Greeting Püchi Llangkawe

The first summer I witnessed the abundance of glacier meltwater, I was overcome by simultaneous feelings of gratitude and grief. Hidden torrents of water coursed beneath layers of ice. Innumerable visible channels moved along its surface. Bits broke off as what was solid turned into liquid, and tiny, muted noises escaped from all directions as a massive frozen body altered in form. Summer meltwater is necessary to recharge innumerable aquifers, lakes, rivers, and streams as glaciers thaw and their liquified selves journey down from mountains toward the ocean. Yet this seasonal cycle also signifies irreparable change, as frozen bodies progressively lose their mass and increasingly harbor memories with future orientation as they become what Hayman et al. (Reference Hayman, James and Wedge2018) describe as the “prospective rivers” of a thawing and melting world.

My initial reckoning with such mixed emotions occurred in January 2022, when I visited Pichillancahue Glacier, located in what is administratively known as the Araucanía province of southern Chile and as Wallmapu by Mapuche people, in reference to their ancestral territory and nation. Alejandra Aillapan, a Mapuche environmental activist, invited me to join her on a hike in Villarrica National Park to greet the glacier atop the Villarrica Volcano. As we climbed up the northern flank, she explained the sacred significance of what Mapuche people call Püchi Llangkawe, along with the Rukapillan (great spirit’s house) of which it forms a part. Rukapillan is how local Mapuches refer to the volcano because it is where the spirits of their ancestors remain and where they, too, will journey upon their death. The term for glacier in Mapuzüngun, the language of Mapuche people, is kurako-piren, made up of the words kurako (rock water) and piren (snow), to indicate the solid state of ko (water). Alejandra performed several rituals expressing gratitude and seeking permission from Püchi Llangkawe before we stepped on its ice, entered its caves, and more intimately observed its morphing contours, drawing on Mapuche cosmovision to respectfully care for relations with the cordillera, mountains, volcanoes, and glaciers. She disclosed that the glacier’s name means “place of small jewels,” and she explained how the peweñantu (sacred forest of Araucarias) we traversed along the volcanic hills is where Mapuche people traditionally collect ngüilliw (piñones) and pu lawen (medicinal plants). Figure 1 is an image of the Rukapillan and Püchi Llangkawe.

Figure 1.

Image of the Rukapillan and Püchi Llangkawe, January 2022. Photo by author.

Notably, there was no indication at any of the park entrances or on the trail signs that one was entering a sacred place and ancestral territory of Mapuche people. Nor were their explanations about the significance of the Rukapillan and the traditional and spiritual practices that intrinsically connect Mapuches peoples to the land that was usurped from them in 1940 with the creation of the park and its continued administration by the National Forest Corporation (Marín-Herrera Reference Marín-Herrera2018).Footnote ¹ Similarly, when I consulted scientific publications about the Pichillancahue Glacier, none of them made any reference to the fact that the research had occurred on Mapuche territory, nor did they incorporate Indigenous history or knowledges into glacier monitoring observations (Rivera et al. Reference Rivera, Brown, Mella, Wendt, Cassassa, Acuña, Rignot, Clavero and Brock2006; Rivera et al. Reference Rivera, Corripio, Brock, Clavero and Wendt2008; Rivera et al. Reference Rivera, Zamora, Uribe, Wendt, Oberreuter, Cisternas, Gimeno and Clavero2014). Worse yet, Alejandra and other Indigenous leaders described the ongoing legal disputes over Mapuche access rights and tourist concessions, including the most recent clashes involving the proposed subtraction of areas of the park to construct a highway that would impact the peweñantu and a plan to build an ecotourism recreational center atop the Rukapillan where the glacier sits that provides meltwater to the communities below (Pacheo et al. Reference Pacheo Habert, Mora-Motta, Stellmacher and Ther-Ríos2023; Huenchumil Reference Huenchumil2019).

Over the past decade, diverse local communities whose lifeworlds depend on the spiritual and physical integrity of Andean glaciers have placed growing demands on glaciologists to accompany their campaigns to defend these ecosystems from the impacts of high-altitude mining, hydroelectric dam construction, industrial tourism, and other potentially damaging anthropogenic interventions (Herrera Pérez and Segovia Reference Herrera Pérez and Segovia2019; Barandiarán Reference Barandiarán2018; Li Reference Li2018). According to its 2022 national glacier inventory, Chile is home to 26,169 glaciers and roughly 80 percent of the glaciers in South America (DGA 2022). Only around 43 percent of this ice is located in protected areas, mostly in the sparsely populated locales of Patagonia. The country is immersed in an almost twenty-year legal debate regarding the passing of a law intended to safeguard the integrity of its glacial ecosystems and broader components of the cryosphere.Footnote ² Scholars have described the emergence of social movements to protect glaciers from industrial activities as cryoactivism (White-Nockleby and Odell Reference White-Nockleby and Odell2025), which first began in Argentina and Chile and later surfaced in other parts of the world, such as Alaska (Bourtis Reference Bourtis2023), Greenland (Ewing Reference Ewing2021), and Kyrgyzstan (Provost and Satke Reference Provost and Satke2016). These grassroots struggles in Chile initiated in 2005 with the Pascua Lama mining controversy, in which the Canada-based multinational Barrick Gold proposed to “move” three glaciers to gain access to mineral deposits straddling the country’s border with Argentina. The rise in community mobilizations to protect glaciers poses challenges and opportunities for glaciologists to examine the public role of their technical expertise as well as the structural exclusions embedded in the disciplinary history of glacier science.

This article builds off what Carey et al. (Reference Carey, Jackson, Antonello and Rushing2016) call a “feminist glaciology framework,” which brings to the forefront glacier knowledges that have been marginalized or deemed outside of traditional glacier science. I ask if, how, and to what extent emerging generations of glaciologists in the Andes are questioning the masculinist and Western modes of knowledge, thinking, and action embedded in their disciplinary training. I do this by examining the possibilities for dialogues between ancestral, local, and technoscientific knowledges to transform the dominant discourses and practices of glaciology. The article poses three specific research questions: How are growing community demands for glaciologists to produce knowledge that is accountable to local priorities affecting the public outreach and practices of glacier science? Which methods can work against the exclusion and marginalization of other-than-scientific, non-Western, and nonmasculinist experiences from the knowledge production processes relating to the cryosphere? What possibilities result from scientific and community-based collaborations in the defense of glaciers within contexts of continuing neoliberal dominance and growing urgency over climate change? I respond to these questions through ethnographic fieldwork with members of an independent panel of glacier scientists, arrieros (herders), and grassroots organizations in the municipality of Putaendo in Central Chile, and my participation in codesigning a knowledge exchange between Mapuche communities and glacier scientists in the Araucanía region of southern Chile. Particularly, this study analyzes the spaces of dialogue that transpired between glaciologists and interethnic local communities to demonstrate the “ontological openings” (de la Cadena Reference de la Cadena2014) that occur when knowledges and practices that have been systematically marginalized from the technoscientific domain of glacier science are acknowledged and taken seriously in conversations over the present and future conservation of the cryosphere. I argue that these ontological exchanges not only have an impact on the possibility of environmental and climate justice for those communities most directly affected by glacier loss but also contribute to building more feminist, plural, and decolonial praxis within contemporary glaciology.

Background and theoretical underpinnings of the study

The Andes Cordillera contains the most diverse cryosphere on Earth, including extensive areas covered by seasonal snow, numerous tropical and extratropical glaciers, and many mountain permafrost landforms (Masiokas et al. Reference Masiokas, Rabatel, Rivera, Ruiz, Pitte, Ceballos, Barcazo, Soruco, Brown, Berthier, Dussaillant and MacDonell2020). Simultaneously, Andean glaciers are among the fastest shrinking and largest contributors to global sea level rise, while also representing crucial water resources in many tropical and semiarid mountain catchments (Dussaillant et al. Reference Dussaillant, Berthier, Brun, Masiokas, Hugonnet, Favier, Rabatel, Pitte and Ruiz2019). The most recent reforms to Chile’s water code prohibit the granting of water rights directly over glaciers. However, glacier meltwater eventually ends up becoming part of groundwater and surface water concessions in the country’s ultraprivatized water system, which is a legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship and subsequent democratic administrations (Panez Pinto Reference Panez Pinto2021).Footnote ³ National environmental legislation requires that any industrial project near glaciers undergo an environmental impact assessment. Yet scholars have questioned the scientific independence of these evaluations from corporate interests and their potential to obscure certain ecological impacts (Barandiarán Reference Barandiarán2020; Ureta et al. Reference Ureta, Lekan and Graf von Hardenberg2020). A belt of the arid and semiarid northern-central zone made up of six regions from Atacama to Maule currently has 4,838 glaciers that are not within the protected areas of national parks (Segovia Reference Segovia2023). In addition, the creation of national parks in Chile does not guarantee that glaciers will be fully safeguarded from tourist concessions or the subtraction of conservation areas to allow for development projects, as evidenced by the controversies involving Püchi Llangkawe.

Ice humanities, Indigenous scholarship, and ethnographic research have highlighted how Indigenous communities have been working with the conceptual and embodied terrain of ice long before glaciologists or social scientific research encountered it (Dodds and Sörlin Reference Dodds and Sörlin2022; Watt-Cloutier Reference Watt-Cloutier2018; Gagné Reference Gagné2019; Nüsser and Baghel Reference Nüsser, Ravi, Schuler and Brill2014; Drew Reference Drew2012; Hastrup and Olwig Reference Hastrup and Fog Olwig2012; Krupnik et al. Reference Krupnik, Aporta, Gearheard, Laidler and Kielsen Holm2010; Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank2005). Around the world, and notably the Andes, mountains and glaciers are understood to be the abodes of important spiritual guardians, embodiment of deities, custodians of sacred ice, and givers of life-sustaining water that is ritually acknowledged by many Indigenous peoples and local communities (Hine forthcoming; Paerregaard Reference Paerregaard2023; Ceruti Reference Ceruti2013, Kaijser Reference Kaijser, Methmann, Rothe and Stephan2013; Bolin Reference Bolin, Crate and Nuttall2009; Rhoades et al. Reference Rhoades, Ríos, Aragundy Ochoa, Orlove, Wiegandt and Brian2008). Yet the origins of the field of glaciology in the nineteenth century—closely interconnected with polar exploration and mountaineering—have been dominated by European masculinist narratives (Chisholm Reference Chisholm2008; Schrepfer Reference Schrepfer2005). This tendency remains the case despite the increasing participation of women in glaciology since the 1970s.Footnote ⁴ Historians have traced how glaciology experienced growth and support because of European and US imperialism and geopolitical expansion, including the predominantly militaristic relationship with polar regions during the Cold War period (Belanger Reference Belanger2010). Glacier science in Chile does not depart from this masculine European influence with the first modern glacier studies in the country conducted in the 1950s by the French geophysicist and mountaineer, Louis Lliboutry, who is considered the “father” of Chilean glaciology, and as the title of a biography published about this life claims, “the man who deciphered the glaciers” (Turrel Reference Turrel2019).

Feminist-inspired approaches in science and technology studies (STS) have attended to power dynamics in epistemological processes to ask how knowledge is produced, circulated, and gains credibility and authority (Harding Reference Harding2009; Haraway Reference Haraway1988). This scholarship has warned about the consequences of the privatization of scientific inquiry, urging researchers to slow down and pay attention to what historically has been bracketed as “nonscientific concerns” (Stengers Reference Stengers2018; Stengers and Pignarre Reference Stengers and Pignarre2011). In addition, science studies scholarship has long demonstrated that classificatory questions, such as what is (and is not) a glacier and where and how to delimitate the cryosphere, are not merely technical, epistemic, and ontological questions, but also intrinsically ethico-political decisions (Bowker and Star Reference Bowker and Leigh Star1999; Hacking Reference Hacking and Biagioli1999). Anticolonial STS proposes frameworks for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against ongoing coloniality and intersectional forms of injustice (Liboiron Reference Liboiron2021b; Murphy Reference Murphy2017; Tallbear Reference Tallbear2014), including onto-epistemic forms of violence that disqualify nonscientific, local, and ancestral realities as “animist,” “backward,” “superstitious” or “cultural” rather than interacting with these diverse forms of knowing and doing as expertise (Liboiron Reference Liboiron2021a; de la Cadena Reference de la Cadena2010).

Ontological assumptions denote what entities can exist, into what categories they can be sorted, and by which practices and methods they can be known (Sullivan Reference Sullivan, Kopnina and Shoreman-Ouimet2017). Ethnographers have used the term ontological conflicts (Blaser Reference Blaser2013; de la Cadena Reference de la Cadena2009) to refer to the tensions involving different assumptions about what exists, arguing that these frictions have gained unprecedented visibility as the hegemony of modern ontological suppositions regarding “nature” and “culture” undergo crisis in an era of continued struggles over the impacts of extractivism, late industrial infrastructural breakdown (Fortun Reference Fortun2012), and runaway climate change (Petryna Reference Petryna2022). Feminist posthumanists provide conceptual language to describe relational ontologies based on what Barad (Reference Barad2007) calls “intractions,” which understand agency not as an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised but as a dynamism of forces. While, as the Métis scholar Zoe Todd (Reference Todd2016, 6) points out, Indigenous thinkers have for millennia engaged with “sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations.” Such relational forms of existence provoke questions about the unexamined ontological assumptions built into the scientific treatment of glaciers as primarily geophysical measures of compacted and thawing ice at the expense of other material, affective, ethical, spiritual, and ontological significances of glacier degradation and loss (Allison Reference Allison2015).

What scholars have deemed potential ontological conflicts not only involve the plural realities of Indigenous communities but also become an analytical tool to discuss the tensions between how a range of communities may relate to icy bodies in contrast to technoscientific, industrial, extractive, and privatizing forms of interacting with glacial ecosystems. This article builds on decolonial and feminist approaches (Liboiron Reference Liboiron2021b; Murphy Reference Murphy2020; Israel and Sachs Reference Israel, Sachs, Alston and Whittenbury2013) to demonstrate how respecting, acknowledging, and creating conditions for dialogues between a multitude of sometimes incommensurate genealogies of human-ice relations is necessary to transform the interdisciplinary field of glaciology and to shift how, where, and who participates in the orientation of research agendas, has access to outcomes, and are considered legitimate interlocutors in decision-making spaces over the present and future of the cryosphere.

Key actors and methods

I first met female environmental activists and Mapuche leaders in Villarrica through an introduction made by a colleague at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile’s Villarrica campus in 2022.Footnote ⁵ As I became further acquainted with these women, including Alejandra Aillapan, they introduced me to other female leaders living around Villarrica National Park, especially the lof (the main Mapuche territorial unit, which is simultaneously a physical space and political and social structure) called Challupen Bajo, who have been most active in the land defense campaigns of the Rukapillan. Through conversations and visits with these women, I learned how Mapuche communities in the park’s buffer zone and academics affiliated with the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and Center for Studies of Regional Development (CEDER) engaged in a project in 2020 to collect the ancestral memory of Mapuche relations with Püchi Llangkawe (Pilquimán Vera et al.Reference Pilquimán, Marisela, Jaramillo and Merino Espeso2024). This collaboration resulted in a publication called Kurako/Piren Püchi Llangkawe: Local Proposals for the Defense and Protection of Biocultural Patrimony (CLACSO and CEDER 2021). The idea of biocultural patrimony refers to the complex interdependent relations between Indigenous peoples and what Western forms of knowing call the environment or biological resources, from the genetic to the landscape scale, as well as ancestral traditions, practices, and knowledges (Paradowska Reference Paradowska2013). The booklet contains an elaborate illustration of Mapuche ways of knowing and relating to Püchi Llangkawe as well as the Mallolafken (Lake Villarrica) watershed fed by its meltwater. It also signals the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from the latest national glacier protection legal project, and the lack of participation of Indigenous organizations on the environmental and mining and energy commissions involved in reviewing the legislative initiative. Alejandra and other Mapuche community leaders expressed interest in gaining access to the glacier science involving Püchi Llangkawe; research they had never been consulted about and much less included in. They considered this Western technical knowledge to be strategically important to strengthening an evolving petition for the Villarrica National Park to be returned to the Mapuche communities living in the buffer zone.

In response to Chile’s most recent glacier protection legal project, an interdisciplinary group of glacier scientists organized the Panel of Independent Researchers in the Sciences of the Cryosphere in April 2021.Footnote ⁶ This panel was originally made up of seventeen members, representing a generation of scientists from diverse disciplines related to the study of glaciers who sought to broaden scientific participation in legally defining what glaciers are, how they should be delimited, and the regulations for their protection. I initially contacted members of the panel because I was interested in understanding scientific attempts to influence legal and policy spheres in Chile’s hyper-neoliberalized culture and extractive-dependent economy. What drew my attention during the semistructured interviews I conducted throughout 2022 and 2023 with over twenty Chilean and Argentine glacier scientists was the lament expressed by several of the panel members about the presence of only a few female colleagues despite their efforts to invite the participation of more women, as well as the absolute lack of Indigenous expertise in the group. Several of these glaciologists also questioned the predominantly Western and European influence on their discipline and the absence of what they called the development of an “Andean-based” glacier science.

On the basis of these interviews, I approached two glacier scientists who were engaged in what I considered to resemble participatory action research methods with grassroots activists and municipal authorities in Putaendo, a city and commune in the San Felipe de Aconcagua Province of central Chile’s Valparaíso Region. In line with feminist glaciological approaches, participatory action research methods encompass codesigning research agendas, methods, and frameworks in direct collaboration with those affected by an issue being studied for the purpose of action or social change (Vaughn and Jacquez Reference Vaughn and Jacquez2020; Fals Borda Reference Fals Borda1987). More than producing a cultural critique for academic purposes, research-to-action approaches emphasize direct engagement with local priorities and perspectives (Hale Reference Hale2006). I conducted fieldwork in Putaendo with these scientists to observe their methods and interactions with citizen groups. In coordination with two of the female Mapuche leaders in Villarrica, we later invited these scientists to attend what we called a dialogue and knowledge exchange between glacier science and Mapuche know-how. The dialogue was not organized to demonstrate the relevance of Mapuche knowledges and experiences for glacier science to validate. Indigenous community members and their allies in Villarrica were interested in assessing the relevance of glacier science for their political priorities regarding the protection of Püchi Llangkawe while being cognizant of the power dynamics and colonial inheritances that would need to be navigated in such an encounter.

I analyze my research questions based on a combination of interviews, archival data, participant observation, and participatory action research methods that include my role as a cofacilitator of the dialogue between glacier scientists and Mapuche communities and their allies that was held in Challupen, Araucanía, in August 2022. In my analysis, I pay attention to a subtheme in the feminist glaciology framework concerned with different ways of knowing and the types of knowledge produced by groups that have been historically ignored or marginalized to examine how more horizontal interactions between technoscientific forms of knowing and alternative relations with ice have the potential to affect the public accountability, masculinist, and colonial legacies present in contemporary glacier science.

Toward community glaciology

The first time I spoke with Fredy Moreno, an arriero from Putaendo, he described his excitement when he learned that ice lay beneath what he and other herders who had crossed the Andes for decades assumed were rock piles out of which water seasonally flowed. They knew to stay close to the patchy arrangements of bofedales (high Andean wetlands) because they are valuable pasture and drinking areas for the animals they usher across the mountains. However, they were unaware that these landscapes safeguarded water being released by melting glaciers. Unlike more commonly imagined white and exposed glaciers, rock glaciers are relatively small lenses of ice or frozen sediment covered by large amounts of seasonally frozen rock debris.Footnote ⁷ As their name suggests, rock glaciers are frequently mistaken for piles of rubble, leaving them more at risk of interventions by mining interests, infrastructure building, and the dumping of materials. A glacier activist who is a member of the Coordination of Territories for the Defense of Glaciers and Their Ecosystems and who also grew up in the Valle de Aconcagua shared a similar narrative with me. She took her school-age son to see the rock glaciers so that he would not grow up as she and her parents had: without being aware that the region’s source water is glacier meltwater. Both these stories occurred within contexts of conflict between mining expansion and glaciated regions, specifically community mobilizations to protect areas containing often-overlooked rock glaciers from extractive projects.

In the case of Putaendo, the discovery of the quantity and importance of rock glaciers resulted from a collaborative research process between glacier scientists, herders, grassroots activists, and the municipal authorities that initiated around the question of where Putaendo’s water came from given that it was the only foothill community in the Valparaíso region whose river had not permanently diminished despite the years of megadrought. As an MA student in geomorphology in 2015, Hans Fernández read government reports indicating that the cordillera of Valparaíso had a large amount of rock glaciers, none of which made any direct reference to Putaendo. Hans did a minuscule analysis of the municipality’s watershed using satellite maps to examine the geomorphology, including topographical and altitudinal parameters. To his surprise, Putaendo’s watersheds registered 130 rock glaciers, which is 62 more than the DGA registered in its first national glacier inventory. These glaciers did not appear in Putaendo’s Municipal Development Plan, which claimed that the commune had no glaciers. Figure 2 depicts the rock glaciers in the cordillera of Putaendo.

Figure 2.

Rock glaciers in the cordillera of Putaendo, December 2017. Photo by Fredy Moreno.

Hans shared the information about the abundance of rock glaciers with citizen groups who were mobilizing against the development of an open-pit mining project called Vizcachitas Holding, operated by the Canadian corporation Los Andes Copper, which would sit atop the Rocín River—the main source of freshwater for downstream communities in Putaendo.Footnote ⁸ The convergence between this scientific data and community organizing led the municipal government to finance three expeditions (2016–2019) to locate and identify the rock glaciers.

Freddy, who led the first group of expeditioners on horseback to a height of 4,300 meters above sea level, described how the group of scientists, herders, municipal officials, and members of social movements witnessed the tracks of large numbers of guanacos and located bofedales. A local biologist who participated in the trek called these wetlands “green glaciers” because they regulate and filter the water flow of high-altitude lagoons fed by glaciers. He mentioned the different flora that people learned to inventory and that had been little studied, given the privatization of most of Putaendo’s cordillera during the Pinochet dictatorship.Footnote ⁹ The newly identified rock glaciers were named arrieros in recognition of the people who made the expeditions possible and whose traditional transhumant livelihoods have intimately traversed the high peaks of the Andes for decades.

Neither the glacier scientist nor the community members with whom I spoke represented their interactions as ones in which a scientific discovery debunked local perceptions about the landscape or in which herders simply aided the scientists in producing knowledge. The collaboration between the arrieros’ and other citizens’ expertise involving the mountainous terrain and the location of wetlands and biodiversity, and Hans’s technoscientific capacity to identify rock glaciers was an exchange between different kinds of expertise. Hans used the term glaciología comunitaria (community glaciology) to describe the praxis that emerged during the expeditions. His partial perspective based on high-definition imagery, abstracted and produced at a distance, required the grounded, materialized, and embodied insights of the herders, who inherited their know-how through generations of lived experience. Indeed, Hans’s satellite maps of the rock glaciers would have remained what feminist STS philosopher Donna Haraway (Reference Haraway1988, 589) calls a “view from above, from nowhere” or a “god trick” whose guise of neutrality had deep ethical-political consequences that came to the fore in the context of community concerns over prolonged drought and the threat of industrial mining to the valley’s drinking water.Footnote ¹⁰

Citizen activism combined with financial support from the municipal authority and the collaborative identification of the strategic rock glaciers fomented the possibility for the subsequent expeditions that led the latest national glacier inventory in 2022 to include a total of 137 rock glaciers in the commune of Putaendo. In addition, it inspired other glacier scientists, such as hydroclimatologist Sebastián Crespo, to design research projects in dialogue with the priorities of community organizations in Putaendo. Sebastián’s research in 2022 focused on an isotope hydrology analysis that quantified and characterized the contributions of different water sources—rock glaciers, snow, and rain—to the Putaendo River.Footnote ¹¹ Alongside this quantitative data, the project included a survey of people’s perceptions of the impacts of the megadrought. I attended Sebastián’s presentation of initial research results to a group of environmental activists and concerned citizens. It fomented a public discussion about the need to keep Putaendo’s rock glaciers covered, given that the debris layer acts as a buffer that protects and filters the slow melting ice, which, according to the study, provides an estimated 65 percent of the water to the Putaendo River during the summer months (Crespo et al. Reference Crespo, Rybertt Goldammer, Palmisano, Lavergne, Lo Vecchio, Muñoz Gaete, Fernandoy and Vystavna2025). The public circulation of technical data about the contribution of rock glaciers to the commune’s sole source water further strengthened the municipality’s ongoing legal arguments and grassroots organizing efforts to defend the cordillera from the Vizcachitas Holding project

Hans and Sebastián are two of the founding members of the Panel of Independent Researchers in the Sciences of the Cryosphere. In 2021, these scientists and a group of colleagues organized what they called a cuerpo técnico (technical body) to protect themselves from being individually singled out and delegitimized given the controversial nature of the legal debate over a glacier protection law (Fernández et al. Reference Fernández, MacDonell, Somos-Valenzuela and González-Reyes2021). This interdisciplinary panel was invited to comment on the latest national glacier legal project, draft reforms for the country’s water code, and submit articles related to water, rights of nature, and glaciers for the proposed constitution that was voted on and rejected in the September 2022 national referendum.Footnote ¹² Despite the diversity of viewpoints and positions among panel members, a core group of these scientists critically reflected on their methods, the masculine and European legacies in glaciology, and the implications of practicing more public engaged science. During an interview I conducted with Hans, Sebastián, and Camilo Rada, a geophysicist who also actively participated in the panel, they explained that citizens in Chile were tired of not being consulted, denied access to information and feeling unable to exert political impact over the protection of glaciers. This resonated with their professional sense that policy debates involving glacier expertise had historically been dominated by a small circle of male glaciologists. Camilo, who had collaborated with Greenpeace and the Chilean nongovernmental organization (NGO) Fiscalía de Medio Ambiente (FIMA) in writing reports on the impacts of high-altitude mining around Santiago, mentioned that the emergence of a new generation of glaciologists in the country coincided with the Pascua Lama mining controversy. “The sudden social relevance of glaciers inspired younger students to want to support social causes because the reception of glaciology has changed. However, this also depends on knowing how to transmit technical knowledge to the public, which many scientists fail at,” he said.

Scholarship on citizen science has emphasized how the right to information is fundamental to guarantee informed public participation in environmental governance decisions (Kimura and Kinchy Reference Kimura and Kinchy2019). As Camilo points out, scientific capacities to translate technical concepts to diverse publics are a crucial component of efforts to democratize science. However, the transmission of technoscientific information to lay citizens does not necessarily decenter its authoritative hold over expertise. Nor does it guarantee knowledge exchange rather than unidirectional knowledge transfer or dissemination. Further, democratizing science may not address the deeper onto-epistemic and political stakes of scientists being asked to unlearn and relearn what and how they know or to design research projects in dialogue with the diverse realities, priorities, and expertise of Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous communities. The collaborative process of identifying rock glaciers in Putaendo provides an example of more participatory and inclusive methods not only for producing knowledge about glaciers but also for understanding how community-based glaciology can reconnect and foster more intimate and informed relations between diverse populations who had been alienated or dispossessed from the high-altitude ecologies of the Andes cordillera.

Municipal authorities, scientists, local herders, and environmentalists together rendered Putaendo’s rock glaciers and their strategic water provision visible. In the process, they asked: “How to see? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who and what gets blinded? Who interprets the visual field?” (Haraway Reference Haraway1988, 587). In line with the methodological, ethical, and conceptual propositions of feminist STS, the way of seeing these glaciers, what was at stake in locating them, and to whom these representations were accountable were just as significant as the technoscientific achievement of delimiting and quantifying them. In the process, a practice of community-oriented glaciology emerged and addressed the mistrust felt on the part of many residents regarding what they perceived as conflicts of interest of certain scientists, including glaciologists, hired to conduct the environmental assessments in proposed extractive projects. Hans and Sebastián’s approach to research in Putaendo motivated Mapuche activists Alejandra Aillapan, Cecilia Rayen Caniumán, and me to invite them to participate in a dialogue and knowledge exchange with Mapuche communities and their allies in Challupen, Araucanía. The invitation was made with careful consideration of the distinct geographical, social, and historical conditions of southern Chile, including the Mapuche land-defense campaign and the fact that neither of these male scientists had previous experience working with Indigenous people.

Learning how glaciers relate with itxofill mongen inaltupillan (all life without exception)

When Hans, Sebastián, and I arrived at the lof Challupen Bajo, our host, Cecilia, had the ruka warming. It was August, and the cold, winter-morning air was chilling. Cecilia, who had been a community leader in the 2020 research project on the ancestral memory of the kurako-piren, offered the traditional Mapuche meeting space built by her family to hold the event. The fire circle was lit, and the water for the maté that would circulate among participants throughout the two-day conversation had begun to boil. Before the event could commence, we heard the kultrun (a drumming instrument used by Mapuche machis, or traditional healers, usually women) calling us to head toward a nearby stream to participate in a llellipun, a small ceremony to simultaneously ask permission and demonstrate gratitude to the rewe (canelo), lawen (medicinal herbs), ko (water), kutral (fire), and mapu ñuke (Mother Earth). The lonko (the governing leader for each lof), Felipe instructed the group, which included Mapuche men and women and non-Mapuche environmental activists and allies, about how to properly behave in the ruka. No one was to throw garbage on the fire, which was the gran newen (great spirit-force-flow of energy), and we were to always pass everything from right to left to flow with that energy and not contrary to it.

Before the event, Alejandra and Cecilia had set the terms of the conversation, establishing Mapuche sovereignty over the information that would be shared with the visiting glaciologists and how the agenda would be organized. Principally, the community had technical questions about the state of the Püchi Llangkawe glacier, which they anticipated the visiting scientists could answer. Their sense was that the data might strengthen their arguments to develop a petition requesting Mapuche stewardship of the Rukapillan and the return of the park as ancestral territory. Many of the Mapuches living in and around the park, and especially the women who were often occupied with domestic activities, had never visited Püchi Llangkawe, even though they had spent a lifetime observing and honoring the Rukapillan, gathering medicinal plants and piñones on its volcanic hills and depending on its aquifers and streams for their water supply. The workshop was conceived not only as a space to sensitize scientists about the need to be more respectful of glaciers as Indigenous biocultural patrimony during their knowledge production processes but also as an opportunity to render visible and share the community-led research that compiled ancestral knowledges and relations with Püchi Llangkawe among more of the Mapuche women, youth, elders, and non-Mapuche allies.

The idea of glaciers as Indigenous biocultural patrimony in the case of local Mapuches is based on the inseparability of the Rukapillan, araucaria trees, volcanoes, glaciers, watershed, and Andes cordillera from their küyfikeche yem (ancestors) and identity tied to the mapu (land-country-territory). The historical tensions between Mapuche communities and park authorities, who mostly denied the former’s spiritual and traditional connections to the Rukapillan, along with the community’s uneasiness over the lack of informed consent to the glacier science being conducted on their ancestral territory, provoked questions about the unexamined ontological assumptions built into the treatment of glaciers as solely geophysical measures of compacted and thawing ice. These frictions produced what, borrowing from Marisol de la Cadena (Reference de la Cadena2014), I call incipient “ontological openings,” in which what Mapuche people understand as Püchi Llangkawe—a spiritual being and lively actant inseparable from the Rukapillan—stretched the limits of dominant, masculine-defined technoscientific paradigms involving the treatment of glaciers.

The first day of the dialogue was spent building trust; Mapuche participants asked questions regarding the glacier loss that had been recorded at Püchi Llangkawe. These technical questions were situated in regional social dynamics, such as concerns over whether local water sources were being contaminated by the massive growth in tourism, real estate development, and ongoing dispossession of Mapuche land around the park. Hans and Sebastián reported a worrisome 43 percent reduction in the glacier’s area over the previous sixty years and demonstrated this through graphs and maps. They also reported that a thousand people live ten kilometers from the crater, which is considered a risk zone given the history of lahars caused by the combination of rainfall, glacier ice, and the underlying magma and gases at play during the eruptions of the Rukapillan, one of the three most active volcanoes in Chile. As more rapport was established between community members and the scientists, moments of exchange occurred between glaciological-based descriptions and ancestral origin stories. For example, Hans and Sebastián asserted that the glaciers in the region had formed between eleven thousand and fourteen thousand years earlier, and that their melting during the last phase of the Pleistocene epoch had caused the sea to rise more than four hundred feet to cover parts of the continent. Several of the Mapuche male participants contrasted this narrative based on geologic time with the story of Treng-Treng and Kai-Kai, which describes an ancient flood and epic battle between two mythical snakes who are guardians of the land-mountains and seawater. This story explains how Chile’s current geography and the Andes were formed. For them, volcano eruptions, tidal waves, and floods continue to result from the actions of Treng-Treng and Kai-Kai in response to human behaviors.

There are two images that characterize the dynamics of the weekend-long dialogue. One is of an older Mapuche woman taking notes with deep concentration during Hans’s presentation on the last glaciation period, which, according to geomorphologists, produced the Mallolakfen and Calafquén lakes in the region. The other is of Sebastián and Hans sitting on the ground outside the ruka during the lunch break, keenly listening to lonko Felipe. The lonko was perched on a tree stump slightly above them, explaining concepts in Mapuzüngun for wind currents, such as the waywen kürüf (wind that molds, compacts, and buries), which accumulates snow to make glaciers, and the diverse bodies of water—lewfü (river), wüfken ko (aquifer), trayenko (spring), and püchi lafken (small lake)—that descend from the Rukapillan and become part of the pu lafken (lakes) and pu llozko (wetlands) connecting the hydric system of the Valdivia River watershed, which eventually flows to the Pacific Ocean. Figure 3 portrays this scene of dialogue and knowledge exchange. Both glaciologists expressed surprise at the conceptual complexity and comprehensiveness in Mapuzüngun for phenomena that they technically observe and study and the apparent equivalences between certain scientific and Mapuche concepts.

Figure 3.

Glaciologists listening to the explanations of lonko Felipe, August 2022. Photo by author.

During the second day of exchange, Mapuche participants, especially the women in the group, introduced the concept of itxofill mongen inaltupillan (all life without exception in and around the volcano). Alejandra clarified that itxofill mongen is often translated into Spanish as “biodiversity” but exceeds that idea, given that all life includes what scientists categorize in biological terms as life, as well as the immaterial and spiritual forces composing the mapu. The illustration of itxofill mongen inaltupillan in the booklet produced about the ancestral memory of Püchi Llangkawe demonstrates the intradependency of Indigenous existence with the Rukapillan, including its kurakopiren, as a material and spiritual center to which their identity and mapu are inherently connected. For the Mapuche, this dynamism of forces is where all life is constantly exchanging, influencing, and working inseparably with the Rukapillan—entity through which all life originates and eventually returns. Figure 4 illustrates this intrarelationity. For them, ice is never only ice, nor does living with and relating to it solely involve the agency of human communities. The second day of dialogue emphasized that taking care of the Rukapillan implies nurturing spiritual practices between human communities and more than human beings and forces through which all life takes place together in the mapu. A deeper discussion transpired between the Mapuche participants about their obligations to the sentient beings inhabiting the territory and the spiritual rituals, like the guillatún, which the lonko argued they needed to resume and practice more frequently. He drew attention to the fact that not all the Mapuche communities were responsibly caring for their relations with the Rukapillan and other ancestral guardians of the mapu.

Figure 4.

Mapuche illustration of the intrarelationality of the Rukapillan and itxofill mongen inaltupillan (CLACSO-CEDER 2021, 8).

Over the two days, everyone who attended the event demonstrated a good-faith effort to suspend what Martin Savransky (Reference Savransky2021) describes as the question of defining reality to tentatively learn to trust in or at least listen to and respect the other’s way of knowing and narrating reality. The dialogue did not represent high political stakes because it was not a space in which policy or legal decisions were being debated. On the one hand, Mapuche communities gained useful technoscientific knowledge about Püchi Llangkawe and positioned their millennial expertise and cosmology in relation to the Rukapillan. On the other hand, glacier scientists experienced a kind of onto-epistemic pluralization in which glaciers and their surrounding ecosystems became more than recreational sites and technoscientific objects to be observed and described in terms of their geomorphological and hydrogeological dynamics. The ontological openings that occurred between these diverse ways of knowing required the scientists and other non-Mapuche participants to “slow down our analytical habits” (de la Cadena Reference de la Cadena2017, 6), so that glaciers and pu kurako-piren could exist simultaneously without collapsing into sameness—in other words, it required decolonializing dominant masculinist technical and material representations of ice to allow glaciers and pu kurako-piren to conceptually emerge together as both similar and different to each other.

Alejandra later said, “For us, the Mapuche community, it was valuable to have the opportunity to converse in a horizontal way with scientists who are as worried as we are about the ‘life of glaciers.’” She placed air quotes around the last part of the sentence to maintain the distinction between kurako-piren and glacier, indicating that both come into existence on the basis of the relations that enable them. Sebastián commented, “Listening to Mapuche ancestral knowledge of glaciological processes pushed us [the scientists] beyond describing the mere technical aspects of glaciers toward a more holistic vision that left us impacted by how much science can learn from Native peoples.” The decolonial approach to the exchange began by being responsive to the priorities of the Mapuche communities and their ability to leverage the production of scientific data to strengthen their collective spiritual and organizational processes. In line with the concerns of feminist glaciological approaches, the dialogue exposed “more-than-scientific voices” and the diversity of ways of knowing and relating to what scientists understand as the cryosphere.

At the conclusion of the event, the Mapuche leaders requested that Hans and Sebastián send them a technical report with information about the geological history of the Rukapillan, as well as data on the rate of Püchi Llangkawe’s retreat. However, the collaboration did not end with the submission of the report. Almost a year after the dialogue in Challupen Bajo, Hans, Alejandra, and I were invited to present on the experience at the Fifth Congress of the Chilean Society of the Cryosphere, held in Viña del Mar in May 2023. During our talk, we presented on concepts such as restorative justice and provided reflections about how an anticolonial glaciology might be practiced. Alejandra shared illustrated concepts in Mapuzüngun and narrated the ancestral, spiritual significance of Püchi Llangkawe and the Rukapillan. This was only the second time that social-science-based presentations were included in the conference program and the first time an Indigenous person, and woman, presented.

After our presentation, it was mostly young professionals in the field of glaciology, and a significant number of female students, who approached us with interest in furthering the conversation and asking how they might collaborate or participate in creating similar knowledge exchanges with local communities. Hans later told us that he continued to receive positive comments about the presentation from his colleagues, many of whom said they were emotionally moved by learning how Mapuche people envision and relate to what scientists generally understand in material terms as melting bodies of ice. For Alejandra, she explained to me that attending the conference “was an important opportunity to share ancestral know-how and experience that could be on the same level and even coincide, in some respects, with Western scientific knowledge,” while maintaining a respect for ontological difference and Indigenous autonomy. The example of the knowledge exchange in Challupen Bajo and the anticolonial methods we described during our presentation began to undo aspects of the colonial and masculinist violence underpinning the interdisciplinary field of glaciology. The presentation momentarily slowed down the thinking of the Chilean glacier science community and provoked preliminary questions about how to reorient their scientific practices in ways that could situate glacier knowledge in diverse social contexts and acknowledge alternative understandings and relations with elements of the cryosphere.