(Self)translating with "earth-beings”

The climate crisis highlights the urgency for humanity to understand that it is part of an ecosystem. The point of convergence between ecofeminism, posthuman feminism, and Indigenous knowledge is to question the earth as a mere resource and to provincialise modern Western ontology, which rigidly separates humans from non-humans. This dualism perpetuates structures of oppression, imperialism, speciesism, racism, and sexism. This paper investigates the role of self-translation in indigenous literature as a political practice of onto-epistemic defiance, drawing on the case study of the work of the bilingual writer Ch’aska Anka Ninawaman, who self-translates from Quechua to Spanish. The writer’s life, as well as that of her Quechua community, is marked by land expropriations and environmental devastation caused by mining corporations. The paper examines how Anka Ninawaman develops new creative forms of inter-ontoepistemic and inter-semiotic translation (verbal and nonverbal). Translation revitalizes and re-elaborates the Quechua oral tradition in which communication with “earth beings” is fundamental. Her work highlights the interrelationship between Indigenous knowledge and Western theoretical contributions, enriching the theoretical framework of Translation Studies from an Indigenous and feminist perspective.