“La tierra está enferma”—“the territory is sick” as the result of the armed conflict, say the elders of the Awá people, one of Colombia’s Indigenous groups primarily living in the region of Nariño, who preserve their native language, the Awapit, and with it an entire spiritual and cultural relationship with its territory.Footnote 1 For the Awá people, the prolonged internal armed conflict in Colombia affected not only human beings but also their Mother Earth, the Katsa Su, la gran casa—the big house. They consider their territory a living being that can experience pain and is currently sick and in need of reparation. In 2019, the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace—as the court in charge of dealing with cases related to the armed conflict—embodied these views and recognized the Katsa Su as a victim of the armed conflict, with its own right to reparation.Footnote 2 But what should reparations to the Katsa Su look like? And more broadly, how does the concept of repairing Indigenous territories challenge traditional anthropocentric assumptions of reparation in Colombia and beyond?
In September 2024, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace issued its first reparative measures to the Katsa Su, called “Harmonizing the territory and weaving paths towards the collective restoration of the Awá people—Katsa sukin wat puran manas at miwara putkit wan aim kirɨt puraruza tɨnta ñannapa katkimtu pura kamakpas.” Departing from the Awás’ understanding of the territory, this essay analyzes these reparative measures and assesses their potential to rethink the concept of reparation as a continuation to “the process of decolonization and self-determination.”
The Katsa Su, A Victim of the Armed Conflict in Need of Reparation
According to the Awá people, they belong to the Katsa Su, their Mother Earth, the source of good living and the home of all beings. An elder explains: “Katsa Sú is a vital space, a place where we live with nature, where life is reproduced, balance and harmony are maintained, and where we recreate our thoughts.”Footnote 3 The Katsa Su, as the primary source of Awá’s derecho propio, literally “own laws,” integrates four cosmogonic worlds: the Maza Su = Ishkum Awá, the world below or of the people who eat smoke; the Pas Su=Awáruzpa, the world where the Awá people live; the Kutña Su =Irittuspa, the world of the dead; and the Ampara Su =Katsamika, the world of the gods.Footnote 4 To apply their justice, Awá’s traditional authorities must know the laws that govern the four worlds, observing at the same time the contingencies that being in the middle of an armed conflict require.Footnote 5
Like many other Indigenous groups, the Awá see a relational ontology where human and more than human beings are interrelated and interconnected. According to the Awá, they do not exist without the territory—“Sin territorio no existimos.”Footnote 6 By extension, the territory—Mother Earth also needs her sons. The Awá have thus a holistic understanding of the territory where Indigenous people and the territory are a single reality that is defined and built hand in hand. This pluriverse understanding of the world presumes “the existence of many worlds somehow interconnected, in other words the human world is connected to the natural world and also to the spiritual world.”Footnote 7 This approach requires us to see harms to Katsa Su in a relational way, going beyond traditional definitions of environmental damage, to includes harms like the disappearance of “the spirits that inhabited the thickets of the mountains and the waters of the rivers … that regulate and harmonize human life together with Mother Nature.”Footnote 8 In this context, reparations should address those kinds of harms, so far ignored by the international legal narrative, and aim to restore the altered relationship with the territory. Although some authors have proposed to “green” the concept of reparation by adding an environmental component to it,Footnote 9 this essay argues for relational reparations, which move beyond the Western human/nature divide and, based on Indigenous relational ontologies, stop treating land as a mere natural resource.
Reparation in Transitional Justice, a Critical Approach
Reparations aim to address the needs of victims who suffered harm and ease their suffering to achieve durable peace, justice, and reconciliation.Footnote 10 Reparations are an essential component of transitional justice, understood as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.”Footnote 11 If reconceptualized meaningfully, reparations thus have the potential to enhance Indigenous groups’ relationship with the territory, transforming socioeconomic realities and delivering historical justice. Because territory and Indigenous people’s identity are interconnected, reparations are essential for them, as they are “not only suitable for improving the living conditions of the injured persons, but [they] also [provide] in a more ‘metaphysical’ sense the basis for reconstructing the link between the present and the past, restoring the continuity of the present generations with their ancestors and the integrity and ‘eternity’ of the cultural and spiritual identity of the communities concerned.”Footnote 12
Rooted in the human rights movement and based on liberal paradigms, transitional justice was built on the underlying assumptions that victims must necessarily be human beings and that the experience of pain should be localized in human beings.Footnote 13 In this context, reparations have so far been conceived exclusively in anthropocentric terms, focusing solely on human needs and “treating land as a resource that can be divided and redistributed.”Footnote 14 They have failed to consider Indigenous relational ontologies, traditionally relegated to the sphere of myth or legend. By excluding Indigenous voices from its framing, reparations have in fact reproduced the “coloniality of knowledge”Footnote 15 and constitute, in Tamara Thermitus’s words, a form of “epistemic injustice.”Footnote 16 Relational reparations respond to these critiques. They enable us to visualize and address harms that have been silenced by transitional justice by engaging with Indigenous knowledge and considering their pluriverse understanding of the world. In this sense, relational reparations rooted in Indigenous ontologies respond to the twofold targets of reparations identified by Tendayi Achiume: they integrate historically marginalized knowledge systems and conceptions of reparation but also address the contemporary structural injustices of colonialism, including the ongoing and disproportionate impact of climate change and mass extractive projects on Indigenous territories.Footnote 17
Relational Reparation at the Special Jurisdiction for Peace in Colombia, a Renewal
In November 2016, after decades of internal armed conflict, the Colombian government and the FARC-EP signed the Final Peace Agreement, which expressly recognized that because of their “historical conditions of injustice, resulting from colonialism and exclusion and from having been dispossessed of their land,” Indigenous people, including the Awá people, have been seriously affected by the armed conflict.”Footnote 18 Consequently, the Final Peace Agreement established the Special Jurisdiction for Peace as the transitional justice court and commanded that it should apply in the resolution of its cases, an “ethnic focus”—enfoque etnico, meaning that it must take into consideration the differentiated experience of the armed conflict and worldviews of Indigenous people. Applying this “ethnic approach” to reparation, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace has expressly underscored the need to consider the harms to Indigenous ancestral territory in their spiritual and cultural dimensions and asserted that the territory “must be harmonized, healed and comprehensively repaired, respecting the autonomy of Indigenous authorities and their political organizations.”Footnote 19 As stated by Arévalo Mutiz, Manosalva Agudelo, and Montero De La Rosa, this “differentiated, comprehensive reparation, not only to individuals and collectivity but also to the territory” represent undoubtedly one of the major challenges of the Colombian transitional justice process,Footnote 20 but also, as the essay shows, an opportunity to reshape the concept of reparation through Indigenous territories.
In September 2024, the Jurisdiction adopted its first restorative measures to the territory, to the sick Katsa Su. The first phase of its restorative project “Harmonizing- Armonizándonos,” called “Weaving the restorative path,” aims to create a practicable and safer route to ensure access to the House of Wisdom (la Casa de la Sabiduría) “Marcos Pai.” The second phase, “Consolidating the foundations of the restoration,” will reconstruct the House of Wisdom “Marcos Pai” and include a nursery project for the socioecological restoration of the area. The third phase, “Harmonizing and reforesting through restoration,” seeks to contribute to the protection and restoration of the intercultural reserve of one of the reservations of the Awá people. Those reparative measures result from a long-standing dialogue with Indigenous people and their legal and knowledge system.
Perhaps surprisingly for proponents of environmental or green reparations, this restorative project put a special emphasis on the House of Wisdom (la Casa de la Sabiduría) “Marcos Pai,” underscoring the relational character between the territory and the Awá communities who inhabit it. Restoring the House of Wisdom, and hence strengthening the Awá’s own system of knowledge and justice, is essential for repairing the territory. It is with this knowledge that the Awá people can communicate with the territory and regain harmony. This demonstrates that the reparation of the territory and humanity are intertwined. The reforestation project proposed in the third phase follows the same logic and is tied to the harmonization of the territory. Unlike more conventional environmental conceptions, the reforestation project is designed not only to address environmental damages caused by the deforestation but also to consider its social and spiritual consequences. In this sense, reparations are more complex and go beyond replanting trees. They must address the disrupted relationship with the territory and restore harmony. Reforestation must take place according to the instructions of the spiritual leaders who, after consultation with the spirits and with their permission, show where and how to replant. While the act of replanting may resemble customary environmental proposals, its underlying narrative and process behind them differ drastically. This is precisely the point made by this essay. When it comes to Indigenous lands, Indigenous legal systems should guide the entire process of designing, conceiving, and implementing reparative measures.
The reparation to the Katsa Su is merely one example of how reparation to the territory could be imagined. As Arévalo Mutiz, Manosalva Agudelo, and Montero De La Rosa note, “today the Colombian State does not know or understand how to repair the territory, because there are 105 indigenous groups and 105 ways to repair each of those territories.”Footnote 21 Consequently, identifying the appropriate reparation in each case requires engaging with Indigenous worldviews and derecho proprio or own laws as a legitimate and equal source of knowledge. The derecho proprio will not only surface harms that have thus far been excluded, such as the disappearance of the spirit, but it will also point to the process for designing the reparation in each case. This focus on the derecho proprio enables reparation efforts to overcome legalistic and selective approaches toward harm. It allows for a broader understanding that could transform socioeconomic realities. Engaging with Indigenous worldviews as legitimate source of knowledge, without marginalizing them or reducing them to myth or legends, constitutes also “a first step towards a transformative reparation for historical harms.”Footnote 22 In line with Tamara Thermitus’s finding relating to the Gathering Strength Dialogues Principles, it is only by involving Indigenous communities that have been historically marginalized in the reparation process and strengthening their capacity, that restorative justice can be delivered and that reparations could be truly transformative.Footnote 23 In that regard, transformative reparations should “move beyond material assistance (or individual redress)” and aim “to strengthen the capacities and respect the agency (and dignity) of victims to the endpoint of empowering themselves rather than relying on the state.”Footnote 24
Conclusion
The groundbreaking recognition of territory as victim in Colombia has caught the attention of scholars around the world, especially for its potential in terms of reparation that could better protect the environmental and reflect Indigenous relational ontologies. The question of how to structure these reparations to the territory, however, has persisted. All eyes turned to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. Last September, it released the first reparative measures to the great territory of the Awá, the Katsa Su, “harmonizing.” While this restorative project only constitutes one example of reparation to the territory that cannot be generalized, it suggests one possible path forward for adopting reparations to the territory and underscores their potential in terms of reconciliation. It highlights how involving Indigenous communities in the reparation design process and engaging in an equal dialogue with their relational ontologies and legal systems, can unleash novel forms of reparation that reflect a pluriverse understanding of the world, address historically marginalized conceptions of reparation, tackle the structural injustices of colonialism and ultimately transform socio-realities. In the context of today’s global environmental crisis, which disproportionally affected Indigenous people, relational reparations also introduce a critical racial dimension to the discussion,Footnote 25 and reconceptualize in a meaningful way the right of reparation for environmental damages suffered by Indigenous communities.
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