Wind Futures: Indigeneity, Aerial Politics, and the Making of Renewable Energy in Colombia

This ethnography explores how renewable energy technologies intersect with Indigenous peoples' environments, embodied practices of resistance, and political and economic life in Colombia. It traces the mutual shaping of energy corporations and Indigenous cultural, epistemic, and ontological worlds amid global efforts to move towards a low-carbon future. Drawing on 16 months of fieldwork, the dissertation describes how Indigenous Wayúu communities, energy experts, and state bureaucrats experience, negotiate, and inflect the shift from coal mining to wind farming in La Guajira – one of the windiest places on the planet and the ancestral land of the Wayúu (the most numerous Indigenous people in Colombia and Venezuela). The chapters uncover how global energy companies design and operate their projects in close, though uneasy, alignment with Wayúu modes of ordering land, airspace, and power. Since the prime location for wind farms is within Wayúu land that cannot be privatized, it is only in accordance with Indigenous legal, political, and social orders that Colombia's goal of reaching zero carbon emissions by 2050 can be attained. Such conditions, I argue, create a new form of "green" and racialized extractivism that actively recruits and transforms – rather than obliterates – indigeneity as a crucial scaffolding for clean energy production and capital accumulation. The recruitment of Indigenous aesthetics, kinship grammars, moral economies, land tenure norms, and environmental knowledge is not merely a visual or affective appropriation for fashioning corporate identities; it is central to producing renewable energy. And while Wayúu communities partake only minimally in the economic benefits reaped by wind farms, this new energy frontier has sparked a resurgence of struggles over wind through which Indigenous actors creatively advance their autonomy, collective rights, and imagined futures in a time of climatological uncertainty. This multi-sited ethnography draws on extended research in the Wayúu communities of Kasiwoulin, Arutkajui and Karakachon (located near the Jepirachi wind farm); the Office for the Empowerment of Wayúu Communities of Jemeiwaa Kai, a subsidiary of AES corporation that is building six wind farms at the heart of Wayúu land; and shorter stints in Bogotá and Medellín. Building on works from political ecology, environmental and economic anthropology, and critical Indigenous studies, it makes the case that indigeneity and wind power in Colombia are co-constitutive. Exceeding the domains of infrastructure, techno-politics, and atmospheric science, wind power is inextricably entangled in broader questions and dynamics concerning indigeneity, settler-colonialism, and decolonization. The dissertation thus unsettles taken-for-granted assumptions about renewable energy that dwell on its assumed positive qualities and universal benefits and reflects on the local contradictions and unexpected possibilities that arise when planetary scale problems caused by petrochemical modernity place Indigenous people at the forefront of environmental policy.