ABSTRACT
The Kamëntšá people of Uaman Tabanok (Sibundoy Valley, Colombia) perceive their territory as an “intimate place” based on the reciprocity between people and the environment and Indigenous notions of ancestrality and spirituality. However, colonisation imposed a foreign concept of territory, which affected the Kamëntšá culture and place of origin by resignifying the landscape and introducing a market-based economy rooted in exploiting and destroying the environment. Likewise, heritage policy and practice have also played their role in this process. As tools of colonisation, anthropology, archaeology, and museums worked side-by-side with the State and Catholic Church to extirpate Indigenous People’s cultures and territories and disconnect them from their histories and sacred places. In this contribution, we outline how missionaries colonised and evangelised the Kamëntšá people by imposing Western notions of heritage and nature, how cultural heritage institutions and academics have perpetuated this work by delegitimising Kamëntšá knowledge and history, and the severe sociopolitical and environmental impacts derived from this. Furthermore, we analyse the interconnection between cultural heritage and the environment from a Kamëntšá point of view and put forward a decolonising approach to heritage and environmental conservation based on the Kamëntšá
