Photo by ymyphoto on Pixabay, under license.

Small in stature, with black and white fur, whiskers for days, and a touching gaze, Añemó, which in the Kamentsá language means “to be strong,” came into my life on August 7, 2021, during a pivotal year in my personal, intellectual, and academic history. I had begun my PhD in law just a few months before, with a scholarship from the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia, where I took on the challenge of communicating, through legal lenses, other ways of being in the world.

Añemó. Photo by the author, shared with her permission.

In 2020, I encountered for the first time, the Awá people, a binational community of the jungle living between Colombia and Ecuador, who opened the doors to Katsa Su, their Casa Grande, as they call it in Awapit, their language.

According to the Awá, everything that inhabits Katsa Su is people. The tree that bleeds, the stream that looks around, the birds that orient with their song — all of them cohabit four worlds: the first, of the smallest beings like ants or armadillos; the second, the one the Awá tread; the third, where the spirits dwell; and, fourth, the place of the creator.

For the Awá, Katsa Su is a mother who cares and provides, but who also makes us ill when her boundaries and sacred codes are disobeyed. For example, when we don't ask for permission the first time we encounter a river or when she refuses to be visited, people lose themselves in her depths.

Through the Awá people and Katsa Su, I learned a different way of being. I also learned the notion of Wat Uzán, living beautifully, from a people who had been attacked since the Spanish conquest, and more recently, from 1990 to 2016, during Colombia's armed conflict. In 2019, Colombia's Special Justice for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz), which was set up in 2017 to bring justice to victims of the armed conflict, declared their territory a victim of the war, along with the Awá people themselves.

Katsa Su is located in Nariño, southern Colombia, a department where, that same year, the rights of nature were recognized. Decree 348 of the Government of Nariño established rights for all strategic ecosystems of the region. The right to be respected, protected, conserved and restored.

‘Animals as Subjects of Rights: A Disputed Legal Category‘ (2023), by Johana Fernanda Sánchez Jaramillo. Photo shared with the author's permission.

During studies for my doctorate, I focused my efforts on writing my thesis, which was published in 2024 after peer approval, without adjustments. But before writing my thesis, Añemó inspired my first book on the rights of other animals, published in 2023, the year I completed my doctorate. Their presence in my life, the wise along with the generous words of the Awá, and their interactions with other beings — who, like us humans, have willpower and communicate, although not through words, their way of being — helped me reevaluate the outdated idea that only human beings, because of their dignity and attributes, can be subjects of rights. My doctoral thesis on nature as subjects of rights and the Awá was published as a book in October 2024.

‘The Rights of Nature and Their Impact on the Awá People's Defense of Katsa Su in Nariño‘ (2024), by Johana Fernanda Sánchez Jaramillo. Photo shared with the author's permission.

These two books are the product of two years of research, and were written with love and rigor. Both were published by Editorial del Rosario after being approved by academic peers outside the university. Both works are the fruit of the expansion of love beyond the human, of my new place of expression, my conviction that we are not superior and that, as Saint Francis of Assisi said in his time, we are all brothers and sisters. As with the Awá in Colombia or the Maori in New Zealand, we can extend our kinship beyond our species.

Añemó has allowed me to adopt another species and forge a deep bond in our small, multispecies family of two. For their part, the Awá taught me that if we are attentive, if we learn from wise people like them, we can understand how other beings speak to us, guide us, and protect us.

My conscience, from my small place, as another daughter of Mother Earth, motivated — and continues to do so — my academic and journalistic activism in favor of the recognition of rights for all living beings by the legal system, rights that peoples who preceded us have recognized in their belief systems and in their ancestral way of coexisting in harmony with the living beings of their environment.

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