American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This paper seeks to present the experience of the Quechua Indigenous Community of Quipisca (CIQQ) regarding the socioenvironmental conflicts of its territory, which has been stressed by the presence of large-scale mining activity. In this sense, we explain how the CIQQ has formed a collaborative and community work plan in which the concept of indigenous cultural heritage has taken a relevant role in the defense of the territory and the ritual landscape of Quipisca, while it has also served to strengthen the identity and recovery of cultural practices. In this way, the presence of different ceremonial apus (sacred hills), different geoglyphs, and caravan routes in the ancestral territory are made visible in the face of Chilean environmental legislation and traditional scientific knowledge that makes invisible the knowledge and feelings of the community regarding these spaces. In this context, we exemplify the territorial tension of the mining advance in the cultural and ritual landscape of Quipisca as a dichotomy around the representations of the world, where, for CIQQ, the hills and ceremonial sites have a relational life between nonhumans and humans, while, for the mining company, they only represent spaces of mineral extraction.