“There is No Territory to Sow”: Urban Coloniality of Nature and Muysca Dwelling

Urban Farm DB summary

Focusing on the Indigenous Muysca community of Suba in Bogotá, Colombia, this ethnographic study, framed within Participatory Action Research methodology, examines the unique and enduring forms of colonialism that Indigenous communities experience in urban environments. Having had their traditional territories abruptly urbanized, the Muysca experience urban coloniality through mechanisms such as displacement, environmental degradation and epistemicide, while engaging in embodied practices of contestation including language revitalization, urban gardening, and occupation of sacred sites that have become urbanized. The study explores dwelling as an embodied, place-rooted everyday experience to show how the Muysca produce alternative socioecological lifeworlds within the city, and argues that these embodied practices unsettle the logic of urban coloniality of nature that continues to drive Indigenous dispossession.