What does it cost to maintain partnership across impossible differences?

In 2021, three researchers arrive in Colombia's Vaupés region expecting to conduct participatory research with Indigenous communities. They carry sophisticated methodologies, institutional support, and good intentions. What they don't expect is that the communities have been managing researchers for decades—and have developed their own sophisticated strategies for protecting what matters while satisfying institutional demands.

Rivers That Converge follows these researchers and their community partners across five years of sustained collaboration. It documents not transformation but maintenance: the daily work of navigating between knowledge systems, the economic costs that accumulate in spreadsheets no institution reimburses, the technology that enables connection while constantly failing, the both/and impossibilities that everyone navigates without resolution.

This novel makes visible what academic papers cannot capture: the strategic performance required to satisfy institutions while protecting sacred knowledge, the humor during technology failures, the frustration when rhetoric advances faster than structural change, the care expressed through equipment repair. It shows Indigenous communities forcing institutional adaptations through sustained pressure, researchers learning that partnership means dependence rather than methodology, and technology serving relationships while barely functioning.