Truth Demands

A memoir or murder, oil wars, and the rise of climate justice.

Please join author Abby Reyes in conversation with anthropologist Cari Borja for a profoundly moving exploration of Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice. This isn’t a book talk. It’s a reckoning with history, grief, power, and the price of bearing witness to truth.

In 1999, Abby lost her partner, Terence Unity Freitas, and fellow activists Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa(Menominee) and Lahe’ena’e Gay (Hawaiian) after they departed Kajka Ika—the “heart of the world,” sacred Indigenous U’wa territory imperiled by multinational oil interests. They disappeared entirely, and then their bodies were discovered, bound and bullet-riddled in a Venezuelan cow field. Two decades later, Abby finds herself at the center of Case 001 of Colombia’s truth and recognition process, called back into a past that refuses to stay buried.

Spanning three continents and three decades, Truth Demands traces Abby's journeys through loss, purpose, and accountability in the crosscurrents of big oil, Indigenous resistance, and climate justice. It is a memoir that asks us: What does truth ask of us? What do we do with the fragments we carry?

The evening will also address the present in a discussion of the frontline work Abby now does in California alongside worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, urban farms, and mutual aid networks advancing climate resilience and economic justice from the ground up.

Abby Reyes is an author and systems-thinking leader in driving community climate solutions. Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice was published in 2025 and was praised by The New York Times Book Review and recommended by Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability and Yale Climate Connections. Born in Virginia, Abby began her environmental work in the Philippines and later accompanied the U’wa in their struggle against oil extraction. Today she is Director of Community Resilience Projects at the University of California, Irvine, supporting climate-vulnerable communities and their academic partners to accelerate community-owned just transition solutions. A graduate of Stanford University and UC Berkeley Law, she clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, co-chaired the board of EarthRights International, and is an advisor to the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.