Sheryl Lightfoot is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia and author of
Elsa Stamatopoulou is Director of the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and author of
The A´i Cofán Nationality of Ecuador: Between Invasion, the Border, and Resistance
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Published:November 2023
This chapter profiles the A´i Cofán People, whose traditional territories straddle the Colombia-Ecuador border, and their experience of colonization, natural resource extraction and exploitation on their land, the severing of their territory by the imposed land border, Colombian armed conflict, and neglect on behalf of state governments. This chapter demonstrates and explores the coping mechanisms that were developed in these communities to resist and survive these devastating phenomena. This chapter explains that the complex realities of living in borderlands are not limited to this space. The experiential relationship between the A´i Cofán People and the Colombia-Ecuador border is representative of similar experiences faced by other cross-border Indigenous Peoples in Ecuador.
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