Josefina Tunki, a fearless leader of the Shuar Arutam People in the Ecuadorian Amazon, had a message for Richard Warke — the Canadian billionaire majority shareholder of Solaris Mining, the company tearing open her ancestral territory for copper without her people’s free, prior and informed consent. She spoke the way you speak when you already know the other person isn’t really listening — but the world is.

“Our gold, our minerals, our resources of great value is the water, the forest,” Tunki told him, “because from there we have our medicines.” She described water that arrives purified through subsoil and stone, a living system interwoven with the bodies and the very lungs of her people. Open-pit mining, she said plainly, destroys that environmental life — and she was careful to name it as more than a local wound: “It’s not only the territory we live in — it’s also the global crisis that’s affected.” Then she turned the billionaire’s logic back on him. Indigenous Peoples are perpetually accused of dragging humanity into poverty, she said, while men like Warke extract staggering wealth from the earth beneath their feet. “If the owner only thinks about money, it’s different from what we think.” Different, yes — but the world is starting to hear the difference- it can no longer claim it didn’t know.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​