A view of the Kampankias Mountains and Santiago River, the sacred and ancestral home of the Wampis people, Peru's first Indigenous Amazon group to claim autonomy from the Peruvian state in a bid to to conserve their territory. In recent decades, the Wampis’s 1.3 million hectares of territory have been overrun by timber mafias, wildcat gold miners, and multinational oil companies. Confronting death threats, deadly oil spills, mercury-laced rivers and the steady annihilation of their old-growth forests, the tribe of roughly 15,000 who live along Peru’s lawless northern border with Ecuador, collectively declared their territory to be part of the first Indigenous autonomous government within Peru. Underpinning the Wampis’s territorial and political ambitions is a message of conservation. Their territory, which encompasses over 1.3 million hectares of lowland jungle, absorbs an estimated 57 million tonnes of CO₂ annually, and is recognized by the United Nations as a highly biodiverse Indigenous conservation corridor.