SYNOPSIS

In 2008 the Ecuadorian Constitution was rewritten to recognize indigenous political and philosophical ideas, becoming the first in world history to ratify the Rights of Nature, - theoretically conferring legally defensible rights to nature herself.  Seven years later Indigenous groups march 300 miles to the capital city of Quito to protest the government that they helped elect, and defend the constitution that they helped create. Footage from the protests animate this struggle with palpable urgency.

 

A portrait of Nature as a rights-bearing entity is gradually composed by the indigenous voices advocating for its recognition as subject - not object - a revelatory idea for our age of impending ecological catastrophe. Throughout the film, western conceptions of nature recede as indigenous ideology constructs a more nuanced view of environment and territory.

 

Footage reveals a Copper Mine in the Amazon with a polluted river known by the locals as Yaku (black), where mining runoff has ruined their access to fresh water and food. Here we meet a family of indigenous Shuar who contest the right of the government to lease their land to a Chinese mining corporation and allege the murder of their brother to have been perpetrated in response to his outspoken resistance. They describe their experience from a clearing next to their homes where dump trucks rumble as they pass like clockwork on the adjacent road - into and out of the mine. Only a few days later, the Indigenous march to Quito begins here in the remote Amazonian mining town, 300 miles south of the capital.

 

In the fog laden highlands of Canar, indigenous Kichwa families convene to celebrate their communities and the agricultural lands they manage in the surrounding territory. We see women in traditional Incan skirts play soccer in American baseball caps, and the next minute follow one of them into the nearby mountainside to tend her cattle. An indigenous Kichwa poet tenderly reads a poem about the fragility and vulnerability of the land and the lives it sustains. In the highlands, the government makes fewer direct transgressions, but the communities here are nonetheless united in resistance. They too march to the capital.

 

In the paradisaic small town of Vilcabamba we meet the only person to win a lawsuit on behalf of the Rights of Nature - American polyglot environmentalist Eleanor Huddle. We find that no indigenous persons have been able to defend their territories in such a way, and that the eccentric expat who claims spontaneous inspiration from “the infinite I am” believes she was destined to be the first actor in this revolutionary new paradigm of environmental law.  

 

Throughout the film, Interviews with activists, politicians, intellectuals, and victims of environmental violence frame a narrative that explores the implications of the Rights of Nature and at the same time the plight and dignity of the indigenous movement in Ecuador.