Peoples of the Earth by Andersen Martin Edwin;Pastor Robert A.;Pastor Robert A.;

Author:Andersen, Martin Edwin;Pastor, Robert A.;Pastor, Robert A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Chile: Contesting the Lands of the “People of the Earth”

“How is it possible to have 37 episodes (of violence) to then continue sending in the Carabineros (militarized police), thinking that the Carabineros will solve the problem?”

—Francisco Huenchumilla, a Mapuche leader and

former secretary-general of the presidency

A majority of the native peoples of Chile are Mapuche and number between six hundred thousand and one million people, 4 to 7 percent of the country’s population. The Chilean Mapuche territory, in a large area in the central part of the country, is more densely populated than where their relatives, the Argentine Mapuche, live—the same people sharing a common ancestral home—the latter numbering approximately one hundred and thirty thousand and who reside in a vast area encompassing the Patagonian provinces of Neuquen, Rio Negro, Chubut and Santa Cruz. The very name, Mapuche, which means “people of the Earth,” underscores the fact, as one Mapuche leader himself noted, that “indigenous thought does not distinguish the environment from the self.” Although more Mapuche today find work in Chile’s urban areas than in rural precincts, land remains an indispensable part of the spiritual and economic elements of the Indians’ culture and way of life, helping them maintain a strong cultural identity.1 Today more than three thousand Mapuche communities in Chile in the country’s southern region are home to numerous ethnic and emerging ethnonationalist organizations, giving impetus to a “national” Mapuche project, united in demands for constitutional recognition of their identity, culture and rights, together with ownership of their traditional lands. Momentum has rapidly increased as their ancestral territory has been steadily eroded by claims by multinational corporations, land barons and even non-Indian farmers. Because of this, some Mapuche seek a legal status similar to that of the Rapa Nui (Polynesian) people of Easter Island, to which the government in Santiago has conceded a relatively self-governing autonomy as a “special territory.”2 However, the geographic isolation of Easter Island makes autonomy an easier political decision; the geography of the Mapuche does not lend itself to a straightforward decision.

In 1961 anthropologist Louis C. Faron noted that the Mapuche—“one of the largest functioning Indian societies in South America” and known pejoratively as “Araucanians”—have historically been viewed by non-indigenous Chileans as

hopelessly ignorant, shiftless, and lazy. This situation is aggravated by the fact that Mapuche reservations occupy some of the most desirable farming and cattle-raising land in this part of Chile—land coveted by white settlers, who complain that the reservations surround them like a “ring of iron,” preventing their expansion. . . . The government is desirous that the land be exploited by the best agricultural methods, and regards the Mapuche as a stumbling block to the improvements strategic white colonization would bring. These attitudes are translated into “pressures” on Mapuche society.3

Because they halted the advance of the Incas at the Rio Maule in the fifteenth century, their foes at that time called the Mapuche “Promaucae”—a deformation of the Quechua word “purum auca,” meaning “rebellious people;” their title was reaffirmed when the Chilean

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.