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While acknowledging advances in legal recognition of Indigenous rights, much of the research literature positions negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and corporations simply as 'neoliberal technology' that gives the appearance of Indigenous consent while allowing exploitation to continue. This analysis is flawed in considering agreements as discrete, stand‐alone phenomena. It ignores the possibility that Indigenous peoples may use agreements as part of broader strategies to achieve control over extractive industry activity and to secure a share of 'development' benefits — strategies that involve selective engagement with the state. This article supports its argument by locating an agreement between the Chilean lithium mining company, Albemarle, and the Council of Atacameño Peoples within a broad and sustained strategy by Atacameño people to address the negative impacts of mining in the Salar de Atacama, Chile, while securing its economic benefits. This strategy includes using the agreement to voice Atacameño territorial claims and environmental concerns to the state, and to insist that the state lives up to its responsibilities. The analysis leads to a fuller appreciation of the agency exercised by Indigenous peoples in dealing with the sustained expansion of extractive activity on their territories, and a more nuanced understanding of negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and mining corporations and between Indigenous people and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mineral extraction landscapes are infamous for their histories of spectacular ecological destruction and corporate-Indigenous community conflict. In contrast, until recently mining company activity and Indigenous community responses in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, have been marked by a somewhat mundane political and environmental dynamic characterised by invisible, shifting and short-term benefits for locals and unspectacular contests. However, the effects of extractive industries are cumulative and complex. In this paper, I examine the operation of relatively new Chilean regulation relating to environmental and social impact of mining that includes obligatory consultation between proponents and Indigenous peoples. Relying on new regulation, Indigenous people have expanded their repertoire of response to mining, refusing extractive development's proffered benefits and entering negotiation with powerful outsiders on better terms, but there are also social costs. Using the critical terms of community leaders who protested about the "overburden" of new projects mounting up in consultation with proponents, I examine the structural and temporal problems generated by new regulatory process. Through ethnographic material derived from engaged anthropology, I show how community administrative and political labour to respond to the technical processes of consultation is at once mundane and exhausting. I argue that community work to consider and respond to proposed extractivist projects "exceeds" the progressive politics of recognition and new Chilean regulatory frameworks of consultation and left unaddressed, generates additional negative effects. I suggest that regulatory processes regarding the social impact of extractive industry should take seriously the implications of overburden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of value is fundamental to contexts of resource scarcity given that contest over use and distribution of scarce resources centres on judgments about rights, interests and access. In mining processes, the use and extraction of water in great volumes commodifies and threatens supplies of what others understand to be a substance essential to all forms of life. In the Atacama, while industrial extraction and commodification by the mining industry are the basis for indigenous people's contestations over water resources, an analysis of everyday water practice and performance (as 'ordinary ethics') demonstrates that an indigenous ethics of resources includes commodity values under certain conditions. This paper examines a field of competing actors engaging in extraction and use of scarce waters in order to make an argument for the importance of considering the complexities and dynamics of ethical practice and water value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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