Photo credit: Des Femmes – Antoinette Fouque

All I do now is make short-term plans. Back in my homeland, I expect to be arrested or murdered every day by organized crime in league with the state. Exile? Impossible! If I die, I won’t be the first, and that will have a political price for the Milei government.

This is what Moira Ivana Millán told us when I met her with Ariel Salleh at Des Femmes – Antoinette Fouque, with the complicity of Christine Villeneuve. It was certainly the most important moment of Ariel’s Paris tour.

Moira is Mapuche (the persons “che” from “Mapu”, the land, in the Mapudungun language), a people of four million souls who live in the Wallmapu region, occupied by Chile to the south and Argentina to the north, for some fourteen thousand years. While contemporary Chilean policy is generally assimilationist, granting a few rights to the original peoples only to dissolve them into the colonial culture, Argentina’s is far more brutal, with countless disappearances, violence and abuse of all kinds.

This part of the country colonized by Argentina is home to Moira, weychaffe (self-defense warrior, appoximative translation) and leader of the Women’s Movement and Indigenous Minorities for Buen-Vivir (Good Living). She fights for an alterNATIVE world, against Terricide, in a struggle with and for Bodies-Territories that expresses the same deep concerns as queer, decolonial and antispeciesist ecofeminism, woke: the desire for total and irreversible abolition of patriarchy, total refusal of illimitism and Power (hello Françoise).

Her book, Terricide, which is a must-read, speaks of the reappropriation of identity, of children, old people, women, men and Two-Spirits people, a word still virtually unknown in France. The Two-Spirits a generic term coined at the end of the last century by the assembly of the original peoples of Abya-Yala, expresses people who don’t fit into any of the binary categories. They have always existed and been recognized in as many terms as there are native languages. Among the Mapuche, in the Mapudungun language, these are the weye.

Terricide bears witness to a politics, cosmogony and spirituality that inspire us to think about tomorrow, when we will be living on the ruins of capitalism. We might as well make the best of it, and Moira helps us to do so by contributing a stone to the world’s sociodiversity, whose impoverishment, like that of biodiversity, is at the root of Terricide. (transleted with DeepL)

Mari mari kom pu lamgen ka kom pu che. (Greetings, sisters, brothers, others, greetings to everyone) (1)

(1) Quote from Terricides by Moira Millán, Paris, éditions Des Femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2025