On September 25, 2011, Bolivia garnered international attention when federal police violently attacked the camp of indigenous protestors marching against the construction of a highway through the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS). The international backlash against the violence forced Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, to temporarily ban construction of the highway in Law 180. After a counter-march led by cocaleros (coca leaf-growing Aymara and Quechua peasant migrants to the region) demanding the highway arrived in La Paz, the government revived the highway project. It conducted a consultation in the TIPNIS in 2012 and began construction in the TIPNIS’s southern colonization zone in 2017. Scholars and the media have used the TIPNIS conflict to evaluate Morales’s project of social, economic, and political reforms. This focus on Morales has obscured the voices of the TIPNIS communities, who participated in the national debates over indigenous identity, indigenous rights, development, and environmental protection that developed out of the conflict over the highway. This thesis will argue that the TIPNIS communities exploited the window of opportunity opened by the consultation process to press their own visions of indigenous identity, indigenous rights, and environmental protection.