Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Multispecies Justice in the Andes

I walk through La Paz and, as usual, the city vibrates with its everyday chaos: vendors call out from crowded streets, minibuses weave around the plazas, the aroma of api drifts from market stalls. In the midst of this urban orchestra, I enter my hotel and prepare to speak with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. I listen to Aylluman Kutiripuna (Let Us Return to the Community), performed by Luzmila Carpio, a Quechua artist whose voice carries the tonalities of the Andes and who has confronted the dilemmas of crossing worlds: singing in Quechua, her mother’s language, or in Spanish, the dominant language of Bolivian modernization. Carpio chose her mother tongue as a deliberate act of weaving ancestral sound into the present.

Carpio’s melodies are political acts. By composing children’s songs in Quechua, she prepared new generations to carry memory into the future; later, through bilingual works, she showed that a heterogeneous society—where Indigenous legacies reconfigure modernity—is possible. Her art intersects with Rivera’s philosophy, in which one must inhabit contradictions without resolving them, turning tension into creation.

For more than forty years, Rivera has illuminated the ways in which Andean peoples think with the earth. Her intellectual project insists on the anticolonial power of Indigenous philosophical sources, which include non-human beings whose presence carries normative force. Within this horizon, mountains occupy a privileged place. In Andean thought they are not inert masses of rock but tutelary beings, guardians of memory and everyday legislators. Ritual offerings—chicha, coca, textiles, and gold—are juridical acts of reciprocity recognized by their binding authority.

From this standpoint it becomes possible to rethink the process of colonization of the Americas and the birth of the international legal order. The dominant history traces its origins to papal bulls, the theologians of Salamanca, or the legal rationalizations of empire. But from an Aymara perspective another story emerges: Andean peoples interpreted the arrival of Europeans through their own categories, incorporating the colonial order into their ritual economies.

Cerro Rico of Potosí offers a decisive example. For Europe, it was an engine of modernity: the silver that sustained capitalism and empire. For Andean peoples, it remained a source of law within their own jurisdiction. Ritual offerings maintained obligations and responsibilities, and although extraction transformed the place, generating physical and cultural extermination, it did not erase the mountain’s authority. Catholic saints and Indigenous deities became intertwined, and silver itself was reinserted into ritual cycles.

This dual character—pillar of European capitalism and source of Andean law—reveals the core of multispecies justice in the Andes as it emerged through colonization. The colonial encounter was not only dispossession; it was also persistence and reappropriation. Resistance involved absorbing colonial impositions within Indigenous frameworks and transforming them from within. This perspective complements anticolonial narratives centered on destruction, which, although necessary to expose violence, risk overlooking the creative forms of Indigenous modernities that emerged in the cracks of empire.

An echo appears elsewhere on the planet. Human geographer and political geologist Adam Bobbette recounts how, on the slopes of Mount Merapi in Java, villagers interpreted volcanic activity through stories linking the sultanate to marriages and treaties with deities of the volcano and the sea. Eruptions were understood as consequences of human moral failures, and living with the volcano required rituals. Merapi was a participant in politics and in conceptions of justice. The same occurs in the Andes, where mountains legislate to organize agriculture or retain water. Their agency structures jurisdictions.

Before the conquest, the Andean world had already developed sophisticated systems of governance, astronomy, architecture, and law. Colonial domination interrupted these developments, but Indigenous jurisdictions did not disappear. They adapted, entering into dialogue—sometimes coercive, sometimes strategic—with European traditions. Thus, the double bind of Indigenous modernity—being simultaneously inside and outside Western institutions—became a methodological stance.

Rivera translates this into Aymara with the expression pä chuyma: having a soul divided between two impossible mandates. For me, this means reading Western Law from Indigenous cosmologies, what I call indigenizing international law for multispecies justice—that is, working from that divided soul, recognizing that Indigenous peoples inhabit both their own jurisdictions and Western legal orders. It means assuming that law is relational and that it is forged in tensions that are not resolved but can become productive.

Incommensurability—the fact that Indigenous and Western legal worlds cannot be fully reconciled—is a theoretical and practical strength. Thus, indigenizing international law does not mean replacing one system with another, but allowing them to coexist in tension: letting mountains speak alongside constitutions; allowing the ritual economies of water and wind to challenge extractive regimes; letting multispecies justice unsettle human-centered jurisprudence; and enabling us to critique both Indigenous and Western sources of law without romanticizing them.

In this way, colonization can be thought differently: as a field of tensions in which Indigenous peoples deployed strategies of creative reappropriation. Cerro Rico was simultaneously a colonial mine and a tutelary mountain; Andean modernity emerged as a weave that inhabits the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous, the human and the non-human. In the age of climate emergency, the planet’s future depends on our capacity to listen to those other legislators—disappearing glaciers, drying rivers, erupting volcanoes—and to recognize that their claims are also juridical.