Since the days of the Conquest, commodity extractions have negatively impacted Latin America’s natural landscapes. As stewards of their ecosystems, indigenous people have long been victimized by government development plans. The developmentalist state’s treatment of their local ecosystems as blank canvases devoid of humans, flora, and fauna, have left indigenous people, from such countries as Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico, in precarious positions. How have these indigenous groups reacted to such changes that threatened their economies, cultural practices, and approach to their natural landscapes? The diverse papers in this panel discuss how, through their attempts to protect their identity, natural resources, and economic practices, local indigenous inhabitants found innovative mobilization tactics to resist and/or collaborate with local, federal, or colonial officials and private entities in the extraction of vital commodities from their homelands. Each of the commodities under analysis in these projects, water, timber, oil, and the land itself played a vital role in both local and national (or colonial) economies. The economic importance of such resources therefore compelled state forces to take great pains to control both natural landscapes and local inhabitants. Yet total compliance and submission was not as easily accomplished as most government functionaries may have hoped, and indigenous people proved adept, even quite savvy, in utilizing every tool of resistance at their disposal. While armed resistance is often the indigenous people’s tactic most documented by historians, the native groups in these papers employed other successful, non-forceful means, including lawsuits, protests, and allying with non-indigenous peasant groups. Indigenous communities also proved adroit in navigating the struggles that sprouted up between stakeholders engaged in resource extraction. Regardless of whether this tension was between royal officials, encomenderos, indigenous caciques, and town councils in colonial New Spain (Mexico), between groups of indigenous people and/or against colonists in twentieth-century Ecuador, between mestizo and indigenous peasants in twentieth-century Mexico, or between groups of indigenous people and indigenous communities and the state in twenty-first century Bolivia, the indigenous communities and individuals discussed in these papers somehow found their way into organizational meetings, court rooms, or community forums. In this way, these indigenous activists were able to—against incredible odds—express their grievances and desires, and even gained a voice in local development decisions. While still marginalized politically, economically, and culturally, this panel pushes back against the narrative that state forces completely silenced and confined indigenous Latin American people from the colonial era to the twenty-first century. In fact, by displaying and invoking their traditional ecological knowledge of their ecosystems, indigenous people continually exerted—variably across time and space—measured forms of power and autonomy that forced the state to reconsider treating natural resources as targets of exploitation. This panel will appeal to scholars interested in a broad range of topics, including: ethnohistory, environmental history, ethnic studies, political ecology, indigenous studies, state formation, economics, political protest, and subaltern studies.