Making space for Wao Öme in court: Contesting prior consultation and translating Indigenous territory in Pastaza, Ecuador

Widespread juridical progress has been made across Latin America in favour of Indigenous and local communities’ participation in resource governance. Nevertheless, existing mechanisms have often proved to be ineffective, contradictory or even complicit in perpetuating extractive violence and territorial dispossession. In this context, Ecuador has witnessed a surge in litigation initiated by Indigenous communities opposing extractive projects and challenging the limits of state-led consultation. This paper explores practices of ontological translation deployed by activists in the context of litigations over Indigenous territories and prior consultation, focusing on the case of Waorani of Pastaza v. Ecuadorian state . Drawing on ethnographic research and court documents, I analyse the strategies mobilised by the Resistencia Waorani to contest the auctioning of a new oil block in the Ecuadorian Amazon and to challenge the legitimacy of institutionalised mechanisms of prior consultation. I argue that through the mobilisation of counter-mapping, personal testimonies, chants, and anthropological accounts, activists engaged in mediated acts of ontological translation that sought to render wao öme - Waorani territory - legible within legal proceedings without fully subsuming it to state territorial logics. The case illustrates how courts can function as sites of partial and negotiated onto-epistemic opening, in which relational understandings of territory gain recognition. It also sheds light on the ways Indigenous organisations and activists strategically utilise litigation and judicial instruments to advocate for a plurinational state. By tracing these constrained openings, the article contributes to debates on the judicialisation of Indigenous struggles and the use of law as a strategic terrain for advancing decolonial environmental justice, particularly within a context where extractivist development continues to be prioritised by the state.