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Memory Studies 2015, Vol. 8(1) 75 –85

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Mapuche mnemonics: Beyond modernity’s violence

Macarena Gómez-Barris University of Southern California, USA

Abstract The recent, spectacularly massive student marches in Chile have in some ways occluded Andean regional responses to extractive neoliberalism over the last 40 years. If we consider native subjectivity and the longer periodization of colonialism, then a different conceptualization and analysis of memory and subjugation emerge to complicate the field of memory and cultural studies. In this article, I analyze modern state violence through the “reducciones” period and post-1990 movement of “democratic transition” as two instances of acute racial capitalism and formulations of resistance by Mapuche peoples. Here, I wish to address what genealogy of cultural studies makes sense for understanding the long arc of colonial memory and paradigms of indigenous resistance. As such, my article tries to theoretically address possible future directions of memory studies in the Americas.

Keywords democratization, genocidal violence, hunger strikes, Mapuche, performance

Introduction

The 40th-year marker of the military coup in Chile on 11 September 2013 produced multiple dis- cursive, visual, and performative interruptions to “business as usual” that redefined the meaning of nation and state violence, most forcefully narrated from the quarters of indigenous activism and cultural production. Mapuche poet Leonel Chilcaf showed the irony of this 40-year marker by stat- ing, “the military dictatorship pursued the Leftist population for 17 years, though the indigenous population in the BíoBío region was persecuted for more than 500.” Although Chilcaf’s statement is a rhetorical move, since unionized urban labor, Communist Party members, and rural workers all experienced varying degrees of police and military repression throughout the nation’s history, the poet astutely observed how indigenous peoples of Southern Cone territories have been on the receiving end of genocidal violence as a permanent condition, reaching far beyond intermittent experiences of authoritarian repression.

Scholarship on the violent production of citizenship has also refined the commonly held belief that Pinochet’s regime (1973–1989) represented an exceptional period, instead pointing to the

Corresponding author: Macarena Gómez-Barris, USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California, 3551 Trousdale Pkwy., ADM 304, Los Angeles, CA 90089-4012, USA. Email: [email protected]

552410MSS0010.1177/1750698014552410Memory StudiesGómez-Barris research-article2014

Article

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ferocity of the nation-state police and military apparatuses that operated within a wide range of legal codes and were granted impunity throughout the sixteenth through the twenty-first century. Most convincingly, Bryan Loveman and Elizabeth Lira’s (2000) Las Suaves Cenizas del Olivido: Via de Reconciliación (1814–1932) reframes state violence from episodic eruption against dissent- ing members of the citizenry to naming violence as the constitutive feature of the criollo liberal state. While Loveman and Lira center the legal mechanisms of governability and institution build- ing in their analysis, carefully working through the modern political history of citizenship, they do not offer a sustained accompanying critique of the legal, material, and racialized legislations that have long been directed against and exclude indigenous populations from citizenship structures of the nation.

The category of citizenship has been both central to memory discourses in the Americas and germane to prolific scholarship on democratization processes in the Southern Cone. As I have discussed in other work, citizenship plays a complicated role in political transitions, often usurping dissident memories for the project of state normalization (Gómez-Barris 2009). Narratives of vic- timization can easily be incorporated into official histories through truth commissions that write accounts of the past that often reproduce and extend the liberal multicultural state. Although “wit- ness citizenship,” as I have elsewhere called it, has some resistant potential, ultimately victims’ stories and experiences are not immune from the state’s incorporative function. However, as I attend to in this essay, Mapuche mnemonics function differently in relation to assimilation, primar- ily because the colonial history of dispossession is not available to transitional states’ teleological constructions of “moving on.” I address how indigeneity and the longer arc of Mapuche cultural memory complicate memories of state violence. What are the strategies and opportunities for a different kind of memory practice that come available through Mapuche mnemonics? I discuss these questions by first, situating Mapuche mnemonics in the arena of colonial contact, and second, by thinking about more present-day conditions of indigenous activisms as linked to the experiences and refractions of modern state violence. Unlike the aggrieved “witness citizenship” activisms of the dissident era of the 1960s and 1970s that temporally operate for the most part in the past tense, indigenous subjects continue to face the onslaught of military and state violence.

Colonial sketches

Prior to the 1526 encounter with the Spanish military, Mapuche territories extended from the Central and Southern parts of Chile, to the north between the Aconcagua River, and to the south to the Chiloé Archipelago. While northern indigenous groups were defeated and absorbed by colonial society more quickly, the Mapuche and Huilliche territories situated between the South Valdivia River and the Chiloé Archipelago were, to a certain degree, left alone by Spanish colonial powers until a later moment. Mapuche inhabitants near the Maule River and the Tolten River successfully resisted the Spanish Crown during many battles of the Arauco War that began in 1526 and contin- ued leading to the “destrucción de las seite ciudades,” the destruction of seven outposts, by Mapuche and Huilliche uprisings in 1598. Mapuche and Huilliche resistance to Spanish colonial- ism is legendary, as the relentless Spanish military campaigns were repeatedly defeated and forced into retreat by well-trained native militias.

A powerful experience of anticolonial activity in the Americas, the narrative of Mapuche his- torical resistance has often been coopted by the Chilean nation to construct indigenous male hero- ism as part of its romantic mythology. During the seventeenth century, Lautaro, the most well-known leader of Mapuche resistance and the historical protagonist of South American indigenous auton- omy during the Spanish colonial campaigns, used conquest techniques to weaken Pedro de Valdivia’s control over Mapuche territories. Pedro de Valdivia, the royal governor of Chile, was

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captured and prosecuted by a Mapuche tribunal, and was accused “for wanting to enclose and pre- tend to populate these lands with people from other worlds and subjugate us by them” (D. Rosales cited in Bengoa, 2000: 420). Despite ongoing battles, from 1641 to 1825, Mapuches experienced large measures of autonomy from the Spanish Crown. For the Araucanos, as they were called by the Spanish, the 30 treaties signed between the state and Mapuches legalized their sovereignty through the legal recognition of land rights. Although sovereignty was unstable at best during this period, the BíoBío River formed the dividing line between the Spanish and Mapuche frontier. This frontier space operated as a metonymical division that presented a geographical and representa- tional split between two different societies.

Until 1886, Mapuche communities maintained their autonomy through a series of skirmishes when the Spanish defeated the indigenous military in a period that is unfortunately referred to as the Pacification of Aracania.1 In 1866, the nation-state inaugurated a new campaign, the Military Occupation of the Auracania, where scores of Mapuche peoples were massacred and their lands significantly reduced. The Chilean government promoted European immigration especially from Germany and settler colonists founded a host of new cities, while the state established a permanent military presence that would continue to expand its influence in the region.

After the shift from autonomy to colonial subjugation, and as a result of the biological ethnocide that ensued from Spanish diseases, the Mapuche population shrunk to 100 million. In the nine- teenth century, legalized through the Chilean state apparatus, Reducciones, reservation like territo- ries, vastly minimized communal land holdings that were at the center of extended families’ social organization. This dramatically fractured the Mapuche peoples into 3000 dispersed communities that threatened the very basis of native organization. In the subsequent process of capitalist expan- sion in the region, impoverishment, and proletarianization, Mapuche communities were faced with the possibility of extermination.

In contrast to much of the historiography about the post-reducciones period that reifies Mapuche culture as static and immobile, José Bengoa describes how Mapuches showed important forms of cultural adaptability to new conditions of lost autonomy. Bengoa (2000) reflects upon the idea of a close-knit and flexibly insular society that maintained important traditions from original societies (pp. 366–367). Mapuche scholars have described how Bengoa’s work often functions from a per- spective of state interests, so I am reticent to cite his work too extensively here.2 Yet, the piece of this investigation that is suggestive is the notion that extreme violence potentially was accompa- nied by an opening for other forms of autonomy, namely, through the cultural realm.

Within the context of rapid changes to structures of freedom in Mapuche territories during the late nineteenth century, ritual, spiritual practice and cultural formations provided new possibilities and zones of negotiated autonomy that turned decisively away from identification with colonial subjugation toward new forms of communal agency. Unlike the uneven freedoms that Mapuche peoples had experienced in other periods of postcolonial contact, these zones were more tightly controlled spaces, mediated by central figures within shifting external paradigms. Thus, culture began to occupy a central role in Mapuche social formations.

Indigenous cultural memory has historically functioned to mediate the constrictions produced by first colonial and then modern subjugation. For instance, alongside the lonko, male chief, the role of the Machi female spiritual guide was increasingly significant in this new landscape, where female mediators reinforced new codes of conduct as protection from social, economic and cultural disintegration. As Ana Mariella Bacigalupo analyzes, Mapuche female agency can be located in the figure of the machi, who does not signify alterity as colonial representation would mark her, but instead functioned as a touchstone figure for a set of mnemonic practices that respond to material restrictions. Through offerings of medicinal arts, healing herbs, incantations, and local bodily knowledge, as well as syncretically incorporating elements of Catholicism, the machi became the

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center of Mapuche communal life and creativity. As Bacigalupo writes, the machi “must simulta- neously operate according to the traditional prestige systems of their communities while gaining legitimacy as healers and religious intermediaries in the dominant wingka world.” Within a racially subjugated paradigm, and the gender stratification of the modern colonial project, state violence was met with forms of indigenous knowledge that negotiated between these changing worlds.

Raising these submerged histories of machi knowledge and praxis illustrates the degree to which we must expand our discussions of the memory of state violence and its social formations as imbricated with the colonial and postcolonial period. While indigeneity is informed by tradition and cultural practices, it has also been situated in complex tension and negotiation with state power, male authority, regional identity, and gender identities. Bacigalupo (2003) concludes that “Heterogeneity and transcultural dialogue are always present even in the most traditional forms of Mapuche cultural expression such as machi lore and practice” (p. 43). These forms of transcultural dialogue and mnemonic exchange complicate the aftermath picture of state violence that is often described in relation to dictatorship histories of the Americas. Considering the paradigms of fluid- ity and adaptation that are apparent in the role of the machi, cultural memory becomes not a reposi- tory of wounds, traumas, and victimization, but an activator of forms of expressive resistance.

Embodied autonomy

Historically, as I have been arguing, in the face of acute violence, cultural memory functioned as an important realm of autonomy for Mapuche communities. Throughout the twentieth century, the struggles over land and land titles continued, culminating in the Christian Democratic land reform process of the mid- to late-1960s and Salvador Allende’s acceleration of that process during the Popular Unity period in the early 1970s. Although Mapuche activism was present in rural peasant struggles at every level, indigenous rights were minimally acknowledged as a visible realm of political and representational engagement.

The dramatic legislation put in place by the Pinochet regime to further subdivide, privatize, and liquidate indigenous communal lands is an essential piece of the kinds of continuous injustices committed particularly against indigenous peoples of the southern territories. Democratization, the main conceptual and temporal marker of the new memory studies literature, does not consider, for instance, how the transition processes left in place legal architectures of anti-indigenous legisla- tion. After the neoliberal state stepped up its level of police and military repression against Mapuche populations in the 1990s, indigenous organizing efforts increased in terms of scale and the spec- trum of their visibility. Direct actions such as sit-ins, mass marches, and land takeovers proliferated in the region and urban centers, resulting in the state’s discursive suturing of Mapucheness with the representational reduction of indigeneity to domestic terrorism.

As I analyze in this section, two strategies in particular have been criminalized as “acts against the nation,” that of arson, or literally setting fire to the plantation forests, and hunger strikes that took place within and outside of prisons. How does withdrawing from food and using the strategy of arson perform indigenous cultural memory? How do these acts counter the effects of extractive capitalism, where the Mapuche body and ancestral lands literally form the limit space of neoliberal settler state?

Since the late 1990s, burning the monocultural forest plantations has been condemned in the national and international media as acts of domestic terrorism against private property. To prose- cute these “illegal actions,” the state has made use of the Chilean Anti-Terrorist Law 18.314, put into effect shortly after the Pinochet regime took power as a mechanism against internal acts of subversion. This legislation and criollo society’s racism spread fear of the Other, constituting Mapuche activists as terrorists, which effectively doubled the sentences for certain offenses,

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conditioned pre-trial release, allowed the prosecution to withhold evidence for up to 6 months from defendants, and permitted convictions based on testimony given by anonymous witnesses. Such anonymous witnesses have been called faceless witnesses, since they dubiously appear in court behind screens so they cannot be formally identified. Like the military courts of the global war that prosecute the so-called terrorists behind the invisible screen of military tribunals, the use of face- less witnesses in this new frontier war functions to restructure the politics of visibility. In a context where indigeneity is threatened by the shadowy presence of speculative capital, faceless witnesses do the work of continuing to make Mapuche precarity invisible to the wider public. The military tribunals and their faceless witnesses prosecute indigenous subjects as criminals and terrorists, producing new categories of invisibility for the sake of neoliberal expansion.

Since the 1990s, the Mapuche-led organization Consejo de Todas las Tierras has used quema- das, or arson, as a mode of resisting military and police brutality, a strategy that has gained momen- tum over the last couple of decades, especially in the early part of the last decade. Burning the land, as founder and leader of the organization Aucan Huilcamán Paillen told me in 2004, is a form of “land recovery” and “symbolic re-occupation,” methods that counter the vast armament of the state that has long contracted with the United States and Israel for its security expansion.3 In September 2006, when Aucan Huilcamán returned from a United Nations meeting, where he co-drafted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, he was arrested for promoting illegal acts on for- est plantations. As Huilcamán discussed, the conflict “places Mapuche peoples as human rights defenders in situations where they will be perceived as committing illegal acts,” a process that takes place because the state, “does not recognize land eviction against the indigenous peoples of the country.”4 Such radicalized activism, articulated through the activities of multiple organiza- tions and leaders, though originating in the leadership of Aucan Huilcamán, has formulated a sharpened Mapuche response to the history of reduction. Mapuche critique and dissent, in this instance, echoes the anticolonial histories of mass uprising and resistance, while also adjusting to the contemporary neocolonial paradigm of land privatization. The land will burn before you can further extract it.

The historical echo of indigenous resistance in the face of “no futures” can be found in the 5 November 1881 struggles aimed against the royalists, a skirmish that quickly became an insurrec- tion resulting in massive death for the less equipped Mapuche militias. Against all odds, as Pepe Bengoa notes, “Mapuche people knew perfectly well that they were going to lose and that the majority of them would die in this general insurrection.” There was

a cultural imperative that obligated Mapuche peoples to appear with their lances, in front of the huinca (White man) to say, “We are still an independent people and we will cease to be such only in a ritual act of combat and death.” (Bengoa quoted in Worthen, 1998: 253)

Despite Bengoa’s language that reinscribes insurrection as masculine heroism, the history of Mapuche collective refusal and the choice of death as a form of autonomy forces a confrontation with the neoliberal state. Mapuche populations imagine liberation from the predicament of multi- national occupation. This liberation can come through a challenge to the meaning of nation by collective refusal.

Canadian indigenous scholars have prolifically shown the limitations of a national framework, turning away from the politics of recognition to indigenous practices that are instead rooted in their own cultural practices of survival. Dale Turner, for instance, discusses the role of indigenous poli- tics as one that never foreclosed on the possibility of other nations, advocating for a reorganization of the settler state according to the heterogeneous systems of governance based on indigenous models. As he states, “the existence of the nation state is not a given” (Turner, 2006: 37). Glen

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Coulthard (2007) also deftly argues that there is no renewed version of the colonial relationship that magically absolves the making of its racialized difference. Through acts of defiance, rather than incorporation, the liberal nation-state loses its meaning in these refusals.

Acts of hunger Mapuche number nearly one million in this country of over 16 million people. The struggle for their rights to what they claim as ancestral lands in the south of the country has frequently spilled over into violence. In the last few months, the conflict between Mapuche communities and the state has heated up, especially in the southern region of La Araucanía. (Patricia Troncoso, YouTube video)

In 2004, four Mapuche activists, including Patricia Troncoso, were prosecuted for burning 100 ha of pine plantations officially owned by Chilean and multinational forestry companies. In an online interview, Patricia Troncoso, chronicled the acute conflict conditioned by neoliberal expan- sion into Southern territories. In images that show her medicalized body as emaciated and wasted, force-fed by the state in a facility from within the walls of the Santiago prison, Troncoso is depicted as a skeletal figure that engages justice through embodied politics of hunger striking.

In 2010, Troncoso’s durational hunger strike lasted 112 days, perhaps marking the longest hun- ger strike in the history of the nation. Called “tricky” and “cunning” by the national mainstream media, in the international setting of social media and activists’ networks, her message and image have traveled differently over the past 4 years, instead producing solidarity nationally and interna- tionally with Mapuche peoples. One of the most significant aspects of this circulation is access to Troncoso’s narrative about the conditions of forced imprisonment and ongoing force of indigenous social movements, the state’s attempt at disarticulation of the Mapuche movement. As Troncoso described at the end of the 2010 hunger strike,

The illegitimate violence of money and power, that imprisonment, persecution and criminalization of our cause, that police brutality, are not the way to solve the historical and political problem with our people. Because while you, the politicians, come and go, future generations of Mapuche people continue to germinate and grow. And the Mapuche will continue to resist your arrogance and domination. We will continue to struggle, we will continue to resist and we know that for each one that falls, ten shall rise up.

Rather than accepting the genocidal logic of inevitable assimilation, or the finality of indige- nous defeat, Troncoso invokes a history of Mapuche struggle from the colonial past that, while masculinist in its discussion of native heroism, is inverted by its female locus of enunciation. More importantly, contrasting the “no future paradigm” granted by the state that I have addressed, Patricia Troncoso declares a permanent condition of resistance. The definition of indigeneity as resistant and future-oriented pushes against another hegemonic discourse that of Mapuche com- munities as either disappearing or anachronistic. Troncoso describes her own subjectivity as inter- subjective and connected to Mapuche experience, where the racialized female body is not the site of biological reproduction, as her use of the word “germinate” might indicate in the quote above. Although Troncoso is not Mapuche, per se, she is racially intermixed and has been adopted by certain Mapuche activist organizations as an indigenous spokesperson. This in itself is an interest- ing approach to cultural memory in that the mnemonic gesture is to imagine Troncoso’s hunger strikes within a longer line of Mapuche activisms.

In an extensive Special Rapporteur report on the human rights impact of global terrorism, Troncoso’s 2004 case is notable not only for the repetitive durational hunger strikes, but also because of how the state narrated its legal response to these political actions. In most cases that are

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highlighted in the report, nations that have committed rights violations often do not record a response: In China, there was no response, nor in El Salvador; however, the Chilean government provides detailed explanation of its imminent medical attention and preoccupation for the hunger strikers, especially Troncoso (Sheinin, 2009). The detailed preoccupation by the state toward the medicalized body becomes the focus of the discursive and representational act of reporting to the international body of the United Nations, where the state’s legalized response focuses on an inter- est in health and well-being of individual prisoners, rather than a wider commentary on the collec- tive precarity of Mapuche communities in neoliberalism.

Hunger striking as an operation of collective dissent through individualized shows of extraordi- nary agency reveals the degree to which the state has extracted from the Mapuche body. The changes in land titles, food security, the presence of monocrop culture, the general extraction of resource upon indigenous territories, and the regimes of military and police violence that operate in the region all have led to an extremely precarious material situation for the present-day indige- nous communities. Whereas the modern nation-state did its work by reducing and fragmenting these communities, the neoliberal state has functioned upon the settler principle of eradication (Wolfe, 2006). The hunger striking body illustrates these relationships and the long memory of embodied resistance as essential to Mapuche activisms.

Cultural legacies

Poetry occupies a particular location within Mapuche mnemonics as a genre that articulates rela- tionality to land, culture, and vernacular experience. Acclaimed poet Elicura Chihuailif’s Sueño Azul counters fixed notions of Mapuche orality when he writes,

I am not speaking of an idyllic society but of memories/ from my childhood / There it seems to me I learned what poetry was / the grandeur of everyday life, and especially / its details / the shine of firelight, of eyes, of hands. (Vicuña, 1998: 43)

In this poem, poetic gestures take the form of an indigenous vernacular, communicated through stanzas that mimic the circularity and dialogic quality of Mapuche memory. In the forthcoming work, I analyze the importance of poetry for female Mapuche mnemonics, and here I merely want to be suggestive of the written, poetic, and intellectual histories that also inform Mapuche mne- monics in the era of neoliberalization.

As Johanna Crow (2008) cautiously argues in her article “Mapuche Poetry in Post-Dictatorship Chile,” we might do well to be suspicious of the neoliberal market and its celebratory model of indigenous cultural production, since the neoliberal version of celebration has not been able to break from the structures of colonial relations and its power imbalances. Patricia Richards makes this point more forcefully by stating,

neoliberal multiculturalism had done little to challenge dominant racial hierarchies in the Chilean South and indeed the multicultural reforms have not been directly aimed at transforming the subjectivities of local elites. This should hardly be surprising, given that the rationale behind neoliberal multiculturalism is less about changing racial hierarchies than it is about creating self-governing indigenous subjects that will not challenge the political-economic goals of the state. (Richards, 2010: 90)

While these issues are important for understanding the project of social justice over the long term, analysis of the Mapuche situation and cultural practices must be put into its historical context as predating the demands made upon it by the neoliberal market during “democratization.”

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For instance, Florencia Mallon’s (2005) Courage Tastes of Blood begins its analysis of nine- teenth- and twentieth-century nation building from lived and embodied accounts of state formation from Mapuche oral histories. Mallon draws upon oral histories from Nicolás Allío community members to show a range of responses to periods of state repression, impoverishment, land reform, and resettlement throughout the twentieth century. Despite the contingencies of community mem- bers’ ideological and political commitments, especially in the face of violence and fragmentation, indigenous identities emerge within Mallon’s work as significant localized responses that counter the seamless narrative of global integration. In other words, Mallon’s non-integrationist investiga- tion into the processes of Mapuche subject formation reveals the colonial underside of anti-indig- enous national histories in relation to citizenship exclusions.

Through a dialogical historical method, Mallon shows how the Nicolás Allío community was enveloped in a series of complicated negotiations toward land restitution and communal recovery. Created after the first subdivisions, after the Reducciones period, the forced reloca- tion of the Nicolás Allío community was entangled in complex legal, political, and economic questions about how to contend with land loss, displacement, and fragmentation. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Mapuche intellectuals and community members created a repertoire of methods for dealing with the lack of land autonomy that both supported and cri- tiqued state policies aimed at subdivision. Mallon points to the resistant practices of Manuel Aburto Panguilef, whose

connection to the communities and longkos, Mapuche chiefs, gave him access to a distinct perspective on the importance of the land grant communities as spaces of cultural reconstruction and resistance, spaces from which the new generation was attempting to vindicate its territory and identity vis-à-vis the Chilean state. (p. 90)

The imaginary that Manuel Aburto Panguilef’s work captured allowed for a fluid reconstruction of identity, resistance, and generational change. The land grant became an important focus of Mapuche critical discourse.

I turn to Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte by Luis Cárcamo-Huechante (2009) as another route to understand the importance of Mapuche mnemonics. Cárcamo-Huechante describes not only the rupture and instal- lation of neoliberalism by the Pinochet regime, but also the profound cultural shifts made by new political economies. At the end, the author briefly notes that while the Mapuche nation does not exist outside of the neoliberal system, it has managed to find ways of “interrogating and fissuring” the system from within in order to maintain a spirit of “localized critical difference” (p. 251). It is in two directions that I situate Mapuche mnemonics as providing a different kind of critical project: one that extends and redefines the meaning of memory as a wound and one that points to the pro- ductivity of cultural reconstruction and renewal, and the other that emphasizes interruptions or fissures to the neoliberal system as the source of critical difference. Centering Mapuche knowledge and cultural formations in these two instances offers analytical first steps to shattering to the mech- anisms of colonial reproduction.

The bilingual, bicultural written work of Mapuche writer Gabriela Huinao exemplifies a Mapuche intellectual tradition and cultural approach through poems, novels, her own testimonials, and the re-signification of the meanings of tradition. Although there are other important sites of narrative recuperation, Huinao stitches together the fragments of the oral archive, fictionalizing and experimenting with its contents, while interpreting the coyentura of her work as puncturing through the distractions of neoliberalism. Working within the frame that Kehualani Kauanui (2008), Mishuana Goeman (2013), Noe Noe Silva (2004), and several other US-based scholars

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have defined as native feminisms, Huinao narratively accounts for the extraction of land, its resources, and the construction of the indigenous other through colonial regimes of power.

Writing of indigenous kinship bonds that exceed the biological family, she explores the sub- tlety of a poetics that resists speculative multiculturalism. Huinao (2012) recently self- published a book of poetry called Walinto, named after a bird that is about to be extinct in the BíoBío region in Southern Chile, which is a Mapuche–Huilliche text that laments for territory, an ecovision as a communal effort, a momentum of the dynamism of the BíoBío that presences the past as mediating other modes of knowing and sensing the future. Huinao’s work functions through a mnemonic standpoint is reiterated in the workshops she conducts in Santiago, teach- ing the Mapuzungun language and poetry classes to urbanized Mapuches between the ages of 8 and 88 years. In those spaces, she creates and recreates the buried past with a sense of genera- tional futures. This past–present–future she articulates emerges from a Mapuche ontology and cultural praxis.

From the historical location of Mapuche cultural survival, I believe our work is to turn away from the representational apparatuses of coloniality. This is not so easy to do from the location of US scholarship as multicultural liberalism constantly seeks to absorb indigenous knowledges and settler colonialism seeks to eliminate it. As Patrick Wolfe (2006) reminds us,

On historical as well as categorical grounds, therefore, the hyphenated genocides devalue Indigenous attrition. No such problem bedevils analysis of the logic of elimination, which, in its specificity to settler colonialism, is premised on the securing—the obtaining and the maintaining—of territory. This logic certainly requires the elimination of the owners of that territory. (p. 402)

Different generations of Mapuche activists understand what Wolfe calls “the logic of elimina- tion” as a central premise of the state’s impulse and the accompanying importance and need to produce Mapuche mnemonics as a form of resistance, renewal, and refusal.

Toward a conclusion

In this essay, I have worked to redefine the markers of state violence extending the discourses of memory studies and authoritarian repression beyond the modern nation-state. I have turned to consider earlier centuries of repression and state violence that have put under duress the ability for Mapuches to exist. By centering Mapuche mnemonics, we put pressure on memory politics as merely about the period of authoritarianism and its aftermath, and even about the meaning of democratization. The term imagines that the nation-state is increasingly moving to a better state of affairs, toward a more just and equitable society that is continually refined by stronger democratic institutions and principles. The history of Mapuche eradication, survival, precarity, and creativity insists on a different way to imagine the liberal muliticulural settler state, namely, that it will always function to thwart indigenous life. Instead, through indigenous mnemonics, we can begin to see how Mapuche ways of organizing and being are central to organizing social life and articu- lating history before and after the colonial period.

Mnemonic forms of activism and resistance illustrate how Mapuche subjectivity cannot be ren- dered flatly: indigeneity is not merely invisible, demographically minimal, just marginal, insignifi- cant to the state, subordinate to multinational companies, or, on the other side of the equation, a figure of romantic revolutionary ideas, the work of super agentic trouble makers, or that of illicit criminals. Given the 500 plus years and the colonial representations of indigenous peoples in the Americas, easy labels and tropes must be worked through, artfully repurposed or made to alto- gether disappear. Indigenous epistemes make the layers of historical violence visible and tangible,

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forcing us to reconsider the meaning of authenticity, visibility, and the potential of Mapuche mne- monics to renegotiate an imaginary of the future by remembering the past.

Notes

1. In his work Historia del Pueblo Mapuche, Siglo XIX y XX, José Bengoa argues that European racial intolerance and the Christian Western values that were central to the Spanish paradigm of colonization did not support the “difference” encountered by colonizers. What is significant here is that Bengoa does not theoretically explore the extent to which Mapuche and native differences were produced by colonial- ism rather than a mere byproduct of it. The challenge between the Auracania region and Spanish colo- nization was not only a military confrontation, but a clashing of paradigms in relation to land, ecology, spirituality, and community living that would have serious consequences in the subsequent centuries for Mapuche autonomy.

2. See José Millalén, Pablo Marimán, Rodrigo Levil, and Sergio Caniuqueo’s Escucha Winka! (Santiago: Lom Ediciones, 2003) for a detailed discussion of the governmentality at work within much of the Chilean scholarship on Mapuches. More problematically, Bengoa’s work on indigenous resistance builds upon the unacknowledged labor and research of many Mapuche young scholars. He defines a particular view of resistance as adaptable, yet insular. While the “outside” is narrated in this work as an increasing threat to Mapuche people, Bengoa’s scholarship does not sufficiently name the criollo state’s heightened militarization as an occupying and genocidal force throughout large stretches of the southern region.

3. Interview with the author, 15 March 2004. 4. Huilcamán, Aucan, http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/node/2010, “Front Line Defenders,” November

2007, Viewed 12 March 2012.

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Author biography

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She got her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, 2004. Her work is located at the intersections of sociology, ethnic studies, and race. Currently, she focuses on cultural memory and indigeneity in the Americas through a decolonial and feminist framework. Her publications include the books Where Memory Dwells: Culture and Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) and Toward a Sociology of the Trace, co-edited with Herman Gray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), as well as articles published in, among others, Culture and Religion, Sociological Forum, Journal of Visual Culture, and A Contracorriente.