Mapuche history

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chapter two of Louis C. Faron's "The Mapuche Indians of Chile":

MOST OF WHAT is KNOWN about the Mapuche past is closely related to
their hostilities with whites and their eventual pacification.
Mapuche means "people of the land" (mapu: land; che: people) and is
often used synonymously by anthropologists with the word Araucanian.
Technically, Araucanian refers to a much larger, partly extinct, and
geographically more extensive population, and one which was
culturally more heterogeneous than are the contemporary,
reservation-dwelling Mapuche. Araucanian is also the name given to
the language spoken by the Mapuche, and to mutually intelligible
dialects used to the north and south of them. Araucanian belongs to
the Andean subfamily of the Andean-Equatorial language family, which
is widespread in South America.

To Spaniards and, after Independence (1810), to Chilean nationals,
the word Mapuche suggested hostile Indian and was used to refer to
all Araucanians who resisted conquest and were, therefore, considered
fair game for slaving raids and other forms of human degradation,
such as enforced labor on ranches and in gold mining, mutilation of
recalcitrants (for example, cutting leg tendons to make escape
difficult, cutting off male genitals), and subjecting Mapuche women
to concubinage. In today's Chilean elementary school textbooks,
however, Mapuche militarism receives qualified praise, and culture
heroes, such as Lautaro and Caupaulican are described as valiant and
astute leaders. Statues have even been raised to their memory here
and there in Chilean cities. Nevertheless, the contemporary
reservation Mapuche are disparaged. Their problems are sloughed off,
and their basic needs are ignored. "Lauto" and "Caupo," as the two
military heroes are commonly called, have become cigar-store Indians.

What does being "of the land" mean to the Mapuche homesteader? What
are the sorrows and joys attached to having been "of the land" since
time immemorial? Part of the answer to these questions may be
glimpsed in the highly selective account of warfare and pacification
which follows. The Mapuche know something of their early history from
legends and from school books and news

paper articles which some of them have read. This knowledge is
spread, even if imperfectly, over all Mapucheland by word of mouth in
the form of stories and tales. The Mapuche know much more about their
more recent history, chiefly from accounts of the founding of
reservations being passed down orally from one generation to the
next.

Inca forces were unable to conquer the Mapuche. Spanish armies fared
no better. After Chile acquired independence from Spain, its own
troops also tried. They too were no more successful against the
Mapuche than the Spanish troops had been, that is, until 1882. Since
1882, the Mapuche have been living at peace with the whites.

In 1540 Pedro de Valdivia arrived in Chile with a handful of troops,
established Santiago as a military outpost of Peru, and worked at
bringing the Picunche Araucanians to heel. The Picunche (picun:
north), although resisting and causing great damage to the Spaniards
for a time, were subjugated rather rapidly and forced to work for
their new masters placer-mining gold and raising crops and cattle on
Spanish estates. The Picunche were absorbed as mestizos into colonial
society during the first century of the conquest period. The conquest
of the Picunche was, however, a bitter victory for the Spaniards:
their small population did not provide the manpower the Spaniards
needed. Because of this, Valdivia pushed into Mapucheland south of
the Bio-Bio River, in an attempt to harness Mapuche manpower and
exploit the resources of their country. The Picunche are long gone
and almost forgotten. The Mapuche are still a force to contend with.

Valdivia's expeditions into Mapucheland in the middle of the
sixteenth century appeared to be successful, and within a short time
he established seven outposts. At this time it is conservatively
estimated that the Mapuche population was 500,000, an overwhelming
superiority of numbers against the Spaniards.

With the founding of each new settlement, Valdivia made huge grants
of Indians to his officers. One of his captains received 30,000
Indians, others from 8 to 12,000 each. The Spaniards put as many
Mapuche as they could to panning gold in the rivers. Chroniclers tell
of the harsh conditions suffered by the Indians. Hostilities soon
broke out and all mining operations were disrupted. The towns and
forts the Spaniards had built were razed, many settlers were killed,
some were evacuated by boat and returned to Santiago. Although some
of these settlements were later rebuilt, they never again prospered.

Because of their hostility, the Mapuche were considered fair game for
slaving parties during the next centuries. Nevertheless, the Mapuche
managed to keep the Spaniards out of their heartland and retained
most of their ancestral territory for the next three hundred years.
The Mapuche staged several major uprisings and waged continual
guerrilla warfare against the Spaniards. One time they even
penetrated Spanish-held territory to the very gates of Santiago, but
were driven back south of the Bio-Bio River.

The aggressive resistance of the Mapuche caused the Spaniards great
apprehension and cost the Crown a good deal of money for supplies and
troops which had to be sent to save Chile, its colony. Not only did
the Spaniards fail to conquer the Mapuche, they had to devise an
effective, and expensive, means of preventing their being overrun by
them.

It was not until toward the end of the nineteenth century that there
was any deep penetration of Mapucheland. Raids continued, however,
and captives were taken by both sides. Several epidemics swept
Mapucheland and untold thousands died by contracting European
diseases to which they had no immunity. Many Mapuche migrated across
the Andes into Argentina. By the end of the nineteenth century,
Mapuche population had probably been reduced to no more than 100,000.

The Picunche had long since been absorbed as mestizos into colonial
society north of the Bio-Bio River. To the south of the city of
Valdivia there are still remnants of a once larger population called
Huilliche (huilli: south) who represent the southernmost branch of
Araucanians. Relatively few Huilliche live on reservations. Most have
been absorbed into the mestizo element of Chilean society since the
second half of the nineteenth century and are known by several
different local names. The only viable segment of Araucanian society
is that of the Mapuche, preserved largely as a result of the
protection afforded by the reservation system begun in 1884, and
geographically intermediate to the now-extinct Picunche and the
vanishing Huilliche.

Although the Mapuche maintained their independence until the latter
part of the nineteenth century, a good deal of the price of
independence was paid in the form of social upheaval and population
dispersal. The long colonial era had been one of continual guerrilla
skirmishing, occasional general uprisings, and periodic loss of
territory.

When Chile secured independence from Spain in 1818 there appeared to
be an awakening of national interest in the further colonization of
Mapucheland. The new government expressed interest in protecting the
Mapuche from the hardships of increased contact with Chilean settlers
through legislation designed to prevent the unauthorized acquisition
of Indian land. The government was, nevertheless, interested in
having the frontier zone transformed into one of productive small
farms, and had no intention of allowing the Mapuche to hold all the
land they claimed as their own. Safeguards were also established
against speculation in land, which might have lead to the formation
of huge Chilean estates. Official policy and legal precautions were
consistent with the two-fold purpose of assuring the Mapuche adequate
land and, at the same time, opening up some of the area to small
farmers.

Also contained in the post-independence legislation was a hope, later
made very explicit, that the Mapuche would eventually abandon their
traditional way of life and seek employment on Chilean farms and in
the cities and towns of the future. The new national government
envisioned the eventual use of both Mapuche land and labor, as other
governments had in the past. To a great extent this policy, although
revamped periodically since its initiation, has been unsuccessful.
Even though the Mapuche have lost a good deal of their land to
colonists, they have not been easily transformed into the rural and
urban working class envisioned by the Chilean government and/or
landed class.

By the middle of the nineteenth century white colonization had
received a new impulse from European immigration. New encroachments
on Mapuche territory aroused them and resulted in their
intensification of guerrilla activity. The Chilean government
attempted to foster colonization by establishing the reservation
policy of 1866. Under its terms, Mapuche leaders were allowed to
apply for large grants of reservation land for themselves and their
followers. At the same time, the law provided a mechanism for the
gradual dissolution (division) of the reservation communities it
created. Meanwhile, all unclaimed land was to be sold to white
settlers.

It was during this period that the Huilliche, subjected to
large-scale settlement of their land by German immigrants, began to
lose control of their traditional way of life. The Mapuche, however,
seemed to lose little or none of their former vigor.

After 1866 tremendous pressure was exerted against the Mapuche by
white colonists. Huge tracts of land were taken from them along the
Bio-Bio River, along the coast south of Concepcion, and in a vast
area north and south of the town of Valdivia. The Mapuche responded,
as they had in the past, by staging a major rebellion, from
1869-1870, in which they were defeated and their population further
dispersed and socially disrupted. Peace ensued for less than a
decade. The final great Mapuche revolt came in 1880 and lasted about
two years. Again, peace was established, but this time the military
power and political autonomy of the Mapuche were lost. Great
population flux characterized the decade or so after 1884, during the
establishment of the present reservation system. The exodus to
Argentina assumed proportions greater than ever before. The Mapuche
who remained in Chile, although restive under defeat and a harsh
peace, were willing to accept the protection of the reservation
system, the basis for present-day Mapuche society.

Since that time the population has increased greatly. Aside from the
quarter million or so Mapuche who live on reservations, there are
unknown thousands living and working in Chilean towns and cities, on
Chilean farms, and in the national army and police force. But the
geographical spread of the reservations, despite territorial losses
and shifts in population, still lies within the aboriginal boundaries
formed by the Bio-Bio River on the north and the Calle-Calle River in
the south.

The heartland of the contemporary Mapuche is formed by Cautm and
Malleco provinces, where the majority of reservations are found. As
one moves north and south from the heartland to the aboriginal
boundaries, the number of reservations diminishes sharply, and the
Mapuche population dwindles almost to the point of extinction. In
effect, the occupied area has been compressed as a result of white
intrusions from the north and the south, during periods of
encroachment in the last four centuries. There has been a marked
redistribution of both land and population.

It is obvious in looking at the map on page ii that, although there
are large blocks of reservations in the heartland, there are also
large "blank" areas, and that reservations do not cover the heartland
uniformly. For the most part, the blank areas on the map are now
occupied by white settlers who began to make serious inroads on the
Mapuche stronghold only since the closing decades of the last
century. It was around that time, too, after pacification and the
establishment of reservations, that towns, roads, and railroads began
to be built in Mapuche territory. This was territory over which the
Mapuche had been accustomed to roam with relative freedom.

It should not be thought that the blank areas within the heartland
were once covered by reservations or settled by permanent Mapuche
residential groupings before or after 1884 and, that, therefore,
these areas were wrested from the reservation-dwelling Indians. This
is not the case. Most of the blank area was never accounted for in
the reservation system of 1884. Prior to pacification, and under the
previous and ineffectual reservation system of 1866, the blank spaces
comprised a heavily forested and/or swampy, unoccupied land which, at
most, offered a place of retreat for warring bands of Mapuche during
periods of peak stress. Most of the redistribution of land and
population involved the compression of the Mapuche into their present
habitat, driving them from the peripheries of their aboriginal
territory. This occurred in several phases from the middle of the
sixteenth century to 1884 and, in regard to reservation land
specifically, between 1884 and the early 1920s, the number of
reservations has remained constant, a phenomenon which reflects a
cultural resistance of the latter-day Mapuche, rather than a
lessening of the acquisitive attitude of Chilean society.

There is some indication that at the time of the Spaniards' arrival
in Chile the Mapuche lived in relatively stable agricultural
communities, at least in the most favorable parts of their territory,
and that continual skirmishing with the whites put an end to this
sedentary life. In any case, it is obvious that fighting with Spanish
troops for a couple of centuries served to make the Mapuche highly
mobile. Mobility was both a strategy of attack and retreat (as in
most guerrilla campaigns) and it is likely that the shifting type of
garden cultivation which was practiced by them during the colonial
era developed in response to their increasingly mobile way of life.

The reservation system ushered in a period of much greater stability,
during which time local groups could remain settled on their
agricultural lands for generations. A change to field farming at
least correlates with the greater stability, even if it did not
actually reinforce it at first. At the same time, military
organization withered as garden horticulture became almost entirely
woman's work, and men turned their attention to field farming and
animal raising. It is simple enough to show that out of the
reservation system there developed a pattern of life based largely on
membership in patrilineal units; a life in which patrilineal descent
groups become fundamental units in Mapuche economics, politics,
religion, kinship, and marriage connections, and in other facets of
institutionalized, normative behavior. One-quarter million or more
Mapuche, conservative and recalcitrant, continue to pose a great
problem of assimilation for the Chilean government. On the regional
level of intersocietal relationships, there has long been conflict
between white Chileans and reservation-dwelling Mapuche, in many
spheres of activity and belief. The Mapuche regard most Chileans with
distrust, even suspecting them of being sorcerers. Short of this,
Chileans are felt to be unscrupulous merchants and land grabbers who
are unjustly protected by Chilean law. Most Chileans regard the
Mapuche as intellectually inferior savages. Antagonism is aggravated
by the fact that Mapuche reservations occupy some of the best farm
land and pasturage in Chile, land which is coveted by white settlers
who complain that reservations surround them like a "ring of iron,"
cutting off their potential expansion.

Merchants and bankers in the towns echo this complaint because most
of their profits depend on the agricultural production of the
frontier zone. The Chilean government is desirous that the land be
exploited by the best agricultural techniques, and regards the
Mapuche as a stumbling block to modern farming and larger returns.
These attitudes are translated into pressures on Mapuche and Chilean
society alike. They are part of the environmental and social
adaptations made by both Mapuche and Chilean.

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 08/21/2001

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