Rivers and Reconciliation

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographic and participatory action research project to reconstruct the “socioecological memory” of the Mandur River watershed in the Colombian Amazon. The objective of this project was to create conditions for community dialogues over the territorial ordering, recovery, and conservation of the watershed in the midst of ongoing socio-environmental conflicts. The author introduces the proposal to engage in what grassroots organizations call “profound reconciliation” along with the ethical stakes of reconciliatory processes that tend to human and more-than-human relations damaged by the interconnected dynamics of structural violence and decades of war. The author presents the environmental humanities-based methodologies that emerged in the collective process to elaborate the memory of the Mandur. The article also discusses the importance of fostering spaces for bettering conflict and offers reflections about the challenges posed for public engaged scholarship when a post–peace accord transition shifts toward the perpetuation of violence and militarized forms of conservation. Scientific and arts-based practices provided distinct evidentiary and speculative tools for analyzing the current conditions of the watershed and imagining future reparative strategies. The article argues that these methods allowed communities to not only diagnose the problems at hand but also hesitantly ask “What else is possible?” in a context of economic precarity, chronic insecurity, and institutional omission.