Mapuche Poetry in the age of Heritage

ABSTRACT

Heritage has the potential to foster introspection and reflection about the many communities co-existing within nation-states, and therefore, can lead to complex intercultural engagement. In Chile, recent efforts to catalogue intangible collective indigenous heritage ask Mapuche groups to self-represent univocally, giving way to a limited and static understanding of Mapuche culture and presence in Chile. A productive counterpoint can be found in Mapuche poetry, specifically, in the work of renowned poet Jaime Huenún. Though not officially considered within the realm of heritage, the literary representations I analyze emphasize the equivocal and entangled nature of indigenous and non-indigenous cultures in Chile. Focusing on the metatextual space of Huenún’s anthology prologues, I show how Huenún resignifies the notion of Mapuche community beyond the national framework of heritage, offering a resource for rethinking heritage’s role in creating productive spaces for interculturality.

KEYWORDS:

• Mapuche poetry
• community
• heritage
• Jaime Huenún

Acknowlegdment

Thank you to my research assistant Felipe Canales who helped me format the footnotes and bibliography of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Marrie’s chapter on the UNESCO convention (UNESCO 2008,177).

2. See historian Fernando Pairican’s interview regarding violence from police and the under-representation of it (Pairican 2018).

3. See (Crow 2013; Mallon 2005; Richards 2013).

4. In 2016, I developed the argument that Jaime Huenún’s Reducciones was a powerful counterpoint to atemporal heritage practices in Chile. ‘Un aporte historiográfico al patrimonio inmaterial de Chile: Reducciones de Jaime Huenún’ (2016, 159–170). In this article I focus on Huenun’s anthologies as productive enactments and representations of Mapuche community.

5. Aravena states that the process of creating them lasted between 1884 and 1927, as quoted in Vergara, Campos, and Camilo (2016).

6. Magnus Course states that changing the name to comunidades in 1993 did not respond to a return to traditional organizations of space. Course found that for people in Piedra Alta, the concept of comunidad indígena was a new way of referring to the same reducciones, with the difference that the comunidad divides the land into individual family plots and the reducción was a single common plot (2011, 59–67).

7. Currently, the only approved collective ritual in the PCI catalogue is the ‘Baile chino’. https://ich.unesco.org/es/RL/el-baile-chino-00988.

8. ‘Toda la cultura mapuche está en una situación de riesgo y vulnerabilidad por la pésima relación que existe entre los pueblos indígenas y el Estado. Hay un enfrentamiento y un desconocimiento, en la educación aún no se incorpora la interculturalidad’ (as quoted in “Ngüillatún 2003).

9. ‘Estas manifestaciones son patrimonio, no necesitan ninguna declaración. Finalmente es un asunto político, un asunto de reinvindicación.’ (As quoted in “Ngüillatún 2003).

10. In 2013 a CNCA representative gave a presentation at a research meeting for CIIR (Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research), in which they stated that no collective heritage had been included for the Mapuche yet because it was too difficult for them (the Mapuche) to ‘come to an agreement’ on the definition of the nguillatun. The form for intangible heritage also asks for a description of the given ritual (Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes 2013, 569–585).

11. Here I have used de Sousa Santos’ notion of ‘complete’ in a way that deviates from his original use, but that still reflects the power relations involved. He uses this term to explain how some dominant cultures may self-represent as ‘complete’ and therefore not in need of dialogue with another culture, a move that also inhibits dialogue: ‘Such processes reside in unequal power relations and in unequal cultural exchanges, so much so that cultural closure becomes the other side of cultural conquest.’ (Santos 1997, 54) In Chile, heritage politics impose ‘completeness’ onto indigenous cultures which similarly seems to inhibit dialogue.

12. In the Malleco area the word Mapudungun is used to refer to the Mapuche language whereas in the Cautin area it is Mapuzungun.

13. Matías Catrileo was murdered in 2008 by police in what was a peaceful takeover of sacred Mapuche lands. A biography of Matías Catrileo’s life was recently published, written by Fernando Pairican at the request of Catrileo’s family. To see a list of those killed since 2001 consult Weken noticias, http://werken.cl/portada-2/mapuches-asesinados-en-la-democracia-chilena/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (CIIR, www.ciir.cl) in Santiago, Chile under grant number CONICYT/FONDAP/15110006.

Notes on contributors

Allison Ramay

Allison Ramay holds a PhD in Hispanic American Languages and Literatures from UCLA and she is Assistant Professor of Literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her research and recent publications focus on representations and writings of the Mapuche, from the 19th century to the present. She has co-edited an anthology of female Mapuche poets (Hilando la Memoria, Cuarto Propio, 2006), translated to English the work of Mapuche poet Graciela Huinao (Walinto, Cuarto Propio, 2009) and co-authored Violeta Parra en el Wallmapu (Pehuén, 2017).