Toward Decolonial Praxis in Glaciology: Fostering Dialogues Between Ancestral, Local, and Technoscientific Knowledges in Andean Glacier Science

Abstract According to its 2022 national glacier inventory, Chile is home to 26,169 glaciers and roughly 80 percent of the glaciers in South America. Yet much of this ice is not legally protected. Diverse local communities whose lifeworlds depend on the spiritual and material integrity of Andean glaciers and their meltwaters are placing growing demands on Chilean glaciologists to accompany grassroots campaigns to defend these ecosystems from the direct impacts of anthropogenic interventions amid the climate crisis and years of megadrought. This article builds off a feminist glaciology framework to examine if, how, and to what extent an emerging generation of Andean glacier scientists is learning to question the masculinist and Western modes of knowledge, thinking, and action embedded in their disciplinary training. Through ethnographic fieldwork with glacier scientists, arrieros (herders), and grassroots organizations in the municipality of Putaendo in Central Chile, and the author’s participation in codesigning a knowledge exchange between Mapuche communities and glacier scientists in the province of Araucanía, this article analyzes the possibility for dialogues between ancestral, local, and technoscientific knowledges to transform the dominant discourses and practices of glaciology. It demonstrates the ontological openings that occur when knowledges that have been systematically marginalized from the technoscientific domain of glacier science are taken seriously in conversations over the present and future of the cryosphere. And it argues that these ontological exchanges not only impact the possibility of climate justice for those communities most directly affected by glacier loss but also can contribute to building more feminist, plural, and decolonial praxis within contemporary glaciology.