“We are the seed from which Bolivia was born”: Indigenous politics and the environmental question in highland Bolivia, 1920-1990

This thesis asks what the natural world means to those who work and live in it, by surveying the rise of ecological consciousness and its connections with insurgent Indigenous-campesino politics in twentieth-century highland Bolivia. Despite the abundant literature on contemporary Indigenous movements in Latin America, the scholarship fails to address Indigenous perspectives on the more-than-human in historical perspective. This thesis examines the extent to which radical Indigenous politics in Bolivia repurposed the environment as a sphere of political contention and addresses the question as to why and how discourses on the other-than-human and the natural world become so important for Indigenous movements across the highlands in the twentieth century. In doing so, it builds on existing scholarship to centre understandings of the environment in histories of anti-colonial struggle and accommodates the non-human in historical approaches to Indigenous politics. Combining insights derived from decolonial theory and social anthropology, this thesis uses historical methods to trace the role and function of natural resources and ecology in Indigenous mobilisation for land rights and cultural integrity across the twentieth century. It is based on extensive archival research in Bolivia and the UK and draws on peasant union documents, political pamphlets, audio recordings and legal petitions. This thesis concludes that highland peasant-Indigenous politics in Bolivia shaped new understandings of the non-human as both a political actor and a political issue in twentieth century Bolivia. It reveals the ways in the environment and non-human emerged as a vehicle by which Indigenous movements made wider contestations against state, capital, and imperialism. The findings of this thesis therefore contribute to a burgeoning global scholarship on peasant movements, Indigeneity and the role of the other-than-human in anticolonial movements.