Manuel Tironi and Sarah Kelly draw attention to the ways in which Indigenous communities in Chile are leveraging Territorial Control to prevent the spread of Covid-19 for the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series. Rather than relying on the logics of epidemiology to support these preventive actions, communities are appealing to the logics of sovereignty. While cautious about the temptation to draw simplistic and extractive “lessons learned” for Disaster Risk Reduction from the actions of the Mapuche and other Indigenous peoples, the authors describe how the lessons to be learned are about the need to decolonize disaster response, and to acknowledge the deep histories and shared knowledge that can provide communities with the resources to make effective public health and safety decisions for their people.
Sarah Kelly
Sarah Kelly is a postdoctoral researcher with the Center for Integrated Research on Disaster Risk Reduction (CIGIDEN) in Santiago de Chile. Her research is funded by CONICYT Postdoctoral Research grant #3190867. She also maintains an affiliation as a postdoctoral scholar with Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. Sarah is a cultural geographer whose research examines water and energy conflicts in Mapuche-Williche territories in southern Chile. Her ongoing collaborative research with Williche communities seeks to advance how ancestral knowledge and scientific knowledge can work reciprocally, and how maps can be creatively employed to foment resilience in the face of slow disasters.