Natalia Caniguan

The spatial disciplines have slowly started to acknowledge their complicity with Indigenous dispossession in settler colonial contexts. Since early contact, instruments of land appropriation like surveying, mapping, town building, zoning, and place-naming have helped legitimise settler presence and imposed Western spatial relations over Indigenous territories. Indigenous planning-understood as planning by, for, and with Indigenous peoples grounded in their worldviews, values, and priorities-pre-dates and stands in stark contrast to dominant planning discourses. This paper offers methodological reflections on a participatory action research project that seeks to rebuild a Mapuche spatial planning knowledge base that still exists despite state-led attempts to disarticulate Mapuche socio-spatial relations. Within the logic of Indigenous resurgence, we consider the power of land-based walking and storytelling methodologies as tools to rebuild Mapuche spatial planning. By deepening embodied community knowledge of the land, renaming places, and (re)producing community-owned knowledge that refuses to be shared outwardly such methodologies not only contest the legitimacy of Western planning systems, but reassert the principles that have long guided Mapuche spatial planning and support the reconstruction of Mapuche territory. We also explore the limits of such approaches and whether they can reorient the ethics of Western planning towards Indigenous priorities.

In this article, the process of constitution and development of the indigenous and territorial movement lived in the Mapuche Lafkenche territory of the Araucanía region during the years 2000 to 2012 is analyzed. This process is reconstructed through an ethnography, instance through which it was possible to meet its actors and leaders, investigate in context and the diverse variables that were giving way to the emergence of this territorial movement and that shaped its future, where the state intervention programs and the configuration of the local government headed by Mapuche people, who will become preponderant actors in the process.

Los actuales territorios en que viven los pueblos indígenas están
cruzados por diversos tipos de fronteras y delimitaciones administrativas que
los constituyen. Se entrecruzan y superponen nociones tales como comunas
y comunidades, junto a la irrupción de nuevas definiciones como “áreas de
desarrollo indígena”, lof, ayllarewe, sector, entre otros. Estas denominaciones,
algunas estatales, otras surgidas desde los actores locales refieren siempre a
un mismo espacio, no obstante, los significados que encierran son distintos y
a veces hasta divergentes y cada uno de ellos busca dar cuenta del uso, permanencia,
presencia y control sobre el territorio.
Desde una etnografía realizada en territorio lafkenche de la Araucanía observamos
lo que ocurre con un mismo espacio territorial que es leído y vivido
desde una mirada administrativa municipal con cruces de la política indígena
nacional y desde una perspectiva cultural mapuche. Estas miradas y vivencias
políticas del territorio dan cuenta de alianzas, disputas, estrategias, y discursos
que lo configuran, donde muchas veces lo administrativo y la política local se
vuelve el contenedor de la mirada histórica cultural- constriñéndose el territorio
a los límites políticos del Estado y sus estrategias de acción e intervención

The spatial disciplines have slowly started to acknowledge their complicity with Indigenous dispossession in settler colonial contexts. Since early contact, instruments of land appropriation like surveying, mapping, town building, zoning, and place-naming have helped legitimise settler presence and imposed Western spatial relations over Indigenous territories. Indigenous planning-understood as planning by, for, and with Indigenous peoples grounded in their worldviews, values, and priorities-pre-dates and stands in stark contrast to dominant planning discourses. This paper offers methodological reflections on a participatory action research project that seeks to rebuild a Mapuche spatial planning knowledge base that still exists despite state-led attempts to disarticulate Mapuche socio-spatial relations. Within the logic of Indigenous resurgence, we consider the power of land-based walking and storytelling methodologies as tools to rebuild Mapuche spatial planning. By deepening embodied community knowledge of the land, renaming places, and (re)producing community-owned knowledge that refuses to be shared outwardly such methodologies not only contest the legitimacy of Western planning systems, but reassert the principles that have long guided Mapuche spatial planning and support the reconstruction of Mapuche territory. We also explore the limits of such approaches and whether they can reorient the ethics of Western planning towards Indigenous priorities.

El Bicentenario de la República de Chile se conmemoró en el mes de septiembre del año 2010.
Además de marcar un importante hito histórico, coincidió con un cambio político en el Gobierno del país, el que pasó de la Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia a la Alianza de partidos formada por la derecha chilena. Se cumplieron por tanto 20 años desde que en el año 1990 cambiara el Gobierno militar presidido por el general Pinochet. Ese largo tiempo, dos décadas, coincide con un período de políticas que el Estado ha implementado hacia los Pueblos Indígenas. El Proyecto “Conmemoraciones y Memorias Subalternas” ha realizado durante el año 2010 un conjunto de investigaciones de terreno y documentales tendientes a comprender del modo más objetivo y científico lo ocurrido en el período y por tanto la situación actual de las sociedades mapuches en sus complejas relaciones con la chilena.