Watching the documentary Hija de la laguna the daughter of the lake I started thinking of the Waorani and some similar situations that they have gone through. First of all, both of them have things that are highly valued from the Western perspective underneath their traditional ancestral territories. For Ecuador the main export is oil and for Peru the main export is minerals. As a result, both are facing threats of losing their territories and poorly regulated extractivism greatly impairs their ability to access water due to pollution.

Both oil and gold promise development by the governments for the Indigenous communities who are located on these natural resources. However, the exchange that takes place in the name of development between the extracting companies and the Indigenous people seem highly unfair. These companies offer labour low-wage jobs with oil activities to the Waorani and mining activities to the Quechua in exchange for pollution, environmental degradation, and soil erosion that impedes farming. Even though, the Indigenous groups are able to access market goods and send their kids to school with the money that they make these industries are generating great revenue from their ancestral lands by highly polluting it and providing highly uneven benefits.

The power hierarchies behind this extractivist ideology seem absurdly unfair and often times it goes unnoticed. The government and industries present extracting oil and gold as a way to drag the Indigenous communities out of poverty by offering them jobs and making them a part of the global world. However, they completely ignore the fact that these communities end up with no access to water, and their abilities to feed themselves through subsistence activities by farming and hunting are significantly diminished due to pollution and environmental degradation. In fact, they have become dependent on these activities that highly damage and pollute their traditional lands in order to buy store purchased food. It is completely none sense that these extraction policies promise development when they can not even provide the most basic essential need for water.