultural amalgamation as a form of collective death complicates the death-body-territory narrative in which ecocide, replacement of territory and place annihilation coincide with the elimination of indigenous bodies. For geographers, this poses the question: how is cultural assimilation territorialised under settler colonialisms? The different ways of understanding death in relation to place remind us of what Tuck and Yang (2012) underscored as the epistemological, ontological and cosmological relationships to land that are also erased under elimination. Amalgamation, or cultural assimilation, is a harder process to map and to make tangible. Yet it is precisely this that the geographies of elimination bring to the forefront. Conclusion Death embedded and embodied through territory is what the settler colonialism’s logic of elimination evokes. This is not in the regulated spaces where death becomes part of the landscape or through deathscapes in western societies (Sidaway and Maddrell 2010), but where territory invariably is tied to processes of elimination understood as territorial processes that result in racialised, gendered and sexualised death in both physical and cultural registrars. Territorial implications for preventable death in racialised spaces are having a profound impact on how we understand the relationship between race, place, space and preventable death (Gilmore 2007; McKittrick 2011). Likewise, reflections found in settler colonial and native studies regarding racialised, gendered and sexualised spaceidentity formations are part of these discussions for self-identified indigenous populations undergoing contemporary forms of attrition. Settler colonialism relies on unjust geographies and spatial injustices to maintain itself (Goeman 2017). This paper suggests gendered geographies of elimination from which we can understand place-death and women’s bodies, territories that further complicate and resist linear narratives concerning expected futurity of indigenous death in at least two ways. First is that elimination is a highly gendered process whereby Epera women carry the burden of cultural and physical reproduction. Second, gendered embodied accounts of elimination, such as those experienced by Epera women, deflect elimination as solely place-dependent, pointing toward cultural ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Gendered Geographies of Elimination 17 death as an equally important factor. Epera accounts of collective death are caught at the intersections between place-based physical and a re-scaling of gendered embodied elimination triggered by the threat of cultural amalgamation. Ultimately, this paper sheds light on the different ways Epera experience elimination related to land and beyond the physical presence of settlers, suggesting that elimination occurs in relation to land, not just for the physical attenuation of indigenous peoples for their land. This furthers what Castellanos has called for in bringing settler colonial theory to Latin America; its ability to move beyond binary logics of dispossession and elimination dependent on “either land or labor exploitation” (2017:778). Even when both ecocide and elimination of indigenous peoples are simultaneously working in interconnected ways, there are other elements and interpretations on collective mass death that have everything and nothing to do with place. Epera women’s multiscalar experiences speak to the process of the logic of elimination, of what happens to their bodies in relation to the hostility of placeannihilation pointing to the contradictions and violence created under settler colonial invasion. Last, gendered geographies of elimination are only possible when converging decolonial feminist geographies with gendered settler colonial critiques, thus highlighting the epistemic potential of converging different geographical critiques of colonial settlements on gendered racialised bodies and spaces. Acknowledgements I wish to thank the reviewers for their comments and suggestions, as well as Sarah Rad! n for careful readings of this text. I would cliffe, Elva Orozco-Mendoza and Manuel Bayo also like to thank the Epera community of Santa Rosa de los Epera. References Alexander C, Beale N, Kesby M, Kindon S, McMillan J, Pain R and Ziegler F (2007) Participatory diagramming: A critical view from North East England. 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