CHR Fellow Talk: Associate Professor Andrew Wingfield (School of Integrative Studies), "Connection and its Consequences: Fighting a Road to Ruin in the Peruvian Amazon"

Tuesday, April 9, 2024 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Hybrid Event in Horizon Hall 6325 and on Zoom

River of Resistance is a book of literary nonfiction that Professor Wingfield is coauthoring with his colleague in the School of Integrative Studies, Dr. Michael Gilmore. The book, which is under contract with University of Georgia Press, focuses on the Maijuna Indigenous group in the Peruvian Amazon, exploring the deep connections between Maijuna culture and Maijuna ancestral lands. Since Europeans first arrived in their region, the Maijuna and their lands have routinely been treated as disposable by outside actors pursuing various self-interested agendas. But diligent Maijuna efforts at building political agency over the past two decades represent a bright spot in the mostly gloomy post-contact history of Indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon. The book pays close attention to the current Maijuna fight for land rights and environmental justice as they work to block a government-planned highway that would run through the heart of their ancestral lands, violating Maijuna sovereignty and posing an existential threat to the intact rainforest landscape that sustains the Maijuna physically and culturally.