Territorial Youth Spiritualities: Indigenous Leadership and Amazonian Mobility

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines emerging forms of spirituality among young Awajún men, closely linked to Indigenous leadership and Amazonian territory. It draws on ethnographic research conducted in Santa María de Nieva, in the northern Peruvian Amazon, to explore how these young men inhabit and reinterpret Amazonian space through their trajectories of mobility. Circulation across native communities, cities, educational institutions, workplaces, churches, NGOs, and political spaces fosters a constellation of relationships and practices that shape these young men's life projects and leadership. These trajectories combine elements of tajimat pujut —Awajún “good living”—with aspirations to improve personal and collective well‐being, territorial memories, and forms of knowledge acquired in urban contexts. In a period of profound transformation in Amazonia—marked by environmental degradation, the promotion of extractive activities, the expansion of illegal economies, and intensified territorial mobility—new Indigenous generations articulate responsibility toward their people and forms of spirituality in dialogue with tensions among communal expectations, institutional demands, and their own desires. This article argues that emerging contemporary forms of indigeneity express transformation rather than loss. Through the polyvalent forms of leadership they are forging, young Awajún men rework their relationship with Indigenous spirituality by articulating visionary plants, oral traditions, Christian discourses, and rights‐based frameworks. In doing so, they make new aspirations visible while reaffirming their bond with territory and give shape to what this article terms territorial youth spiritualities .