Forest Spirits and the Witness Stand

In 2012, the Kichwa people sued the country of Ecuador at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights over the use of dynamite in the Sarayaku forest – a space both human and nonhuman in Amerindian cosmology – claiming that harming the “living forest” is an abuse of human rights. This case joins the broad debate on the rights of nature and of nonhuman entities, from the recognition of corporations’ “legal personhood” in the US in 1868, to American judge Christopher d. Stone’s 1974 essay “Should Trees Have Standing? – Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects”. Through critical reading and manipulation of court video archive materials, this research seeks to uncover the tension at the intersection of cosmologies, law and justice, and raises questions about the limits of recognition and representation.