The Kawésqar Waés (Kawésqar Territory’s) Water in the Anthropocene Epoch as Precursor for the Right of Being Nomad and Hunter

Abstract

This article addresses the territory framed within the cosmopolitics and how this reflection places different territorial uses and occupancies in relation with management of nature in the Anthropocene, together with native people’s rights on that nature. Nature, comprehended like goods for protecting, emerges from a full world where people are too close to each other, then, nature’s free spaces must be managed under modern environmental laws like national parks or marine protected areas. Nevertheless, what happens when a native community lives in those protected territories and must follow the rules of a political and environmental legislation? The kawésqar natives from Puerto Edén (Western Patagonia) maintain a cultural heritage about nomadism and hunting based on navigation across kawésqar waés, wich coexists with Western Patagonia (political territory) and water turns a support element that permit the kawésqar’s traditional life together with a major non human collective inside a territory whose water is only one, without divisions. In this context, the right for being nomadic and hunter is analyzed in light of cosmopolitics where the human/non human collective integrates a cosmos where nature is not an environmental management.