International Journal of Heritage Studies

ISSN: 1352-7258 (Print) 1470-3610 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhs20

Indigenous heritage and healing nostalgia:

Mapuche’s lof in Rehue Romopulli, Port Saavedra,
Chile

Joseph Gómez Villar & Fanny Canessa

To cite this article: Joseph Gómez Villar & Fanny Canessa (2018) Indigenous heritage and
healing nostalgia: Mapuche’s lof in Rehue Romopulli, Port Saavedra, Chile, International Journal of
Heritage Studies, 24:8, 843-856, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2018.1428668

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1428668

Published online: 31 Jan 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 233

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjhs20
InternatIonal Journal of HerItage StudIeS
2018, Vol. 24, No. 8, 843–856
https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1428668

Indigenous heritage and healing nostalgia: Mapuche’s lof in

Rehue Romopulli, Port Saavedra, Chile
Joseph Gómez Villara,b  and Fanny Canessaa,b
a
Centre for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies, Heritage Centre, School of Art, Institute of History, Pontificia
Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; bCentre for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies, School of Art,
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article discusses how various agents influence the configuration of Received 17 September 2017
Indigenous emotions and how a healing nostalgia emerges, looking forward Accepted 29 December 2017
to a supposed ‘golden age’ that seeks to heal internal social problems,
KEYWORDS
while at the same time symbolically repairing the ‘immemorial’ Indigenous Heritage; Indigenous;
conflict with the Chilean State and its society. It takes as its starting point nostalgia; emotion;
the discussion initiated by Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell concerning recognition; Mapuche
nostalgia in the field of heritage, and traces that emotion through
ethnographies and collaborative cartographies with Indigenous Mapuches
of the Rehue Romopulli, in the Araucanía Region of Chile.

Introduction
The Mapuche people are an Amerindian people that include all the ethnic groups that speak or used
to speak Mapudungun. In the fifteenth century, they inhabited the Southern Cone of America from
the Aconcagua Valley to the Chiloé Islands. The Mapuche ethnic groups that lived south of the Maule
River could not be subdued either by the Inca Empire or by the Spanish Empire during the ‘Arauco
War’, however, in the nineteenth century, between 1861 and 1883, through a war called the ‘Pacification
of the Araucanía’, the Mapuche were extracted, reduced and eradicated by the Chilean Republican
State, who declared fiscal property and auctioned a large part of the Indigenous territory. Since then,
the Mapuche people have experienced a long cultural and political struggle for the recognition and
restoration of their cultural heritage, as well as for the recovery of their ancestral lands. Mapuche land
claims have taken multiple forms over time and space (Bengoa 2000; Merino 2007; Tricot 2007; Araya
Anabalón 2010; Barrientos 2011; Morán 2012; Bacigalupo 2015; Fuentes and de Cea 2017). This article
does not pretend to exhaust the complexity of the problem, but to capture some emotional nuances
that the Mapuche heritage claims have taken today.
This article proposes the concept of ‘healing nostalgia’ as the axis of Mapuche Indigenous emotions
in Chile in the context of heritage, as well as in the problems of intercultural recognition (Forester
and Vergara 2000). In Chile, the problem of the political recognition of Indigenous peoples has been
studied (Fuentes and de Cea 2017), however, the relationship between heritage, affectivity and rec-
ognition has not been addressed. When this relationship is not considered, the plans of the State

CONTACT  Joseph Gómez Villar  jgomezv@uc.cl, rinconquerido@gmail.com

© 2018 Joseph Gómez Villar and Fanny Canessa. Published with licence by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
844 J. GÓMEZ VILLAR AND F. CANESSA

have led to divisionism (Pilquimán 2016) and the claims of Mapuche groups have had to be shaped
by national imaginaries, master narratives, and the authorised heritage discourse. These imaginaries
have contributed to an increase in an Indigenous self-perception of territorial dispossession and ethnic
disarticulation (Skewes 2016). Moreover, the authorised heritage has affected advances in ethnic justice
and differentiated citizenship policies (Araya Anabalón 2010), while at the same time weakening the
role of the Mapuches’ notions of space and time regarding the future of their people (Bacigalupo 2015).
The study of the relationship between heritage, affectivity and recognition concerns the international
discussion present in heritage studies about the way in which ‘memory and imagination require an
emotional commitment to develop and mark meaning, genuineness and relevance’ (Campbell, Smith,
and Wetherell 2017, 610). Neglecting the understanding of the functions and nuances of emotions
in intercultural relationships has meant that the concepts of heritage and community used by some
academic sectors and political institutions are fraught with restrictive assumptions about consensus
and homogeneity (Waterton and Smith 2010).
In Chile, mistrust about the legitimacy and authenticity of Indigenous demands has been associated
with a tendency to consider the attitudes and affections of Indigenous peoples in a negative way, that
is, as romantic idealizations or political instrumentalisation to receive privileges (El Mercurio 2014).
But, at the same time, a lot of political and academics actors has been used Mapuche demands as a
cultural difference affirmation policies model indiscriminately (Alleyne 2002).This ambivalence we
believe emanates from an inadequate appreciation of the role of emotions in the constitution of the
politics of difference, as well as the projection that these emotions imply in fairer, diverse and inclusive
designs of the future (Campbell, Smith, and Wetherell 2017; Smith and Campbell 2017).
Another aspect of the discussion involves the relationship between emotion and representation.
Neoliberal states such as Chile have been associated with a type of subtle notion of heritage recognition
that reproduces the triumph of the coloniser and maintains the subordinate status of the colonised.
Within this situation, the nostalgia of the postcolonial society eclipses Indigenous nostalgia and its
effects (Orr 2017). In this sense, official representations have become tourist rhetoric to define the
features of ethnic communities and landscapes, minimising attention of the socio-political implications
of the recolonization, as well as an Indigenous past affectively remembered by Indigenous themselves
as resistances to the recolonization (Cheer and Reeves 2015). These problems frame questions about
the connection between the way representations and emotions of heritage are related to social justice,
understanding heritage as a condition and as a form of social action (Johnston and Marwood 2017)
in which attitudes, affections, and emotions can best be understood in dynamic relationships with
ideological representations.
Another aspect of the debate has to do with the controversial aspects of the geography of nostalgia,
in tension with modernity (Bonnett 2016). In the case studied, we are interested in territorialisation of
recognition, as well as the emotions that involve the ethnification and recovery of the sacred landscape.
Curiously, although the ethnonym ‘Mapuche’ means ‘territorial human being’ and the central axis of the
demands of these natives is conceptually geographical, both the notion that recognition dialogues are
meaningless if they are disconnected from Indigenous emotions as well as attitudes towards territory
have been neglected. Mapuches’ social and religious relationships of power and organisation have a
strong geographical base, and their own worldview implies a deep-rooted emotional interaction with
the mythological landscapes. A more complete perspective on this point involves linking the physical
aspects of the past with the living emotions of the present, which include present-day physical elements
as well as an ideational set of memories and legends that make environments meaningful (Prangnell,
Ross, and Coghill 2010). A more detailed investigation with collaborative cartographic methodologies,
such as those addressed in the present article, are necessary so that the ontological root of Indigenous
nostalgia appears using spatially mediated memories, inscribed in particular places and revived with
events and with geographically individualised interactions (Kearney 2009).
Taking all of the above into account, but without attempting to exhaust the multidimensional com-
plexity involved in the relationship between affectivity, heritage and recognition, the present article
intends to add more comprehensive elements for ‘debates seeking to de-institutionalise patterns of
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 845

cultural participation, particularly those directed by an uncritical and unhelpful notion of “commu-
nity”’ (Waterton and Smith 2010, 12). While, at the same time, connecting these debates with emotions,
especially with nostalgia, insofar as
expressions of identity through heritage making appeals to both past and continuing human experiences, which,
in contexts of marginalisation, seek to garner empathy and thus forge bonds with the past that are used in affective
calls for recognition and respect. (Smith and Campbell 2017, 617)
We propose that the concept of ‘healing nostalgia’ can capture these correlations.

Materials and methods

Redrawing the Official Map: collaborative methodologies
The overall focus of the ethnographic research process was orchestrated from the perspective of a
collaborative, participatory study in the period between 2013 and 2016 in the Araucanía Region of
Chile. The methodological design was thought out to elucidate, in a dialogical way, the attitudes,
emotions and reasoning about heritage and community in the inhabitants of a rural locality of Chile
inhabited by Mapuches. The fundamental objective was to trace the interactions of small groups or lof
(clans), and to identify the affectivities that linked them to the Indigenous language, ethnic objects,
places and mobilities, beliefs and memory, and all in relation to the territory. It was interesting to
understand the patrimonial experience of being rural Mapuches ‘there and now’ and to try and iden-
tify the effective and emotional substratum of that experience. Such an ethnographic method was
fundamentally accompanied by techniques such as participatory observation, in-depth interviews,
life history and focus groups. In addition, as a methodological axis to better elucidate the interactions
of the group with the mapu (Morales 2007, 172) and with the emotional aspects of the specific terri-
toriality in the geographic sector addressed, the ethnography was accompanied by the cartographic
method (Chambers 2006; Habegger, Serrano, and Mancila 2006; Barrera 2009). As far as possible,
the dialogues with individuals and groups were carried out by participatory mapping, which in turn
encouraged disputes focused on the organisation of the community in the territory. As a complement,
a discursive comparison was also introduced with the aim of contrasting, with the local particularities,
the discourses on the Mapuche heritage and identity at a more general level (Waterton, Smith, and
Campbell 2006). Transversally, group affective mapping was integrated to the investigative process.
On the occasions when a pressing problem appeared, and certain courses of action were taken to
resolve them, Indigenous people were induced to express their commitment to these problems. They
were also urged to explain the motives of the resolutive actions of the problem in question, in order
to capture their own motives for action, as well as the place that motivations occupy in the emotions
of heritage and community self-perception.

The case study: rural Mapuche of Rehue Rompulli, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra, Araucanía
Region, Chile
Indigenous collaborators selected for the study belong to the following lof: Conín-Budi, Romopulli,
Huapi-Budi, Romopulli Centro, and Rompulli-Huapi, all of which make up the Rehue1 Romopulli,
in the Sector Isla of Puerto Saavedra, Municipality of Saavedra, in the IX Region (Araucanía) of the
Republic of Chile. Textual citations about Indigenous collaborators will bear the initials ‘C’ plus a
correlative number and the place where the ethnographic and cartographic records were made; for
example: C001, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra. No personal names will be used, respecting the ethical
protocol intended to protect collaborators’ privacy.
The collaborators were chosen mainly for their comparative situation with other communities from
the IX Region. In the case of the Sector Isla, a rural sector of fertile land, most of the Indigenous people
own their ancestral lands, therefore their demands are not due to problems of individual land recla-
mation. The expectation of the Mapuche population of the Sector Isla is to achieve greater territorial
846 J. GÓMEZ VILLAR AND F. CANESSA

control, especially regarding religious traditions and ceremonial and sacred sites. This distinction is
important because, unlike other groups whose political priority is the reclaiming of lands for families
who were dispossessed during colonisation, Rehue Romopulli has other priorities. Rehue Romopulli,
despite supporting the demands of their compatriots, has as priority objective to improve cultural,
social and reorganisation aspects of intra-community coexistence. In view of this, some young leaders
had begun a subtler process of research and open reflection on the involvement of external actors. They
were interested in the contributions that the academic world could offer them, so that our insertion
into their problems was not forced. The described situation allowed for a higher level of confidence
and therefore favoured a more friendly, sincere and self-critical interaction on behalf of those involved.
Although we explicitly declared our intention to investigate problems related to heritage to the
groups, we tried not to insist on it. A central concern in our methodology was that we did not unleash
a stereotyped speech on Mapuche collaborators. We wanted to avoid the discursive clichés that usu-
ally circulate in the mass media and are used by the Werken (Mapuche spokespersons) to defend the
Mapuche cause in the political arena. We avoided focusing on concepts such as ‘heritage’, ‘commu-
nity’, ‘identity’, ‘tradition’, ‘memory’, ‘historical violence’, etc. We decided to listen to them freely at
the beginning of our field work to capture what spontaneously worried them the most, and to work
subsequently focusing on the problems upon which they placed greater emphasis. It is important to
clarify that some methodological decisions were made on the ground, that is, just after analysing the
type of problems on which it seemed pertinent to concentrate the investigation.
In this sense, we detected three relevant nuclei. The first, as we mentioned above, was that the
younger Mapuches had set up an inquiry process and for this they handled documentary files and
various historical and administrative maps of the territory. Secondly, we found that in their conver-
sations and journeys they always insisted on the conditions in which the sacred sites were found,
and in particular, two of the main sites for their worldview: Trentrén Vilu and a ceremonial space
guillatuhue and palihue, which had fallen into the hands of Winka owners (white, Chilean mestizo,
outsider, invader). Thirdly, they reiterated great concern about the loss of community organisation,
poor execution of traditions, and conflicts between individuals and families.
Taking the concerns of the Indigenous people into account, we designed a series of special activities
under the label ‘Redrawing the Official Map’. These were composed of two techniques. The first was
participatory georeferencing of the places that they considered relevant. Together with the Mapuches
we participated in a series of walks through the territory. When we reached the territorial landmarks
that they pointed out to us, we asked them for information and their views regarding that landmark.
We photographed and georeferenced each landmark, subsequently attaching all visual and textual
information to a Geographic Information System (GIS) (Fitzjohn 2007). The main objective was to
elucidate the meaning of common spaces, as well as the relationships between them, thus creating the
possibility of seeing them again and discussing them in larger groups of Mapuches (Uluocha 2013;
Kienberger 2014; Hunt and Stevenson 2016).
The second method was a focus group with map discussions. In a small rural school called ‘Los
Cisnes’, we coordinated several meetings with the community. At these meetings, all maps and available
documents were displayed, both those that the young Indigenous leaders had compiled and those that
we had made in collaboration with them and with the help of the GIS. We also included blank maps
of the area and placed them on the wall so that, if they wanted to, community members could draw
or record observations and comments (Keitumetse 2009). The general objective was the clarification
of the territorial-communitarian discourse and its relationship with affections and collective memory.
Another aspect of the methodology was the observation of the role of the material culture of the
past (Bennett 2005; Stig and Carman 2009). Given that Mapuche material culture of the first half of
the nineteenth century is the public, official and authorised representation of the Mapuche people, it
was necessary to confront the relevance of that nineteenth-century representation with the current
Mapuches, contrasting to the extent the State and the Chilean society’s postcolonial nostalgia differed
or not from the Indigenous affectivity itself. Regarding interactions and dialogues, we obviously paid
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 847

the greatest attention to emotions and evaluations, but we also tried to induce some dialogues towards
self-reflexivity, to capture reasoning about the concrete situation of the community and the territory.

Results
Detriment to language
We highlight some observations. Several collaborators agreed that there was an almost total loss of
the Mapuche language (Mapudungun) in the younger generations. We could verify that only the
generation of around 70 years of age spoke Mapudungun perfectly, even some presented difficulties
in speaking Spanish. The generation of around 40 years of age could understand the language, but
could not speak it. The younger ones neither spoke nor understood the language, they only dominated
loose words. One collaborator said:
I understand what my grandparents say, but I don’t know how to speak well ... the women here understand, but
they don’t speak. Some of us are taking classes to speak our language. We would like everyone to be able to speak
it again. (C001, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)
The children were in the process of learning from the intercultural education plans promoted by the
Chilean State in schools in the area. Another collaborator informed us that:
Children are not interested. My children are lazy ... at school there are classes, but they take them because they
have no choice. (C003, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)
Most of the collaborators agreed that the Mapuches stopped speaking the Mapudungun language
because parents prohibited their children to speak it. They thought that it was a measure of protection
to avoid discrimination. Another factor attributed to the loss of Mapudungun was Augusto Pinochet’s
military dictatorship (1973–1989). They associated the fact of not speaking the language with the
memory of a certain fear of political repression. They thought that by not speaking Mapudungun,
this was spontaneously installed as a precautionary measure so as not to stand out and, thus, going
unnoticed by the authorities at the time and their supporters. The interviewees mentioned that some
arrests, mistreatment and arbitrariness against the Mapuche countrymen and women of the area
created an atmosphere of distrust and need for camouflage.

Nostalgia for well-made rituals, ancestral power and the sacred landscape
Another relevant observation had to do with the attitudes of the Indigenous people about the deterio-
ration of traditions, the diminished respect for the ancestral authorities, as well as the desire to recover
the traditional order and the sacred sites of the territory. In the studied sector, the collaborators were
worried about the deterioration of the ‘guillatún’2. A young collaborator gave us her memory and her
emotions about the guillatún:
When I was a girl, going to the guillatún scared me. I cried because I didn’t want to go ... it was terrible. People
always ended up in fights at the guillatún ... all drunk ... there were serious injuries. (C002, Sector Isla, Puerto
Saavedra)
Several informants recognised the negative role of the evangelical influence in the area:
The arrival of evangelicals produced problems. They said that the guillatún and machitún were the work of the
devil ... They tried to make sure that we didn’t perform the guillatún. There are people here who converted to
evangelicalism. Being Mapuche was complicated. (C005, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)
Another collaborator, very involved in changing this degrading situation assured us that:
The loncos [Caciques] did not do things properly. They allowed themselves to be disrespected. The guillatún wasn’t
like before, people would drink until they got drunk and started to fight for any reason ... but also because there
was a lot of fights from beforehand, between families ... the machis [healers] fought against the loncos and they
also fought between machis. (C004, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)
The observations related to rituals and the authorities were closely related to Indigenous concerns
about loss of community control over the territory and desecration of sacred sites.
848 J. GÓMEZ VILLAR AND F. CANESSA

Figure 1. Trentrén Vilu. A Sacred Mapuche site occupied by evangelicals. Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra, Region of Araucanía, Chile.
Ethnographic record with informed consent of Huapi-Budi lof. Photos by the author. Map data: Google, DigitalGlobe.

When the sea will enter, the ‘Tren-tren’ [mythical serpent] will not rise, as it is injured, its legs are cut because it
is inhabited and they have been overworked .... (C006, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)
Others have taken away our things, but we ourselves are to blame. There are Mapuches who have lost respect for
the Walmapu [the ancestral territory of the Mapuches] and soon a great misfortune will happen here. Look how
they are destroying La Mesa Hill. They allow aggregate companies to take the land and destroy sacred places.
(C007, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)
We have several sacred places that were ours and now they are not. The hill of Rehue Romopulli, where the two
Chemamules [wooden human figures] are, is from a Winka who inherited it from his mother, an evangelical
teacher. We are making efforts so that the government buy it so it can become land belonging to our community.
There are two Tren-trens that are not from the community, one of which includes the evangelicals. (C008, Sector
Isla, Puerto Saavedra) (see Figure 1)
During the work with the cartographies the idea of the intervention of the State in the territory
emerged with force. They showed, using the maps and archives they had compiled as examples, how
Augusto Pinochet’s government had divided out the land and divided the sector into 73 agricultural
properties which he called ‘communities’:
Pinochet came and divided the land the way he wanted ... that brought many problems among the people here ...
the government made a division in the communities that did not exist before. (C009, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)
The division by Pinochet brought conflict ... each one on his own ... the loncos were no longer respected the way
our ancestors respected them. That was not like this in the past. This is Rehue Romopulli and the lonco [Ulmén]
was José Pindal and now is Segundo Huanquimán Calfulén. (C010, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)
In the meetings with the community there was agreement that the effect that the state produced, giving
pieces of land with private ownership to each family, was the loss of sacred sites and the dismantling
of rituals. Almost all agreed that forced division into non-ancestral ‘communities’ was one of the main
causes of the cultural disorganisation of the rehue, the increase in social problems and family conflicts.
On the blank maps that we made available to the Mapuches, the solution they saw for a real process
of recognition of their heritage and the life of the rehue quickly appeared. In concrete terms, this meant
recognising the ancestral territorial, cultural and political structure, prior to the intervention of the
military government. That is, recognising Rehue Rompulli and its five lof: Conín-Budi, Romopulli,
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 849

Huapi-Budi, Romopulli-Centro and Romopulli-Huapi (see Figure 2), also recently incorporating the
Rucatraro lof. The recognition and recovery of the rehue and its lof crystallised as the most observed
nostalgic axis at the end of the field work:
We have to respect the Rehue Romopulli again [...] with the same respect as in the past, if there is no respect,
there will be alcohol, fighting, poverty ... young people leave .... (C010, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)
I had to take the loncos to another place so they could see how they performed an orderly guillatún! A well-per-
formed guillatún! [...] as it was in the past. We have to recover all of that little by little, with a lot of patience.
(C007, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)

Figure 2. Map of the Sector Isla, delineated by the Mapuches. The black outlines define the area of the Rehue Romopulli, its five lof
(clans) and the Ulmen (principal chiefs according to the structure of the ancestral authority). Property of the author. Ethnographic
record with informed consent of the community.
850 J. GÓMEZ VILLAR AND F. CANESSA

Textiles, jewellery and Mapuche women

Other complementary observations should also be made. In general terms, no particular interest
was observed in the emblematic Mapuche material culture, that is, the Mapuche material culture of
the first half of the nineteenth century. The affections and attitudes are not linked to the artefactual
dimension of heritage. The studied families do not live in rucas, the deciminonic Mapuche houses,
but in rural social housing made from prefabricated panels that are subsidised by the State. Among
men, decimononic Mapuche cultural material, as well as practices associated with them, did not
have a relevant presence in everyday life. However, making knitwear, a practice that continues to be
transmitted among women, was shown as an important trait of identity. In general terms, it can be
affirmed that they did not keep objects of the past, and in ordinary life, people did not use any objects,
costumes or emblems typical of decimononic Mapuche culture. Their daily clothing was like that of
any Chilean from any large city, with two exceptions: the kachümakuñ (manta or grey poncho in men)
and munolonco (woman’s headscarf). In the rituals or formal political acts some Mapcuhes appeared
with the complete or partial traditional costumes and on such occasions, it was more common to see
women in the traditional clothing of the nineteenth century. For utensils and artefacts, we only find
two ketru-metawe, also known as duck-jugs (duck-shaped ceremonial jars), which belonged to the
grandparents of one of our collaborators. Moreover, there was a balai (seed winnower woven in quila)
used as a hanging decoration on a wall. The arts of ceramics and basketry were practically no longer
practiced. An old woman informed us that the clay deposit had run out and an old man confirmed
that the plant quila (chusquea quila), used for basketry, had become extinct in the area. Mapuche
silvermithing had also ceased to be practiced, but some women in their mid-30s had resumed the
practice of silverware, carrying out workshops through INDAP-PRODEMU (National Institute of
Agricultural Development-Women’s Development Programme). The objective of these silvermithery
workshops was to offer business opportunities to rural Indigenous women, yet several collaborators
reported that they participated in the workshops to recover the identity of the Mapuche woman. This
type of work is also supported by INDAP programmes. Some of the women work temporarily cleaning
roads in the brigades of the CONAF (National Forestry Corporation). We do not see men or women
working with utensils belonging to decimononic Mapuche material culture. The indigenous potato
growers do not use endemic seeds either. The older women informed us, they had not used the native
potato seeds since they were girls because the imported seeds had more commercial value.
Regarding our inquiry into the objects, artefacts or utensils of the past, no one showed special
interest in ‘old things’:
There is almost nothing left. Recently, people were still buying old things: wheels, pitchers, balai [a basket woven
into straw to throw and clean cereals] iron pots, blankets, wool blankets, wampo [small boat made undermining the
trunk of a tree], horse saddles ..., and the families here exchanged them for wine, sugar, plastic containers and, some-
times, money ... they also brought a set of knives for the txafkintun [exchange]. (C011, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra)

Discussion
Insecure and hopeful
The Indigenous people of the studied sector feel that the patrimonial, political and organisational
deterioration of the territory and its communities is due to the interaction of a network of both
internal (Indigenous agents) and external (civil society agents and the government) measures. This
double dimension of the problem infuses certain feelings of insecurity and displeasure on the one
hand, but at the same time offers hope and enthusiasm on the other. The advantage of this position is
that the appreciation of the problems of heritage is bilateral, self-critical and more open and therefore
has a more promising destiny (Bhabha 2013, 123). The spectrum of nostalgia for heritage is oscil-
lating: sometimes it is centred on the essential value of ancestral immemoriality, and other times on
the recent memory of unequal political struggle or on the resolution of conflicts with the State. The
aspiration to return to ethnic origins is felt as an internal problem and at the same time as a repair of
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 851

a memory loaded with moments of plunder and submission, or of resistance and animosity. Nostalgia
for language is an example of these opposing feelings: the shame of having lost the language and, at
the same time, the justification of that loss by the action of the State.
Nostalgia, in this case, interacts with historical representations, especially with the representations
of recent political violence (Pinochet’s Dictatorship 1973–1989) and representations of remote time
(the Occupation of the Araucanía (1860–1863), but in Rehue Romopulli the interaction between
historical representations and nostalgia does not reflect a Manichaean or dichotomous emotional
ambivalence. The counterproductive influence of the re-colonising Republican State as an external
agent of dispossession and divisionism is correlated by Indigenous we spoke to with internal agents
whose interaction was also dismembering: the careless attitude of the loncos and machis, neglecting
the proper ritual formalities in the practice of the guillatún, causing with it the deterioration of respect
towards ancestral customs and traditional authority. At the same time, both deteriorations are perceived
as facilitators of a third factor, which is the allocation of individualised agricultural land by the military
government. They recognise that this divisive action was understood in the past as recognition of
Indigenous property, but later proved to be one of the factors of the disintegration of the centrality of
the rehue. Likewise, the three interactions mentioned above add to the interplay with a fourth, social
anomie and certain vices such as alcoholism, all of which served in turn to support another media-
tion: the evangelical church, which took advantage of the context to demonise Mapuche rituals, to
preach the salvation of the Indigenous men and to gain the confidence of mothers and small children,
who ended up being converted to Pentecostalism. Evangelical intervention not only caused many
young people to convert to Christianity and reject Indigenous worldviews, but also, by territorially
appropriating various sacred sites, it dismantled a fundamental cultural integrator in favour of rural
Mapuches: the sacred landscape. However, Indigenous people consider that evangelical interference
did not act alone in the desecration of the sacred landscape, for example by installing a temple on the
back of Trentrén Vilú (see Figure 1). Another more important sacred site, the mound where the Rehue
Rompulli resides, was used (is used) in a ‘sacrilegious’ way by the Indigenous community itself, since
in the same sacred place palín and soccer are played. That is, simultaneously the rehue altar serves as
a guillatuhue-palihue-soccer pitch (see Figure 3). In addition, Cerro La Mesa, a religious landmark, an
emblem of Mapuche ethno-political conflicts (Montecino 2011) and territorial landmark of memory
in the sacred landscape, is being deteriorated by the business of geological materials for construction,
a business through which some Indigenous people benefit economically. Nostalgia for an ideal com-
munity life is based not only on external causation, but also on strong internal self-criticism.

Healing nostalgia
Community self-criticism supports the idea that this Indigenous nostalgia can have a transformative
impact on the future. (Smith and Campbell 2017, 623) consider the possibility of a ‘progressive nos-
talgia’, however in our case, unlike the ideological and historical framework of the modern working
classes, progressivism is not an assimilable idea. The difference is that the Mapuches seem not to
perceive a contradiction between the original ethnicity and modern-day life. In our research, we did
not find any negative or suspicious attitude about the advantages of the most contemporary and tech-
nological life, not even among the elderly. Mapuches from the area coexist with mass media and use
new information technologies, and their tools are also contemporary. Interest in the material culture
of the Mapuches’ decimononic past went from having a practical meaning to having a weak symbolic
meaning, especially amongst women. Young people aspire to possess the same consumer goods as
any globalised metropolitan youth. In general, these Indigenous often see the material austerity of
traditional culture as a negative factor because they associate it with the poverty that causes young
people in the sector to leave the rural world to seek a better future in the bigger cities. They do not
seem to see modern technological artefacts as an impediment to the exercise of ethnicity. From their
perspective, the nostalgia for the spiritual strength of the decimononic ethnic community seems to
inhabit a different dimension than the technological changes of the present and the future.
852 J. GÓMEZ VILLAR AND F. CANESSA

Figure 3. Mapuche sacred site that functions as a guillatuhue-palihue-soccer pitch. Rehue Romopulli, Sector Isla, Puerto Saavedra,
Araucanía Region, Chile. Photos by the author. Ethnographic record with informed consent of Huapi-Budi lof. Map data: Google,
DigitalGlobe.

The set of nuances that make up the nostalgia in the case studied does not evidence a sick romantic
idealism nor a radical ethnic conservatism, but neither offers a sufficiently clear ideological substratum
to think that the past they long for is a reformulation of the completeness of life in the future. The
nostalgia of the case points rather to a series of spiritual ethnic values that they want to recuperate,
as if the community body has diseases that must be healed and this recuperation is the cure and, at
the same time, the health that the community body should maintain for any possible future. It is not
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 853

a postcolonial nostalgia of an Indigenous visual museum, typified ethnographically by its nineteenth

century material culture, before the military occupancy of the Araucanía (1861–1883). It seems more
like a nostalgia-machitún, metaphorically speaking, that is, a nostalgia that functions as a ritual of
healing, not at an individual level but at a large community level. Since it is a nostalgia for the ‘health’ of
the Indigenous social body and its relationship with the non-Indigenous social body, what is intended
to lead them towards the future is not the ethnic past itself, but an ethnic solution to the future. Rehue
Romopulli’s community recovery project, understood in accordance with the cosmovision of the group
studied, rather than ‘progressive nostalgia’ can best be understood as ‘healing nostalgia’.
This conceptual nuance can be justified if it is also contrasted with the problems of landscape
ethnicity and its relation to territorial control. Explicitly, as we saw above in the results, they consider
that the sacred geographical sites are ‘wounded’ and must be recovered and healed. It is not a matter
of yearning for the ancestral ways of using the land, but rather for the safeguarding of sacred sites,
whose value, in addition to the spiritual value, is also preventive. The myth of the serpent Tren-tren
Vilú and the memory of the flood of the 1960 tsunami in the area, implies that if the snake cannot lift
his back to protect the people from drowning, the very life of the community is in danger. The healing
of these sites is part of the urgent mobilising potential of nostalgia (Campbell, Smith, and Wetherell
2017), however, it adds a healing and saving component that cannot be avoided conceptually. This
obviously does not imply that this yearning for a healthy land and sacred landscape implies political
dividends such as controlling the use of the land in the future and at the same time legitimising the
uninstallation of the temples of the Pentecostal church. Here, healing nostalgia presupposes a defensive
longing that aims to achieve the ancient spiritual sovereignty of the territory, but this nuance of healing
nostalgia linked to the control of geographical space, should not be detached from the fact that for the
community it is very relevant to correct the deep failure of recognition caused by the demonization
of the Indigenous beliefs by the Christians who settled in the sector.

Nostalgia and representation

One aspect that may weaken the concept of healing nostalgia is that it cannot be separated from the
aftermath of the memory of political violence and the material and cultural dispossession of coloni-
sation. None of the emotions or individual attitudes we see in this research can be considered as alien
to the ideological work of broader and more structural representations of history and politics. The
nostalgia for a sovereign and happy past is neither spontaneous nor pre-cognitive: it operates against
the background of the imagination of five centuries of rupture and conflict with the Chilean Colonial
and Republican State. In particular, the Mapuche identity in Chile correlates with a deep resentment
against the Republican State: from the nineteenth-century frontal war, accompanied by eradications,
confinements and extractions of the Indigenous population, to a repertoire of public narratives full
of historical distortions and cultural aspects of origin, religiosity and Mapuche praxis (Bengoa 2000).
The Republican State has also circulated ambivalent historical narratives because, although within the
national independence myth, the Mapuches appeared as an ancestral heroic and invincible community
against foreign domination, at the same time Mapuches were transformed, from the second third of
the nineteenth century, to an illegitimate subject of the conformation of the new Chilean nation. That
is, in an anti-civilising cultural otherness whose supposed barbarism and customs were incompatible
with the progress of Western modernity. As an ideological consequence of the military occupation
of the Araucanía (1860–1883), Chilean civil society adopted an attitude of denial of mestizaje with
Indigenous peoples (Valle 2002; Merino 2007). At the level of the authorised heritage discourse (Smith
2006), the installation of an imaginary mirror of the nation’s heritage with a strong tendency towards
Europeanisation and whitening (Lepe-Carrión 2012). This brought with it racial hatred that remained
into the twentieth century and which, after the 1973 coup d’état, intensified under the assumption
that ultra-left revolutionary groups operated among the Mapuches (Barrientos 2011). We can speak
of a reactive nostalgia that was radicalised in the 1980s (Morán Faúndes 2012). This is the moment
when the activism of the Mapuche people transformed their political goals, changing from the claim
854 J. GÓMEZ VILLAR AND F. CANESSA

for land to the integral territorial demand (mapu); as well as changing from the aspiration to politi-
cal participation in the State towards a demand for autonomy such as wallmapu, that is, as a nation
(Tricot 2007). Nostalgia for the precolonial past is radicalised and correlated with political and scien-
tific perspectives that could not cope with the humanised past that emerges from Indigenous ethnic
empowerment (Greer 2010).
Likewise, the influence of the perspective of UNESCO and the Convention for the Safeguarding
of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003 (Ahmad 2006) ratified by the State of Chile, increased the
concept of heritage as a cultural resource independent of concrete political control and participa-
tory parity of individuals in social life (Waterton and Smith 2010, 10). The Indigenous associative
problem continues to be addressed as if the community should finally be a partner for the Cultural
Resource Management process sponsored by State agencies (Cho 2008). This perspective does not
seem to consider the Indigenous resistance to participate in the history and identity of the neo-colonial
nation-state whose heritage is unpleasant and tragic (McCarthy 2017). At the level of the policies of
difference and inclusion, intercultural education poorly questions colonisation and recolonization, as
well as its patrimonial consequences; just as the teaching of the Indigenous past is difficult to address
if the traditional historical-archaeological meta-narratives on ‘civilizations’continue (Zarmati 2015).
The representational weight is undeniable, but the specific Mapuche communities are usually neither
ideological, social, religious, nor economically homogeneous. Therefore, any nostalgia that presup-
poses a certain homogenization of the expectations of the future, would be an unreal generalisation.
However, the idea of healing nostalgia offers flexibility much more in line with what is observed and,
in the case of the Indigenous people themselves, creates a more credible patrimonial connection
between past, present and future. It is for this reason that we think it pertinent to use the concept of
nostalgia for healing. This concept allows for integrating the complexity of nostalgia in the context
studied, and may be applicable to different or broader contexts of recognition. As we have already said,
healing nostalgia can capture a certain connection with the Mapuche Indigenous worldview, while
machitún and guillatún, fundamental Mapuche rituals, are rituals of healing and praying for personal
and community well-being. It makes sense that nostalgia for healing is a way of repairing the extensive
memory of the dispossession and the discrimination that weighs on Indigenous imaginaries. Moreover,
from a more theoretical point of view, we realise that some forms of nostalgic emotion do not emerge
pre-cognitively, but by dialoguing with authorised heritage discourses and conflicting representations.
At the same time, the concept we propose unlocks the socially negative or pathological perspective
on this feeling (Lowenthal 1985; Hewison 1987), rehabilitating its progressive possibilities (Smith and
Campbell 2017, 613). The concept of healing nostalgia can be understood in a tripartite way: as a desire
for patrimonial recovery, as a critical attitude of the present and as a future project. Seen in this way,
we believe that this concept can contribute to improving the perspectives of intercultural recognition.

Notes
The rehue or rewe is the religious, political and social axis of the Mapuches. It is simultaneously a deity, a physical
1. 
space, a symbolic object and a political and social structure. Visually it is usually a thick tree trunk staggered
and nailed to the ground, surrounded by branches from the sacred Mapuche tree called canelo. The physical
space where the rehue is nailed is usually used for the most important rituals: machitún, guillatún and the we
tripantu (New Year, austral winter solstice). Likewise, the rehue represents the territory inhabited by groups of
families or lof (basic form of Mapuche social organisation) that share it.
The guillatún is the most important of the sacred ritual ceremonies of the Mapuche people. This ritual is organised
2. 
by each rehue and directed by a ngenpin (a cultural, political and religious guide). It is destined to pray for the
well-being and unity of the communities and to give thanks for the benefits received. It lasts between two and
four days and is performed every two, three, or four years, depending on the needs of each rehue.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 855

Funding
This work was supported by the Centre for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR). FONDAP 15110006.
CONICYT, Ministry of Education, Chile.

Notes on contributors
Joseph Gomez is a researcher at the Centre for Intercultural and Indigenous Research and the Centre for Cultural Heritage
UC, as well as a joint-appointment professor in the area of Heritage Studies at the School of Art, Institute of History and
Interdisciplinary Masters in Cultural Heritage at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Fanny Canessa is a research assistant at the Centre for Intercultural and Indigenous Research, a professor in the area
of Heritage Studies, Conservation and Restoration of the School of Art at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,
and in charge of the conservation and restoration area of the Museum of Colonial Art San Francisco, Santiago, Chile.

ORCID
Joseph Gómez Villar   http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3377-207X

References
“Access to land and subsidies: a study warns of Indigenous fabrication and calls for raising requirements to receive state
benefits.” El Mercurio, Diciembre 4, 2014.
Ahmad, Y. 2006. “The Scope and Definitions of Heritage: From Tangible to Intangible.” International Journal of Heritage
Studies 12 (3): 292–300. doi:10.1080/13527250600604639.
Alleyne, B. 2002. “An Idea of Community and its Discontents: Towards a more Reflexive Sense of Belonging in
Multicultural Britain.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25 (4): 607–627. doi:10.1080/01419870220136655.
Araya Anabalón, J.  2010. “Intercultural ethics and dialogical recognition. A look at the dignity of the other: the conflict
between the Chilean state and the Mapuche.” Revista Chilena de Derecho y Ciencia Política 1 (1): 61–78. http://
repositoriodigital.uct.cl/handle/10925/1560.
Bacigalupo, A.  2015. “Collective embodied histories of the Mapuche of Chile: ritual transformation of the past and
future.” Scripta Ethnologica 37: 39–79. http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=14845594003
Barrera ,S.2009.  “Reflections on Participatory Geographical Information Systems (sigp) and social cartography.”
Cuadernos de Geografía 18: 9–23. https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/rcg/article/view/12798/13395
Barrientos, C. 2011. “Gender, violence and narration in the memories of southern Chile, Panguipulli, 1970-2001.” Revista
de Geografía Espacios 1 (1): 87–97. http://bibliotecadigital.academia.cl/handle/123456789/2999.
Bengoa, J. 2000. The Mapuche History (19th and 20th centuries). Santiago de Chile: Lom.
Bennett, T. 2005. “Civic Laboratories. Museum, Cultural Objecthood and the Governance of the Social.” Cultural Studies
19 (5): 521–547. doi:10.1080/09502380500365416.
Bhabha, H. 2013. New minorities, new rights. Notes about vernacular cosmopolitanism. Santiago: Siglo XXI Editores.
Bonnett, A. 2016. The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss. Abingdon: Routledge.
Campbell, G., L. Smith, and M. Wetherell. 2017. “Nostalgia and Heritage: Potentials, Mobilisations.” International Journal
of Heritage Studies 23 (7): 609–611. doi:10.1080/13527258.2017.1324558.
Chambers, R. 2006. "Participatory mapping and geographic information systems". EJISDC 25 (2): 1–14. http://www.
iapad.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/robert_chambers_mapeo_partecipativo_es.pdf
Cheer, J., and K. Reeves. 2015. “Colonial Heritage and Tourism: Ethnic Landscape Perspectives.” Journal of Heritage
Tourism 10 (2): 151–166. doi:10.1080/1743873X.2014.985224.
Cho, H. 2008. “Conservation of Indigenous Heritage in the United States: Issues and Policy Development.” The Journal
of Arts Management, Law, and Society 38 (3): 187–204. doi:10.3200/JAML.38.3.187-204.
Fitzjohn, M. 2007. “Viewing Places: GIS Applications for Examining the Perception of Space in the Mountains of Sicily.”
World Archaeology 39 (1): 36–50. doi:10.1080/00438240601136439.
Forester, R., and J. Vergara. 2000. “Customary law and legal pluralism: challenges for the Third Millennium.” In The
Mapuche struggle for the recognition in Chilean society, edited by C. Milka, 191–206. Arica: CEME.
Fuentes, C., and M. de Cea. 2017. “Weak recognition: Indigenous rights in Chile.” Perfiles Latinoamericanos 49. http://
www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=11549647003
Greer, S. 2010. “Heritage and Empowerment: Community-based Indigenous Cultural Heritage in Northern Australia.”
International Journal of Heritage Studies 16 (1–2): 45–58. doi:10.1080/13527250903441754.
856 J. GÓMEZ VILLAR AND F. CANESSA

Habegger, S., E. Serrano, and I. Mancila. 2006. “Power of territorial mapping in counter-hegemonic practices.” Quaderns
d’Educació Contínua 15. http://www.acervo.paulofreire.org:8080/jspui/bitstream/7891/4034/1/FPF_PTPF_01_0693.
pdf
Hewison, R. 1987. Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen.
Hunt, D., and S. Stevenson. 2016. “Decolonizing Geographies of Power: Indigenous Digital counter-Mapping Practices on
Turtle Island.” Settler Colonial Studies 7 (3): 372–392. https://doi.org.ezproxy.puc.cl/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1186311.
Johnston, R., and K. Marwood. 2017. “Action Heritage: Research, Communities, Social Justice.” International Journal
of Heritage Studies 23 (9): 816–831. doi:10.1080/13527258.2017.1339111.
Kearney, A. 2009. “Homeland Emotion: An Emotional Geography of Heritage and Homeland.” International Journal of
Heritage Studies 15 (2–3): 209–222. doi:10.1080/13527250902890746.
Keitumetse, S. 2009. “Methods for Investigating Locals’ Perceptions of a Cultural Heritage Product for Tourism: Lessons
from Botswana.” In Heritage Studies. Methods and Approaches, edited by M. L. Sørensen and J. Carman, 201–216.
London: Routledge.
Kienberger, S. 2014. “Participatory Mapping of Flood Hazard Risk in Munamicua, District of Búzi, Mozambique.” Journal
of Maps 10 (2): 269–275. doi:10.1080/17445647.2014.891265.
Lepe-Carrión, P. 2012. “The Colonial Contract of Chile. Criticism of impure rationality in the racial configuration
of scientific and political discourse and cultural practices in the 17th, 18th  and 19th  centuries.” PhD diss.,
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. http://repositorio.conicyt.cl/bitstream/handle/10533/179946/LEPE_
JORGE_2013D.pdf?sequence=1
Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCarthy, C. 2017. “Incidental Heritage: Difficult Intangible Heritages as Collateral Damage.” International Journal of
Heritage Studies 23 (1): 52–64. doi:10.1080/13527258.2016.1232744.
Merino, M. E. 2007. “The discourse of perceived discrimination in the Mapuche of Chile.” Discurso & Sociedad 1 (4):
604–622. http://www.dissoc.org/ediciones/v01n04/DS1%284%29Merino.html
Montecino, S.2011. “Myth, Sacrifice and Politics of Difference: the 60th earthquake in Budi Lake.” Revista Anales 7 (1):
201–206. doi: 10.5354/0717-8883.2011.12345.
Morales, R. 2007. “Listen to me, Winka." Revista Austral de Ciencias Sociales 12: 159–164. http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.
php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0717-71942013000100007#n39
Morán, J. 2012.“The Antiterrorist Law and Mapuche social protest: a look from governmentality and sovereignty.” Espaço
Ameríndio 6 (1): 48–68. http://seer.ufrgs.br/EspacoAmerindio/article/view/26515/18780
Orr, R. 2017. “The Nostalgic Native? The Politics and Terms of Heritage and Remembrance in two Communities.”
International Journal of Heritage Studies 23 (7): 643–653. doi:10.1080/13527258.2017.1300929.
Pilquimán, M. 2016.  “Community tourism as a survival strategy: Resistance and Indigenous cultural claim of the
Mapuche communities in the Los Rios Region (Chile).” Estudios y Perspectivas en Turismo 25 (4): 439–459. http://
www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1851-17322016000400003&lng=es&nrm=iso
Prangnell, J., A. Ross, and B. Coghill. 2010. “Power Relations and Community Involvement in Landscape-based Cultural
Heritage Management Practice: An Australian Case Study.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 16 (1–2): 140–155.
doi:10.1080/13527250903441838.
Skewes, J. 2016. “Heritage, landscape and coexistence: experiences of dispossession in the Chilean South”. GeoGraphos
7 (87): 1–17. doi:10.14198/GEOGRA2016.7.87(21).
Smith, L. 2006. The uses of Heritage. London: Routledge.
Smith, L., and G. Campbell. 2017. “‘Nostalgia for the future’: memory, nostalgia and the politics of class.” International
Journal of Heritage Studies 23 (7): 612–627. doi:10.1080/13527258.2017.1321034.
Stig, M., and J. Carman, eds. 2009. Heritage Studies. Methods and Approaches. London: Routledge.
Tricot, T. 2007. “Formal democracy and indigenous rights. An approximation to the current relationship between the
Chilean State and the Mapuche.” Historia Actual Online (12): 33–41. http://www.historia-actual.org/Publicaciones/
index.php/haol/issue/view/13
Uluocha, N. 2013. “A Synopsis of Nigeria’s Indigenous Cartographic Heritage.” The Cartographic Journal 47 (2): 164–172.
doi:10.1179/000870409X12525737905088.
Valle, C. 2002. “The judicial process of 12 Mapuche in Chile: between state racism and linguistic violence.” Razón y
Palabra 26. http://www.razonypalabra.org.mx/anteriores/n26/cvalle.html
Waterton, E., and L. Smith. 2010. “The Recognition and Misrecognition of Community Heritage.” International Journal
of Heritage Studies 16 (1–2): 4–15. doi:10.1080/13527250903441671.
Waterton, E., L. Smith, and G. Campbell. 2006. “The Utility of Discourse Analysis to Heritage Studies: The Burra Charter
and Social Inclusion.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 12 (4): 339–355. doi:10.1080/13527250600727000.
Zarmati, L. 2015. “Using Archaeology to Teach Australia’s ‘Difficult’ Indigenous Past.” Conservation and Management
of Archaeological Sites 17 (1): 191–106. doi:10.1179/1350503315Z.00000000096.