[3] The increasing usage of the term can be viewed in the context of decolonization, as it serves to create an understanding that "land and discourse, territorio y palabra, cannot be disjointed" and a geography in which a struggle for sovereignty and resistance occurs on an everyday basis for Indigenous communities.
[6] Despite each indigenous group on the continent having unique endonyms for the regions they live in (e.g. Tawantinsuyu, Anahuac or pt:Pindorama), the expression Abya Yala is increasingly used in search of building a sense of unity and belonging amongst cultures which have a shared cosmovision (for instance a deep relationship with the land) and history of colonialism.
The Bolivian indigenist Takir Mamani argues for the use of the term "Abya Yala" in the official declarations of indigenous peoples' governing bodies, saying that "placing foreign names on our villages, our cities, and our continents is equivalent to subjecting our identity to the will of our invaders and their heirs.
[6] A similar term referring to North America specifically is "Turtle Island", which is used by several Northeastern Woodland Native American tribes, especially the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy, for part of the continent.
However, studies by Guna intellectuals, such as the ethnolinguist Abadio Green Stocel and the sociologist and poet Aiban Wagua, indicate that the construction of the cosmogonic meaning of Abya Yala is related to the partitioning of Mother Earth into continents.
Moreover, the use of this term, which has been considered lacking demonstrable historical foundations, has been adopted by scholars proposing decolonial academic perspectives (Arturo Escobar and Walter Mignolo, among others) and by some Indigenous groups, in some cases associated with leftist ideological political movements in various countries on the continent, without a connection to the different cultures that have developed in the continental territory.