In the early nineteenth century, foreign explorers traveling throughout Mexico and Central America began documenting sites, structures, and monuments then unknown in the United States and Europe. These explorers depicted the ruins they encountered as deserted and lifeless and suggested that the passage of time had rendered them ineffective. This article challenges such a Western, Romantic understanding of Maya ruins. Drawing on ruination studies and the material turn, it argues instead that Maya ruins are affective, consequential, and shape human actions. To do so, the article briefly considers the utility of assemblage theory and Indigenous ontologies to archaeological interpretations of ruins. It then takes as a case study an intrasite sak-be at Punta Laguna, Yucatán, México, and interprets it as a kuxansum—an Indigenous Maya concept of a living rope of blood that, even when seemingly severed, continues to connect spaces, human and other-than-human entities, and various temporalities. This interpretation encourages scholars to question whether broken or seemingly abandoned ruins such as roads must always be interpreted as functionally obsolete or whether new meanings are often made from the old.

Drawing on two decades of collaborative legal ethnographic research with Indigenous communities, this article weaves personal narrative and lived experience to highlight working-class scholar-activism and embodied spiritual rituality as an act of resistance within academia. It critically challenges Western research ethics paradigms by emphasising ethics as a lived, relational practice grounded in rituality and interconnectedness rather than mere compliance. Through an audiovisual lens, it demonstrates how visual storytelling can embody and amplify more-than-human voices, fostering relationality and responsibility. The paper offers two key contributions: recentring the positionality of working-class scholars and recentring the agency of the more-than-human int he field of law as vital in knowledge production. While decolonial and Indigenous scholarship advocate for diverse epistemologies, they often overlook working-class perspectives rooted in societal justice. I argue that a heart-based resistance grounded in critical care, relationality, Indigenous ontologies and spirituality can foster transformative academic knowledge.