Please join the UW Geography Department for a talk by Dr. Megan Ybarra on her recently released book, Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest (abstract below). The talk will be January 5th at 3:30 pm in the Peterson Room in Allen Library with a reception to follow. 

ABSTRACT
Global conservation efforts are celebrated for saving Guatemala’s Maya Forest. This book reveals that the process of protecting lands has been one of racialize dispossession for the Indigenous peoples who live there. Through careful ethnography and archival research, Megan Ybarra shows how conservation efforts have turned Q’eqchi’ Mayas into immigrants on their own land, and how this is part of a larger national effort to make Indigenous peoples into neoliberal citizens. Even as Q’eqchi’s participate in conservation, Green Wars amplifies their call for material decolonization by recognizing the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the land itself.