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Adolfo Huinao was about five years old when his mother wove a rope out of seaweed and together they tied it to a rock on the beach, right where the waves were breaking. This dangerous place served as a hideout when a group of strangers came to the island they lived on in the south of the continent to force them off their lands. They murdered Adolfo’s father and older brother, but he and his mother managed to escape by fleeing in a boat. Some time later, they landed on what appeared to be a larger island and stayed there to live. Adolfo learned Spanish and over time, around the age of 12, he learned that the place he had arrived was called Chile.
Poets Roxana Miranda Rupailaf and Bernardo Colipan Filgueira.Courtesy
Adolfo never found out who these men were because he never returned to his country. The poet Graciela Huinao, her granddaughter, tells this story on a Thursday in late June 2023. We are in a room in the Osorno Cultural Center, in the Chilean city of the same name, built on Fütawillimapu, as the Mapuche-Huilliche people call their territory . historical. It’s Chile and at the same time it’s not. Graciela leafs through a book in search of the poem she wrote in memory of her grandfather, “Los geese say goodbye,” as a wheel of people follows her, enthralled by the story. The first Mapuche-Huilliche Book Fair has brought together Mapuche artists from different regions and the halls are packed with concerts, workshops, concerts and lots of chills. The electric heaters that we protect ourselves around give the activities a timeless atmosphere.
Graciela, who as a child enjoyed listening to her elders in the kitchen and sitting in sheepskins, says her grandfather Adolfo was not a Mapuche like her but from an indigenous people “much further south” of the continent, perhaps Kawéskar or Chonos Wie as was the case with the Mapuche until the late 20th century, the grandfather and his people were also expelled from their territories and forced to live in Chile. Graciela, 67, must have been the same age as her grandfather when he told her about his origins. As you read, it’s hard not to close your eyes and imagine how this girl would marvel at the tunnels of history:
old as you were
You lifted me off the ground
and death was born from your mouth
landing on your beach
Your father and your brother
they rowed to the victim.
(…)
Grandpa, now I know
You were never willing
Your origin Chono or Kawaskar
didn’t get on the boat
The day they stole your country
and your root
Now I understand
the pain in your eyes
From your origin while navigating
in the big graveyard
of the South Pacific.
After applause and a short silence, Graciela looks up from the book. “Perhaps I am not the poet – she says thoughtfully –: the real poets and the real writers are they, the grandfathers and grandmothers. Because we Mapuche know history by word of mouth. And who transmitted to us what we know? It was you.” Graciela has finished writing two books of the stories her parents told her as a child, and they will soon be added to the seven books she has previously published, including poetry, short stories and novels. The youngest mention his name (along with those of Elicura Chihuailaf, Leonel Lienlaf, Jaime Huenún) when they talk about the historic generation that began publishing in Chile in the 1980s and 1990s, emphasizing their Mapuche origins .
This attitude, both literary and political, went hand in hand with the reorganization of the Mapuche resistance movements, and at the same time expressed the identity of a literature that was not only current but very old. “They say I was the first woman of a native people in this country to publish a poem, a book, a novel,” she says now with the perspective that time gives. “I tell them: I’m not the first. I am the first writer who dared to say that she was Mapuche. There we have Violeta Parra, Gabriela Mistral herself. You can see them and they are original faces. But at the time they lived it was so awful to be an aborigine that no one would have bought their records and books if they said so. “The discrimination was so great,” he recalls. In the Latin American “mixture” forest, many of us are trees that have been willingly or involuntarily mutilated from our native trunks and roots.
The fair of the big questions
The fair will open in an auditorium with very high walls, suitable for answering big questions. What is Mapuche literature? What is its history, its place, its future? The poet and historian Bernardo Colipán, invited to deliver a few words, speaks with the hypnotic gestures of a professor that encourages both watching and listening. “Mapuche literature as an oral activity existed long before colonization,” he tells an audience full of colleagues, authorities and students, between Mapuches and Chileans. Much of what has been said calls into question the history of the homogeneous nation-state; that form of national history that convinces you in every part of the continent that the peoples that existed before colonization have disappeared, dissolved into racial mixtures, or are on the way to extinction, and in time.
In Chile, this sense of destiny enabled the Criollo elites to use violence against indigenous peoples comparable to, and even worse than, that of the colony. The Mapuche williche, who managed to resist the Spanish armies until almost the end of the 19th century, were eventually incorporated into republican Chile in bloody military “pacification” campaigns. Not only did they lose territories and the survivors were urged to emigrate, but their children were imprisoned in mission schools where they were forcibly “Chileanized.”
Mapuche literature – says Colipán – is largely based on the memory of what its people have experienced and live. Because of this, writing only began in the last few decades, but was actively used by the Lonkos (Kaken), who wrote letters and memorials to denounce dispossession and violence in their areas. “In these letters”, says the historian, “an important poetics of memory was carried out”. Such is the weight of that memory that in 2017 then-President Michelle Bachelet “apologized for the mistakes and horrors committed or tolerated by the state in our relationship with them.” [los mapuche] and their communities”. The term “horror” seems like an understatement, but the meaning runs very deep in geography. Today, the city of Osorno, in the center of the Mapuche-Huilliche territory, is surrounded by vast industrial fields of pine and eucalyptus trees that have rendered the land unusable for agriculture and continue to drive families to cities like Santiago or Valparaíso.
Many families are returning and trying to reclaim their land. In other cases, the children grow up in the diaspora, in “outskirts”, shacks or young towns, and from there build new forms of Mapuchidad. Bernardo greets the Peñis (friends) who come from different parts. “These poetics travel with you through all the Wallmapu territories who were born in a territory at some point but moved away from their lof (community).” There is the poet David Aniñir, who grew up in Santiago and speaks of an urban in his poems Mapuche, a Mapurbe, listening to the inauguration from an old sofa at the back of what he calls the VIP area. There is also the writer Daniela Catrileo who, together with Ange Cayumán, edits the bilingual magazine Traytrayko, specially designed in large letters for the elderly and for those who travel in buses between the provinces. “There is a Mapuchization of Santiago,” Catrileo said in an interview after the publication of his wonderful story book, Piñén. In this challenge there is also an invitation to look at the capital of Chile with different eyes.
Later, in the same room, the book Wajmapu Wixal, an anthology of Mapuche women poets from different regions, will be presented. The author’s table faces an auditorium full of students from local schools and is challenged to make poetry more engaging than content on mobile. The poet and storyteller Daniela Catrileo, who has traveled from Valparaíso, takes the floor: “I will read a poem about women who fight, women who do not have a specific city, a large indigenous people who fight against it.” The invaders . And it is told in a warrior’s voice. So when I read this, you have to imagine an ancient warrior.”
boy foam
deer girl
dance the rest of your life
In this piece of land
What else can you do?
Nobody wants to accept the ending
Tomorrow we return to the offerings
And I will say:
this is my body
this is my blood
That’s my promise to you
I will twist the enemies’ necks
kick skull
Honor unspeakable fiction
that we cannot write
Before I see their heads piled on the field
I’ll pop yanaconas
This will be my last party
I close my eyes and imagine a song, but what really fascinates me is what goes on in the minds of the students. They talk to each other, whisper to the teachers, laugh at the sound of certain words. Is it a contradiction that many of the Mapuche authors do not write in Mapudungun but in Spanish? Indigenous peoples are often subject to tight controls over how they speak and appear, and some expect them to live up to stereotypes of purity not required of white or multiracial people.
According to a local newspaper, a group of anti-land restitution activists calling themselves “Mujeres por la Paz de la Araucanía” have demanded that the Peace and Understanding Commission provide “genetic tests” to residents of their region to find out who Mapuche are and who doesn’t. White people don’t need to genetically prove they’re white to get rights. “They have not only taken the land from us, but also the language,” the poet David Aniñir will tell me another time. “Now who can tell me what language I should or should not write in?” Aniñir, the son of parents who had immigrated to Santiago de Chile, wrote an already mythical book about the conflict between being Mapuche and growing up outside territory. He called it Mapurbe, and now it’s the nickname his colleagues have given him: “Mapurbe, it’s your turn”. Aniñir takes the microphone and looks at the audience: “I’m from Santiago,” he says. “I wonder what I’m doing here. And it makes a lot of sense because my mom is from around here. I’m sure it’s something you might be learning right now. There is a conflict that is unfortunately in good health.
We are concrete Mapuche
Our mother sleeps under the asphalt
Exploited by a bastard.
We were born in Craptown because of the singing vulture
We were born in bakeries to be consumed by the curse
We are children of laundresses, bakers, fairground and street vendors
We are one of those who stay in few parts
Job market
work on our lives
and invites us
Mother, old Mapuche, banished from history
daughter of my dear people
You came from the south to bring us into the world
An electric circuit ripped open your stomach
And so we were born screaming at the wretched
MARRI CHI WEU!!!! MARRI CHI WEU!!!! MARRI CHI WEU!!!!
In children’s language.
Questions? After the classic silence, shy murmurs pass through the room and then a bold first hand is raised: “What did you mean by Marri chi weu?” The tension breaks between laughter. “Marri chi weu comes from our ancestors,” Aniñir replies. “It means that if one falls in the context of resistance, ten others get up.” And immediately he adds: “But I also understand it like we’re born and the doctor taps you on the baby glass instead of ‘Waaa !’ shouting, the Mapuche say ‘marri chi weu’.”
Laughter gives free rein to courage and the bombardment of questions. “How did you learn to speak Mapudungun?” “I wonder if there is magic among the Mapuche?” “What was the name of the flag the Mapuche used to use?” The answers flow in fluently until a rather tall man arrives , who remembers that it’s almost time for lunch. “Will there be a pardon for Winka soon? “I’ve always had these doubts,” asks one child. Winka is a word used to call Chileans, and Bachelet’s plea for forgiveness is reflected in the question.
Now there is silence at the moderator’s table. “To very complex questions, weak answers, but with a conscience,” says Bernardo Colipán and grabs the microphone. “The Mapuche people are a people of peace. At the same time, the territory was always in the process of resistance to defend the place where our grandmothers’ placenta were planted.” The faces of some children are questioning. “You know. When a boy or girl was born, the placenta was planted indoors. Because of this, nobody will want someone from the outside to force their way in to take away the land on which your mother’s, brother’s, or grandfather’s placenta was planted Because of this, the resistance that is taking place in this area will not end.”
“What is free Wallmapu for you?” reads a small piece of paper that the participants of the workshop of the poet and artist Kütral Vargas Huaiquimilla have to fill in at the end of a small exercise. Kütral divides them into two groups and hands each of them a piece of military camouflage fabric, barely smaller than a tablecloth, which hides another layer of fabric. Unravel or snap the seams with your fingers and discover what lies within this military canvas. The challenge is fun and frustrating at the same time, sometimes requiring the use of strength and teeth until you realize that removing the threads one at a time and with patience is more efficient.
In the work of Kütral, who is also a model, fashion researcher and performer, imagination and writing can be combined organically with one’s own body. At a live event in mid-2017, he tattooed dozens of gunshot wounds on his back, like those seen in the news on the bodies of those protesting for the territories’ retake and being repulsed by the police and military. Oftentimes, activists are prosecuted as terrorists, a legal term the system uses to reduce and jail them. “What is a free Wallmapu for you?” I ask Kütral a few days later when the fair is over. “I feel like for those who know what Wallmapu is, it’s sort of a collective dream to think of a territory without militarization,” he writes back to me. “Like a dream, it is fragile and needs nurturing.” Words like freedom, autonomy, and even sovereignty are delicate language indeed. The Wallmapu is conceivable beyond Chile, but Chile is unimaginable without the Wallmapu.
In the room, the workshop participants finally managed to remove the military cloth. Below that, the Mapuche three-stripe flag or wenufoye, the same one that circulated around the world when it waved in Baquedano Square, the heart of Santiago, appears in one of the most iconic photos of the social outburst.
Unlike other book fairs that obsessively focus on sales, the First Mapuche-Williche Book Fair seems to focus on reading and conversation. All guest authors spend the day in the halls and corridors talking to people, participating in activities and asking questions or engaging in open discussions. The fair feels more like a great collective family effort rather than an activity geared towards the individual brilliance of those who sell the most.
“The fair was a dream that we started realizing long before the pandemic,” Roxana Miranda Rupailaf tells me when I spontaneously intercept her to get her to autograph her latest book “Kewakafe”, a dialogue between boxes, eroticism and writing. beginning with these dashes:
Writing is like hitting
For example when I write
I imagine hitting bodies of water or rocks
the thirst in your throat (…)
there in my fists
power, hunger
move a mountain
make the sky of words sad
Rupailaf is one of the organizers of the fair along with cultural manager Fabián Yefe and director of Osorno Cultural Corporation, Rosana Faúndez. “The dream kept being put off for lack of resources until the resources finally came and there was no reason to put it off,” he tells me. Although little reported in the media, this fair is a major literary milestone, consistent with the 2020 National Literary Prize recognition of writer Elicura Chihuailaf. The impact will be felt over time as the plan applies to the fair grow every year. The organizers hope that the authors will be able to visit the schools in the future. They would also like to invite Mapuche authors from the Argentine side and participants from other indigenous peoples. Could it be the region’s great indigenous literary fair?
Rupailaf signs my book and throws himself into the coordination. Next to the date he wrote the word Chaurakawin, the Mapuche name of the place where we are and which the Spanish occupied in 1558, calling it Osorno. Since the continent’s territories were initially indigenous territories, we inhabit habitats of writing, rewriting, erasing and forgetting, but also of remembering and strife. I’ll write that in my notebook on the last day of the fair as historian and poet Bernardo Colipán guides a group of attendees through some of Chaurakawin’s historic sites. A hill shows the city, its streets, its buildings, its sounds. Bernardo invites us on a journey to the year 1601. Five thousand Mapuche soldiers watch over the city from this distance. Eventually they descend, reclaim their territory, and manage to drive off the colonizers for the next two centuries. “Wasn’t that the first independence on the continent?” Colipán asks. “Why do you think it’s not that well known?”
The answer seems to lie in the Reina Luisa Fortress, a small museum in town on the banks of the river that tells the story of Osorno through paintings and models of historical milestones. In 1558 the Spanish found the city; 1604, attack and destruction; 1793: Treaty between the Huilliches and the Spanish; In 1796 Osorno was refounded, rebuilt and populated; In 1820 the Royalists are expelled; 1846 begins the European immigration, the German colonization. The Mapuche appear only in the signature of defeat and as servants. where’s your story His resistance?
A few days later, back in Santiago, I’m perusing bookstores with similar confusion. There are special tables on Chilean literature where Chilean news stands out, but there are no news by Mapuche authors. Bookstores also usually don’t have display tables for local literature, and you have to browse the shelves for books or ask someone to look for them. The first impression is that it is a matter of voluntary erasure, as in the Osorno Museum story, or perhaps a form of discrimination that can be ameliorated by inclusion. However, it seems more like the projection of a larger political problem onto the literary scene.