When the barrister Monica Feria-Tinta was a child, she couldn’t speak to her grandmother. “I, who grew up in Lima, never learned Quechua, so I never properly spoke to her,” she writes in her new book, A Barrister for the Earth. “I admired her rebellious dismissal of a culture that had come to oppress the Andean world, that had come to oppress her.”
Feria-Tinta, however, grew up fully assimilated into the oppressor’s culture. She spoke Spanish, studied law in Peru, then trained in England to become a barrister specialising in international law. In 2000, she became the first Peruvian lawyer to receive the prestigious diploma from the Hague Academy of International Law. She used that training to represent Indigenous people, rivers, a forest and whole ecosystems, as she describes in her book.
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