In Colombia’s southwestern state of Cauca, the conflict has been an underlying fabric of daily life for over fifty years, the sound of gunfire as ordinary as afternoon rain. Revolutionary rebel groups settled into the mountains; insurgent paramilitaries, resisting leftism sweeping the hemisphere, sought to exterminate them. Meanwhile, a different kind of struggle was gaining rapid momentum in their midst. Beginning in the 1960s, indigenous groups in the region solidified their own mission apart from the war— not to shape national politics, but reverse centuries of dispossession, exploitation, and genocide.