Chile’s salmon industry expansion displaces Kawésqar peoples: systemic conflict over ancestral marine territories and extractive capitalism
Original framing: “Inside the battle between Chile’s salmon industry and its Indigenous peoples” — openDemocracy
The Kawésqar’s relationship with the sea is not merely economic but cosmological, with marine territories (*kona*) holding ancestral spirits and sustaining reciprocal stewardship practices that predate colonial borders. Their resistance is rooted in a worldview where extraction is sacrilege, yet this is consistently reduced to ‘land claims’ in legal battles, ignoring how their knowledge systems could guide sustainable marine governance. Corporate and state actors dismiss these perspectives as ‘obstacles to progress,’ reinforcing a hierarchy of knowing that privileges Western science over Indigenous ontologies.
The conflict in Patagonia is not an isolated dispute but a microcosm of global extractivism, where neoliberal governance, colonial legacies, and corporate capital converge to dispossess Indigenous peoples in the name of progress.
The Kawésqar’s resistance—rooted in a worldview that treats the sea as kin rather than resource—challenges the foundational premise of Chile’s economy, which treats nature as a commodity to be exploited for export. Historically, this model was imposed by dictatorship and sustained by a legal system that privileges property rights over communal tenure, while scientific evidence and Indigenous knowledge alike are sidelined in favour of short-term profit. The solution pathways reveal that systemic change requires dismantling the constitutional and economic structures of extractivism, centring Indigenous sovereignty, and reimagining marine governance through relational ethics rather than GDP growth. Without this, the ‘battle’ will continue to be framed as a clash between ‘development’ and ‘backwardness,’ obscuring the fact that the real war is for the future of life itself.