CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | D'Alesandro, Gina |
|---|---|
| Title | Multispecies foodscapes and polyculture politics, rematriation from Iximulew's Pueblo Maya Ixil |
| Summary | This dissertation is focused on the Indigenous societies and their food systems in Iximulew, Abya Yala that contest the continued legacy of extractivism that endures in the wake of European settler colonization. In it, Indigenous practices and knowledge systems are articulated as continuing a heritage of proprietary systems of governance and interaction that is distinctly ‘more-th an-human’ ;. The dissertation describes forms of Maya Ixil ways of knowing, doing, and being through a politics of feminismo comunitario that is characterize as a ‘rematriation’ process of reconnecting torn ties of Indigenous Peoples to the land after colonial imposed inequalities have done the opposite. Using the 4Rs to interpret the rematriation process, I characterize settler colonial rationalities as jeopardizing biodiversity outcomes through top-down processes that protect profits for benefactors of a patriarchal colonial modernity as historical and contemporary stewards of biodiversity, Indigenous Peoples, are removed from them. The dissertation uses the example of the Visis Caba Biosphere Reserve to demonstrate how top-down models of biodiversity conservation that exclude people result impoverishing all of the human and more-than-human landscape. Focusing on Maya Ixil Indigenous biocultural diversity conservation models that conserve biodiversity bottom-up, I demonstrate through an analysis of rematriation processes’ that the 4Rs, relationality, reciprocity, redistribution, can be seen from Ixil biocultural knowledges and practices that show more-than-human ways of knowing, doing, and being that stewarding the landscape as an obligations and responsibility to provide care through the milpa food system. Mobilizing a politics of feminismo comunitario, the dissertation argues that food sovereignty movements that protect more-than-human identities and their networks of life, materialize forms of justice from a decolonization movement that shares the wealth of an abundance of a living for all beings. |
| Supervisor | Dr. Guntra Aistara |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/dalesandro_gina.pdf |
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