Cosmo-Visions of Truth After Violence: A Conversation with Abby Reyes and Carolina Sarmiento

Last year, I had the privilege of speaking with Abby Reyes and Carolina Sarmiento over Zoom a few days after Abby Reyes’ new book came out: Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice (North Atlantic Books, 2025). Abby tells us about writing her memoir, which reflects on the murder of her partner while he supported U’wa people’s resistance to oil extraction in Colombia and explores how personal grief, Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, and community memory intersect. 

Through Abby Reyes’s connection to Colombia and the work she shares with Carolina Sarmiento in Santa Ana, both found themselves joined in solidarity with the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin. Our conversation weaves the connection between these communities, and each of their struggles against violence, community rebuilding, and Indigenous epistemologies. We explore interdependence, collective protection, memory, survival, and the ongoing challenge of translating Indigenous cosmologies into environmental justice practice.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nicolás Felipe Rueda: Abby, could you talk a little bit about the book?

Abby Reyes: Just this week, after decades of holding my tongue, my first book has been published. It’s called Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars and the Rise of Climate Justice.

When I was in my early twenties, my life was turned upside down in a geopolitical nightmare. And in order to navigate the waters of grief, I wrote. The urgency of writing came into focus for me as my own children came into their adolescence, when they started asking me questions like, “If our systems are so broken, why should we keep trying?” And so, I wrote.

I also wrote because of the situation that presented itself. My partner in my early twenties, Terence Unity Freitas, worked with an Indigenous community in Colombia, the U’wa. Pueblo U’wa’s territory sits on the mother lode of known oil resources in that region, and they did not want the oil to be taken out of the ground.

Terence was a liaison for the community’s demands. Over time, he began to understand that, to the U’wa, the pressure campaign against the oil company was part of a broader assertion by Pueblo U’wa of self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty. In that broader work, Terence and his U’wa colleagues drew upon Indigenous leadership from other parts of the Americas. In 1999, they met Lahe’ena’e Gay, a Native Hawaiian educator and artist, and Ingrid Washinawatok, a beloved Menominee leader in Wisconsin.

Ingrid, Lahe’, and Terence went for a long spell of listening in U’wa territory to understand what this broader community ownership dream looked like. What could it look like if U’wa children could go to an U’wa school and not a missionary school or a school paid for by an oil company? What does it take to educate young people to be those knowledge brokers?

On the very last day of this listening, they were on their way to the airport, and they were kidnapped by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

We thought that it would follow the pattern in that region of Colombia for kidnappings—that it might be very brief and then they would be released. We labored for eight days to find them, to be in touch with the captors, to negotiate for their release. On the eighth day, their bodies were found just across the Venezuelan border.

I came into my young adulthood through the gates of these murders. I needed to figure out how to grapple with them.

At the turning point in Colombia’s internal, armed conflict about eight years ago, the Truth and Recognition Tribunal invited me and the other family members of the slain. The invitation came to me twenty years to the day after the start of the kidnapping, and it was overwhelming.

How was I supposed to unpack the questions that we’ve worked in forbearance to put aside? I needed witness. I needed these stories to not live in my body anymore. I needed more of us to be holding it together. And so, I wrote.

NFR: Abby and Carolina, I know that you share important work in Santa Ana, California with the Menominee Nation. Can you both talk a little bit about how your paths converge in this effort, and what has been the focus of your collaboration?

Carolina Sarmiento:  I was born and raised in Santa Ana, California, about two hours from the border with Mexico. We’ve done a lot of work in Santa Ana around immigrant rights, worker justice, housing justice, climate justice. And through those struggles, in different moments, we were crossing paths with folks from Menominee.

When I came to live here in Wisconsin. this relationship continued. We kept building with both of our communities, and in those conversations, Abby’s name came up. Abby knew everybody that we that we were already working with, and there was a lot of trust there.

NFR: Can you help us understand this interconnectedness that you say is a core of your strategy?

AR: The Truth Commission in Colombia collected oral histories from thousands of people who were in some way touched by the violence of the conflict. There were stories of anticipating violence, there were stories of devastation, and there were stories of Porvenir—of the future that is just around the corner, the waters that show us what is to come.

The waters contain the voice of ancestors. The waters contain stories. The waters run red with the blood of the slain. The waters run black with the spilled oil. And the water is also what sustains our ability to live on the planet.

Water moves around boulders that are in its path and eventually erodes the boulders. Water knows how to move under and how to eddy out and how to be in the slipstream. We humans are doing that, whether we like it or not.

I think a lot about this idea of Porvenir. How do we do the reconciliation needed in our places, in the containers of our communities, to be able to pivot to the far horizon and actually move? Some of that work is happening in a really beautiful way by community rebuilders in Santa Ana and in Menominee Nation.

A lot of that work that I intersect with in Santa Ana is happening in other climate-vulnerable communities. The work there includes creative approaches to worker-owned cooperative development, community land trusts, urban farms. It is about building the infrastructure for mutual aid and health equity to allow the robust, relationship-driven networks that rallied to defend and protect communities in Santa Ana during the pandemic. Figuring out just infrastructure for navigating climate chaos is also porvenir. We borrow the language from our colleagues in Menominee Nation to call that community rebuilding.

CS: Abby, you play a central role with the university. What is the relationship between the university and these initiatives?

AR: What we’re doing is asserting that communities experiencing challenges have the solutions. Many communities on the front lines are carrying the seeds and tending the fruits of solutions that come about because of relationship, ingenuity, and necessity.

If we were smart, we would understand our blueprints for the survivable future beyond the locations in which those experiments are taking hold. What is enabling this work to thrive right now in what feels like the rubble of the present—when it feels like we’re building with scraps? What is it about this harnessing of craft and this dedication to culture that gives these solutions a vitality and a survivability?

NFR: How do you think environmental justice scholars and activists should engage with these epistemologies, especially those that resist translation into Western, legal and economic concepts like ecosystem services?

AR: It’s very tempting to work at the level of changing behavior because the individual is a unit of analysis that we’re comfortable with in the dominant worldview right now. But there’s so much creative work happening at the level of transforming worldview and systems and structures.

The U’wa Indigenous understanding of the purpose of human life is to maintain the equilibrium between the world above and the world below. The oil is the blood of the earth. You keep the oil in the ground; you keep the blood in the mother. That cosmo-vision has, for decades now, made its way into the legal proceedings and filings that Pueblo U’wa has made regarding the 1999 violence that affected my life, regarding the complaints that Pueblo U’wa has against the inappropriate use of public forces by the state, and regarding who gets to manage the sacred sites that are also characterized by the state as national parks.

A legal scholar could look at it and say, “This is a clash between different worldviews.” We have a neoliberal, economic worldview that says one thing, and we have an Indigenous view that says another. And if we do recognize the sovereignty of the U’wa Nation, we can’t pretend that one is the state of nature and one is just a cosmo-vision. We’ve got to acknowledge that humans made up these stories.

We need to figure out how to integrate Indigenous cosmo-visions as our map for addressing climate change is being made.

It’s happening everywhere. Communities are making arguments about collective rights, about the standing and personhood of mountains, rivers, prairies, in different legal systems in different parts of the world. Some of those rights are getting recognized, and we shift.

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Featured image: Dama Verde, an economic project in Pondores (Colombia), supports former women guerrilla fighters as they reintegrate into civilian life after the Peace Agreement with the Colombian Government was signed in 2016. Photo by UN Women/Pedro Pio, 2022.

Abby Reyes is an author, systems thinker and climate justice leader whose work advances community-driven resilience and just transition solutions. Her new book Truth Demands (2025) tells the story of her pursuit of justice and healing on Colombia’s U’wa territory. She directs Community Resilience Projects at UC Irvine and has collaborated globally on environmental and human rights initiatives, integrating legal, grassroots, and transnational climate justice work. Website. Contact.

Carolina Sarmiento is Associate Professor of Civil Society and Community Studies whose research examines urban development, governance, and cultural space in working-class communities of color. She studies grassroots responses to inequality, focusing on community-based planning. Transnational development, and democratic space-making. Her collaborative work partners with organizations such as VOCES de la Frontera, Freedom Inc., and Worker Justice Wisconsin to advance immigrants’ rights, labor justice, participatory research, and community-driven policy transformation. Website. Contact.

Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey is a Colombian historian specializing in the socio-cultural and environmental history of global tobacco. His work examines agro-industrial expansion, campesino gendered labor and care, and corporate-state power through political ecology and environmental humanities across shifting local and global landscapes. Contact.