journal

6 notes

MAY 29

On the plane, the circumstances of my personal, microscopic reality returned to me.  I began to take note of the changes to my knowledge, perspective and character, and to contemplate how I would proceed once home.

As I arrived, I was greeted by loved ones with zeal. I reciprocated, but found myself quiet shortly thereafter. I was exhausted and overthinking how I was feeling and how I was supposed to feel. I was pushing myself to analyze everything while I did not feel like a permanent fixture. After weeks of continuous stimulation and engagement, my analytical gaze seemed automated. Eventually, I felt overwhelmed and knew that I was too tired to draw any worthy conclusions. I would return to it with a rested mind.

MAY 28 - Cerro San Cristobal

Cerro San Cristobal gives a macroscopic view of the geography, infrastructure and activity of the city. It was striking to see the proximity of the immense mountains that had disappeared from view when we entered the city.

I had not expected the spiritual significance of the mountain top. The mourning of death, finality and impermanence made me feel eager and somewhat nervous, but the sense of direction and reaffirmation that the trip brought me gave me peace. I felt peaceful sitting on the stairs.

MAY 25 - Parque Nacional Huerquehuee and Loz Pozones

Our hike in Parque Nacional Huerquehuee was a great opportunity for me to connect with the land. Though I had spent the majority of the trip in “natural” landscapes, surrounded by living organisms, I didn’t feel that I had many opportunities to focus and observe in an intimate and independent way. I enjoyed feeling my body connect with the variations in the land and soil and inspecting the various species I came in contact with.

From a methodological perspective, this was a much needed break from constant stimulation and expectation, as well as much needed physical exercise. More significantly, this is the day that I lost my cellphone and consequently, a large portion of my field notes.

I learned that the practical considerations of information management are crucial when preparing for and during field work. There are risks associated with digital and manual journal keeping. In both cases, there are challenges of convenience and aversion of loss and destruction.

I was lucky to have experienced both strategies by this point and feel it added to my learning experience. I am content with the way that I handled the situation emotionally and the fact that it did not affect my experience beyond the day that I lost it.

MAY 26 - Municipality of Currehue

Museum in “La Aldea”

Our first stop was an anti-museum in “La Aldea” which shares many characteristics with the Mapuche Museum in Cañete. To begin, the museum is state-sponsored and operated by the municipality, but conceptualized by the Mapuche community. It acts as a community space, in fact, a meeting was being held during our tour. Though not present during our visit, there are normally food and artisanal stalls set up. The museum hosts fewer objects and tells the history of the region through stories, as practiced in Mapuche culture. The tours are provided by Mapuche individuals from the municipality, providing a unique encounter between the visitor and an individual whose community is being displayed.

Further to decolonising the gaze, and creating a space of encounter, the museum has succeeded in presenting the culture of the region in a way that is true to itself. Of equal importance is there success in creating a place for the community to meet.

Anita Epulef

We met with Anita Epulef at her restaurant for a cooking class, lunch and discussion. After we prepared our meal co-operatively, Anna spoke about how she utilizes food in her activism and the challenges within the region.

Throughout the discussion, it became apparent that food has many uses. Anna noted that the way that we grow and cook our food is one of the best ways to understand the relationship that we have with our environment. Food can act as a vehicle to pass on heritage. Eduardo feels that she uses it as a bridge between Mapuche and non-Mapuche.

Anna feels that the development being imposed on the region is based on satisfying false needs and that they can sustain themselves happily as a family economy. To be Mapuche, she said, means to live in equilibrium with the place that you are from. In the many projects she has worked against, she has found that people often do not go to meetings hosted by the corporations because they are concerned that they will be fooled. There have been times when people were told to sign to say that they were in attendance at a meeting, and unknowingly gave consent to projects. The companies have not been operating in accordance with international norms of free and prior consent.

This is an important observation made by Anna. From our brief discussion of the region, I gathered that the communities often lack knowledge of the Western scientific basis for the projects proposed for their areas, and are therefore unable to comprehend the proposals in order to combat them. They likely lack the financial capital to do so as well. In a free market, this interaction is not regulated, and it would be fair to assume that this development-based government would be more interested in the solution with the highest economic value.

The intersection of food, development and justice found in Anna’s activism is unlike the common threads we have found elsewhere. I found Anna’s use of food inspirational. She has carved a unique role to play as an activist that is true to herself and effective. She has recognized the overlooked power of food as a carrier of information, emotion and connection. Food is pervasive in everyday life. What power this tool has.

Camilo Coñuequir

We moved on to visit with an agricultural technician, Marisol Coñuequir, in the Mapuche community of Camilo Coñuequir, in the sector of the municipality called Trankurra.  Marisol produces personal care products with medicinal and aromatherapy properties. She has utilized her scientific knowledge and ancestral knowledge to create a form of sustainable development. The inputs are from the surrounding forest and the honey produced by the bees that she keeps outside of her production facility.

I am not certain where she received her training, but her production facility and practices seemed suggestive of Western scientific training. I believe many questioned this practice as a Lonko’s daughter. Assuming that her practices are a form of hybridity, who is to determine whether this is right or wrong but her? I do not see this as a form of intellectual corruption, but rather, the adaptation of new technologies to her traditional practices within current circumstances. Marisol is dedicated to local production and the support of her community. Numerous other actors we encountered throughout the trip mentioned the need for Mapuche communities to determine what it means and looks like to be Mapuche in today’s circumstances. Marisol has found that for herself.  After visiting with the agricultural technician, we visited with her father, Alejandro Coñuequir, the Lonko.

Alejandro told us about how the population in the territory came to be, and how he became the Lonko. I was the most exhausted I had been for the trip, making a confusing dialogue even harder to follow. I am going to refrain from commenting on what he had to say and make a note about methodology.

For the first time during the trip, I caught myself automatically devaluing the truth of a subject. I immediately told myself to remain objective and to accept his truth as valid. I recall him listing the ages of individuals in the community that seemed unrealistic, but cannot recall what else had triggered this thought process. It could be a disconnect in our understanding of age and temporal scales.

1. Vendor stalls at the Tratkintuwe center
2. Alapinta mural on the back of the Trafkintuwe center depicting the experiences or Mapuche people in Chile

MAY 24 - Panguipulli

In Panguipulli, we met with a group of Mapuche political activists who are building networks throughout the region. We were guided by our hosts, Francisco, Beatriz and Jorge, to three spaces dedicated to building political and economic alternatives to Chile’s neoliberal state structure.

The activists are calling upon ancestral knowledge for ways to reunite, organize, strengthen ties within the region and recreate a self-governed Mapuche nation. Some of the parliament’s objectives are the recuperation, defense and collective administration of the territory. They feel that today, there is a renewal of colonisation with the extractive economy that is not in line with Mapuche tradition.

We began at a community center that has housed the network’s monthly “parliament” meeting since 2007. Said “parliament” is a revival of the 1907 Parliament of Kos-Kos, which was established by the Chilean state to discuss the terms of formal recognition with the Lonkos of the region. This was a space of encounter between the Mapuche nation and the Chilean state, whereas the current parliament acts as a space for developing a response to the state structure.

Membership within the Parliament is varied. It includes traditional leaders, as well as individuals recognized as community leaders by the state. The parliament operates horizontally and all decisions are made collectively. All those in struggle are welcome to present at the parliament.

The parliament also meets annually in its original location. The meeting consists of two days of ceremony and two days of democratic political deliberation in working groups around set themes. There are no leaders – only facilitators. Extended families remain together and constitute political units. Decisions made are not based on majority rule, but rather, on the power of the argument. Their access to this location is limited, as it now falls upon the private property of a horse breeder.

The breeder allows them to use the space, as he recognizes its historical significance. They would like to recover the land to establish a market with exchange and selling to support a territorial capacities economy. They have not yet been successful in getting the land. They are unable to access CONADI funding, as the land was not part of a reducción. They do not feel that a land occupation would be appropriate for their situation and continue seeking funding alternatives. It seems that the third location serves a similar purpose to their vision for the second.

The third location that we visited was the Tranfkintuwe center. It is a repurposed train station that has stalls for vendors and acts as a community space. Its purpose is to create a proposal for the territory and an experience of what it would be like. There is a presence of monetary exchange, as well as traditional trade present in the center. In their proposal, they are using modern technologies to serve their values, such as solar water heaters. As numerous other actors that we saw, they are using this location as an experiment to develop a model to be used elsewhere. They are developing this model on their own, with leadership from within the Mapuche community of the region.

It is important to note that the activists are not working in coercion with a political party or any other social group. This is important to their goal of self-government, given the challenges that the Mapuche have had with working with other groups, such as peasants, and the left in general. In the past, they have found their objectives of recognition, rights and justice marginalized when working with these groups. Given that they have avoided this, it is interesting that they have adopted a concept that was established by the Chilean state to organize themselves – the parliament – rather than utilizing a Mapuche term/concept. 

MAY 23 - Citizen Observatory

We visited a human rights center where we heard two speakers. The first discussed the history of the injustices and human rights violations against the Mapuche people in the Chile. I found much of this lecture to be information that I had acquired in the literature, and will therefore not touch upon this. What I did find interesting were his aspirations for the Mapuche people. These include higher levels of recognition; payment of historical debt; national unification of the Mapuche; political reconstruction; and the liberation of Mapuche being held as political prisoners.

The second speaker was a social communicator and journalist working with the center, as well as on his own to develop a Mapuche television station. He discussed a community that has been under surveillance and suffered a lot of violence at the hand of the state. He claims that there is surveillance equipment, including cameras installed in many communities. In this particular community, police live in a shack nearby. He feels that the way that the police are being treated is a human rights violation as well.

In response to a question posed about violence as a means for the Mapuche people to fight the state, he said that it would be delusional to think that it is possible to destroy the Chilean machinery with violence. This would not be an ethical, nor successful strategy. He thinks that there are too few human rights education programs in police training and that the judicial system must be amended to treat police officers equally. After discussing human rights violations, he spoke about cultural discrimination.

In Chile, the Mapuche people lack access to the media. He is working to overcome this by hosting his radio station and creating a television show. Cultural discrimination does not only produce marginalization, it often leads to invisibility and elimination. The media plays a large role in culture-making. As the media solely presents dominant perspectives it excludes Mapuche forms of knowledge from being included in common knowledge. Even if policies were to favour the support of diversity in media, I wonder where marginalized groups would acquire the financial capital to participate without the assistance of the state.

The discussion of the surveillance of and violence against this community called to mind the claimed ignorance of some members of the left discussed in one articles that we read. There is evidently still a significant amount of conflict within the south and current human rights abuses. The state would like it to be thought that the transition is over and that human rights abuses are a thing of the past to be looked down upon in a museum, but this is not the case. The democracy now relies upon the continued dispossession and lack of recognition for the Mapuche people. It was not only a case of the dictatorship, but what came before and after as well.

The Mapuche symbol for power that Manuel was wearing

The Mapuche symbol for power that Manuel was wearing

MAY 22 - Lumaco

Farewell Eduardo

It was quite emotional to leave someone I felt was fighting for the things that I so strongly believe in, in another part of the world. His passion really influenced me. It was extremely valuable to have had another mentor with a different perspective accompany us.

Lumaco

In Lumaco, we met with a Mapuche gentleman, Manuel, who had previously served as the mayor of the tri-cultural (Italian, Mapuche and non-Mapuche) municipality between 2014 and 2012, and his team in a community center that he established while in office. He mentioned the politics and racism involved in the coexistence of the three cultural communities, and the small likelihood of him having become mayor. The area was subject to splitting of lands to individual title, as in other areas we’ve visited. The early arrival of forestry companies affected economic orientation of community. There is a large outmigration of young people here as well as forestry companies only generate short-term employment opportunities.

The presence of the forestry companies is affecting the municipality in other ways. Roads destroyed by the trucks go unrepaired as the corporations pay their taxes wherever their headquarters are located, often in Concepción or Santiago. Most importantly, they have destroyed their natural forests which are of great cultural significance to the Mapuche. Machi are no longer able to pick their medicinal plants that their practices require. They’ve been told to grow them elsewhere, but they need to be in symbiosis with nature for them to have power, an example of culturally-inappropriate policy. The pine and eucalyptus require a lot of water and have dried the soils. People can no longer practice subsistence agriculture and water has been delivered by truck for almost a decade. They have to dig deeper and deeper to get reach water – a very expensive process. This brings up another major issue: access to water.

In Chile, the water laws are an issue. A lack of access to water is just as destructive as a lack of access to land. People may be next to a river, but not able to use it because they don’t own it. Most only have surface rights on their properties. Manuel’s team has performed research on this issue.

As mayor, Manuel used his position to further the agenda of the Mapuche people, who were otherwise marginalized. He negotiated access to natural reserves for Machi to collect medicine. Moreover, in health care, he established an intercultural health care plan with participation from all cultures, including Machis. Lastly, he implemented Mapuche music and more into the curriculum.

While with us, Manuel wore a symbol of power around his neck. We heard nothing of the Lonko in the community. This provides a good example of how the Chilean state has shifted power structures within Mapuche communities. By entering politics, Manuel was not only been able maneuver the Chilean system from within, but he has also been able gain status within the community for the Mapuche that would have otherwise been difficult to achieve given the subordinate social position of the Mapuche to the Italian and non-Mapuche communities.