Epistemic Resistance and Decolonization

Sor Juana's intellectual work challenged colonial authority structures that claimed monopoly on truth and legitimacy. She demonstrated how dominant systems protect themselves through knowledge gatekeeping. Climate crisis is rooted in colonial extraction—the assumption that land, water, and people exist primarily as resources for wealthy nations' consumption. Decolonizing climate knowledge means rejecting the framework that treats nature as commodity and questioning who benefits from current environmental narratives. It means amplifying Indigenous sovereignty and land management practices that sustained ecosystems for centuries before colonial appropriation. Sor Juana's epistemic resistance—her refusal to accept imposed intellectual limits—models how climate justice requires dismantling the knowledge systems that legitimized extraction. This means supporting land-back movements, centering Indigenous environmental leadership, and fundamentally reconceiving humanity's relationship with Earth beyond capitalist extraction.