Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> <bold>Background</bold> Chiloé, an archipelago in southern Chile, is home to a substantial Williche population whose life is organised around the maritorio—a relational territory with no clear boundary between sea and land. Although the sea has commonly been represented as a masculinised space, women are extensively present within it, and rendering this presence visible matters. We therefore ask how Williche women navigators and gatherers from La Barra de Chaiguao and San Juan de Chadmo inhabit, know and care for the maritorio, and what place their practices and knowledge hold in sustaining life—human and other-than-human—and in Indigenous coastal governance. <bold>Methods</bold> We draw on an ethnographic, qualitative approach conducted from 2024 to the present in the communes of Chonchi and Quellón. The methods combined participatory mapping, sensory ethnography and biographically oriented in-depth interviews across two Williche communities, together with eight fieldstays of four to seven days. The resulting material was coded through thematic content analysis and used to construct ethnographic micro-narratives. No statistical tests were applied, as the study is qualitative. <bold>Results</bold> Despite their historical invisibilisation, women have played a central role in community subsistence through navigation, the gathering of luga (an edible seaweed) and shellfish, and craft-making, holding extensive knowledge of routes, tides, ecological cycles, animal and plant species, and the medicinal uses of algae and herbs (lawen). These practices constitute socio-ecological webs of care that sustain human and other-than-human life. This appears to be enabled by the safeguarding of customary uses linked to Coastal Marine Areas of Indigenous Peoples, which articulate intergenerational networks of women. Such dynamics both unsettle, and are strained by, the privatisation of the maritorio and the expansion of aquaculture. <bold>Conclusions</bold> By articulating productive, reproductive and subsistence logics, the practices of Williche women exceed productivist framings and contribute to socio-ecological care and the sustaining of life in the maritorio. Grounded in local knowledge, they are key to a more equitable and careful marine–coastal governance. A situated understanding of these practices, one that makes visible the role of women in and with their communities and maritorios, helps in imagining a sustainable future for the sea and its coasts. </p>