The Body is (Not) the Land: Mapuche Hunger Strikes and the Territorial Aporia

Abstract

On August 11, 2020, the Mapuche spiritual leader (Machi or shaman), Celestino Córdova, recorded what he thought would be his final words.¹ It had been one hundred days since he and eight other Mapuche political prisoners began their hunger strike, in part to demand that the state uphold its promises of consultation on “development” with Mapuche communities and protect the ecologies of ancestral lands as presented by the Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena (CONADI, National Corporation for Indigenous Development) and Organización Internacional del Trabajo Convenio 169 (OIT, International Labor Organization Convention 169).² But the hunger strikes were also to call attention to the targeted criminalization and intensified carceral penalties of the Mapuche under ongoing Pinochet-era antiterrorist laws. These laws were expanded along with neoliberal policies and multinational extractive practices in the 1990s with the “return to democracy” after seventeen years of dictatorship (1973–90) and are still in effect under the government of Gabriel Boric, whose proposed modifications continue to target the Mapuche.³ The demands made through Mapuche hunger strikes address the Chilean state's incessant territorial and corporeal dispossessions⁴ of the Mapuche as a continuum of colonial genocidal projects justified by racist colonial logics, effecting an unremitting attack on Mapuche ontological entwinement of body and land.⁵

Having taken the determination of his death from the hands of the state, with the support of his lof (community) and the ñizol lonko⁶ José Quidel, Córdova spoke the following words:

Córdova did not die from his death strike, as his demand to return to his rewe (a sacred ceremonial altar or pillar specific to a Machi and their lof) was granted, enabling the start of his slow and incomplete recovery.⁹ Still, just days before recording these words, Córdova began a huelga seca (dry strike), refusing both food and liquids “so that,” he says, “my end will not be as slow as the state, the current government, and business sector in general hope.” It was at this point that the hunger strike became a death strike, where the prolonged processes of dying as a political performance of death became a determination of death (de-, completely, methodically, formally; terminare, to limit and set bounds). The move from hunger strike to death strike, from a performance of death (the slow act of dying) to its imminence, parallels the slow processes and the ecologically devastating effects of what Rob Nixon describes as slow violence, while also marking the effects of this slow violence as swift and irremediable. One might consider the representational strategies of the Mapuche hunger strikes and Córdova's death strike as direct political responses to the colonial continuum and its ecological devastations, enabled by a racist and genocidal colonial matrix of power and attendant territorial logics. But the Mapuche hunger strike is primarily, I argue, a direct intervention into state claims to territorial sovereignty through the assertion of land-as-mapu—a Mapuche onto-epistemology of land and body—and corporeal autonomy that wrests one's life and death from the necropolitical state. And although the scholarship on necropolitics often naturalizes state sovereignty, presenting it as an ontological totality, this article frames necropolitics as but one mode of understanding the expansive and morphing “logic of elimination.” Patrick Wolfe has described the logic of elimination as “multifarious procedures whereby settler-colonial societies have sought to eliminate the problem of indigenous heteronomy,” not only through genocidal campaigns but “through the biocultural assimilation of indigenous peoples.”¹⁰ While state necropower is an “expression of sovereignty” that decides whom “to kill or allow to live,” its “killing” is here expanded to account for other methods of elimination that consume and incorporate the Indigenous other.¹¹

Because the hunger strike occurs within this necropolitical space, it is often understood solely within a frame of relation to the state, as an act that “tries to provoke a separation between public opinion and the state in order to pressure the government into making a social change.”¹² And to be sure, the demands of the striker are in direct relation to the state's necropower, which organizes the life of the striking body always at the precipice of state-sanctioned deaths: the state of incessant mortal precarity that is social death's imminence. Herein lies the important distinction between the autoreferential, or inwardly directed, suicide and the hunger strike, a heteroreferential, or outwardly directed, political act of willful self-destruction. From this perspective, the hunger strike should also be understood as a process of asserting autonomy and self-determination in a specifically Mapuche historical and cultural context in relation to, but not emergent from, the state's necropolitical force as exercised through these strategically sanctioned deaths. For such deaths are defied by the Mapuche hunger striker's intentional self-destruction, a decision on how and when to die that is wrested from the state. While the Machi, like the hunger striker, chooses when and how to die, they also choose when to be reborn “to intervene in the present and to engage history once again.”¹³ This makes Córdova's strike particularly poignant as a transtemporal suturing—drawing upon a genealogy of Machi knowledges that precede colonialism and will exceed it—that continually reperforms Mapuche corporeal and territorial precedence.

Remarking on the intensification of hunger strikes and increased prevalence of death strikes as a political technique and “form of expression,” Banu Bargu writes that “this intensification renders the weaponization of life an emergent repertoire rather than an isolated, random tactic, an individual act.”¹⁴ As such, the Mapuche hunger strikes over the last twenty or more years have become part of a global political genealogy that asserts that death is not the limit of struggle; nor is death sought to end one's suffering under extremely antagonistic conditions. With their reclamations, restitutions,¹⁵ and assertions of corporeal and territorial autonomy, the Mapuche hunger strikes must not only be understood representationally, as acts of contestation opposing necropolitical forces. Rather, these strikes should be understood as performances that demand impossible futures through the politicization of forms of self-destruction that reveal Mapuche presence, a constitutive relation with land as territorial precedence, and conceptions of land and/as self as not colonially derived. This latter phrase is critical as it asserts that the coconstitutive relation of the Mapuche with land dwells in the body as much as it does in the land itself, a becoming whose origins proceed from knowledges and experiences (Mapuche kimün) prior to the colonial encounter and by which the Mapuche know and narrate themselves.¹⁶ While many scholars continue to see political acts such as the hunger strike as forms or modes of resistance, this essay asserts that the hunger strike is (per)formative of Mapuche corporeal and territorial autonomy always already in opposition to the violent colonial inscriptions and descriptive impositions of Man.¹⁷ This is to say, the very fact of the Mapuche assertions of corporeal autonomy and presence as territorial precedence is always already in opposition to the state's claims to territorial sovereignty. The (per)formative, here, points to both the hunger strike's mnemonic doing of violence—its performativity understood as the ability to make one remember within a Mapuche cultural memory—and the formative nature of this violence in the constitution of a Mapuche political subject within the context of the colonial continuum.

With Machi Celestino Córdova's recent hunger strike as a point of departure for an analysis of the violence and effects of Mapuche dispossessions from Spanish colonization to the present, I will here make two linked arguments. First, through a brief rethinking of Chilean history, I argue that settler-colonial anti-Indigenous racial projects have allowed and continue to allow for the dispossessions of the Mapuche in the service of national territorial cohesion and global extractive capital. This includes the imminence of corporeal death in the condition of social death applied to those Mapuche who refused and continue to refuse incorporation, recognition, and removal. These racial projects acted as catalysts for and have sustained the environmentally devastating forces of slow violence that manifest ecologically. A very brief constellatory mapping of five settler time periods (Spanish colony, Parliamentary Republic, Presidential Republic, dictatorship, and postdictatorship) as a colonial continuum shows that the modern invention of race¹⁸ and its specific racist mobilization against the Mapuche, who are seen as too close to nature and uncivilizable, are the grounds upon which all subsequent extractive capitalist practices and their attendant environmental devastations emerge. In this framing, anti-Indigenous violence is environmental devastation, and environmental devastation is anti-Indigenous violence. Second, I offer a meditation on the Mapuche hunger strike as distinct from other strikes in its assertion of Mapuche ontological, and thus territorial, specificity. Part of this argument is linguistic, in the relation between mapu (land) and che (people), but this relationship between Mapuche ontology and territory is grounded in the fact that Wallmapu itself, and the sustained Mapuche relationships with these territories, is the primary site for historical and memorial continuity, the emergence of Mapuche kimün (knowledge), and thus the constitutive fact of Mapuche identity. I here consider the hunger strike a performance of Mapuche corporeal and territorial autonomy that discursively and gesturally defies the necropolitics at the root of slow violence in the region. To do so, I extrapolate how the Mapuche hunger strikes refuse colonial conceptions of both Indigenous bodies and land in favor of Mapuche conceptions of a coterminous and coconstitutive body and land as the formation of a people (che). In doing so, the Mapuche hunger strikes unsettle the very foundations of Chile's tautological claims to territorial sovereignty, revealing the territorial aporia by which land is both coconstitutive of the Mapuche subject (mapu) and a colonial territorial object (Chile).

The Mapuche hunger strike is in this way an interrogation signaling the interconnections between Spanish colonialism, Chilean racism, slow violence, and their ecological and sociohistorical effects. Nixon describes slow violence as a vast, ecologically devastating violence that is not identical to but emerges from and is sustained by structural violence. He defines it as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”¹⁹ In the context of Mapuche struggles, it is within the logic of elimination that environmental devastation and anti-Indigenous violence is “typically not viewed as violence,” and therefore environmental devastation is not understood to be anti-Indigenous violence. But by framing slow violence capaciously as “a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales,” Nixon identifies this violence as the violence of a colonial continuum rather than the immediate or spectacular violences we associate with the “events” of state violence.²⁰ The concept is thus capable of attending to the conflicting and coinciding temporalities that correspond to the rival territorial imaginaries of the nation-state and Indigenous peoples, as well as the territorial overlap of capitalist extraction as ongoing Indigenous dispossession.

When attempting an analysis of violence, slow or structural, we must attend to it as a racialized and biopolitically delimited concept.²¹ For example, in a 2010 interview, the Chilean National Prize–winning historian Sergio Villalobos asserted that “the [Mapuche] hunger strike was part of terrorism, as it instills fear in the population.”²² In his comments, Villalobos not only racializes Mapuche acts of nonviolence as violence, denying the validity of the Mapuche hunger strike by naming it terrorism; he also goes on to deny the very fact that the strikes themselves occurred, given their slow and strategic unfolding. Further, by using the language of “instilling fear in the population,” Villalobos appeals directly to the 1991 amendment of the Pinochet-era antiterrorist legislation to criminalize the Mapuche hunger strikers, whom he sees as mobilizing terrorist violence. The amendment defines terrorism as an “attack against life, physical integrity or liberty by means which produce or may produce indiscriminate harm, with the purpose of causing fear in a part of or all of the population.”²³ As David Lloyd so precisely avers, “Violence . . . is legitimate not by virtue of the ends it pursues, but only if the established legal system accords it legitimacy.”²⁴ And although Lloyd is extending Max Weber's foundational theory that “there is no very firm distinction between the authority of the state and its power, or between the state's power and its use, or monopoly, of violence,” for the Mapuche and many Indigenous peoples globally, state violence is actually diffuse across extractive corporations.²⁵ Villalobos here reflects the logic of the state that invalidates the Mapuche hunger strike in order to maintain power via its monopoly on violence: a requirement for the sustaining of state territorial sovereignty.²⁶

Violence, for the state, is a method for its repeated assertion of sovereignty, described above as a logic of elimination. Mapuche historian Fernando Pairican identifies this logic when he insists on a specific Mapuche framing of the colonial continuum of violence that reveals it as an ongoing strategy for the state's legitimation of sovereignty. He writes, “To discuss violence in the geographical setting that is Wallmapu, it is important . . . to talk about violences. The violence of racism, usurpation, the non-recognition of political rights and farmers' [rights], of poverty and that which it has been able to effectuate from the Mapuche world.”²⁷ All of these violences lie at the intersection of body and land, of the state's violent assertions of territorial sovereignty and Wallmapu as a “geographical setting” written (-graphia) by and on the Mapuche body. While Mapuche ontology is literally grounded in a relationship with land conceived of in terms of human and nonhuman relations, where the people (che) are materially and symbolically of the land (mapu), it is important we specifically attend to the expanded Mapuche conception of land, which I explore at length in the second section of this article.²⁸ As is the case with many Indigenous peoples, fundamental to Mapuche core beliefs and practices, küme mongen and mapuche kimün (healthy, balanced living and ancestral knowledge), is a relationship not only with land but with a specific territory, Wallmapu, with its politics and poetics.²⁹ Therefore, a negation of Mapuche territorial autonomy is also a corporeal and ontological negation through the state's violent assertions of territorial sovereignty and the temporality of the colonial continuum. This is a linear time that begins with the colonial encounter that invented both America and, in this originary material and epistemological dispossession, its expansive racial regimes. This is to say, the invention of America via colonialism was also the invention of the “Native” and the “Indian” as both racially distinct categories and categories distinct from race.³⁰ It thus becomes imperative that, rather than understanding Indigenous responses to ecological devastation enacted by the state and multinational corporations as resistance, we first consider the racist colonial origins of slow violence and its inscription in the material and epistemic frameworks within which Indigenous peoples are always already racially categorized and rendered oppositional.

1. The Racist Origins of Slow Violence in Chile: The Land Is (Not) the Body

While many scholars of Latin America have produced work that primarily considers deracialized class as the dominant mode of the region's social organization, especially in discussions beyond Brazil and the Caribbean, the Mapuche (and Black and Indigenous peoples across the continent, archipelagos, and their diasporas) insist on centering race as the state's organizing logic and biopolitical weapon. For the Mapuche, slow violence is grounded in racism, understood as an ongoing biopolitical project that Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “the state sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”³¹ Considering this vulnerability, Alexander Weheliye asks, “What then is racism if not the political exploitation and (re)production of race? Which is to say that the biopolitical function of race is racism.”³² By the accrued racializing narratives discursively attached to the Mapuche body that, paradoxically, both relegate them to a place “beyond the pale” of state protections from violence and discursively absorb them into the nation as “Chileans” without territorial claims or Indigenous identities (“representation without presentation”), the state enacts its biopolitical regulation of Mapuche lives and deaths.³³ The centrality of racism's biopolitical force in an ongoing colonial project is made explicit by Mapuche political prisoner José Huenchunao Mariñan and diasporic Mapuche scholar Alina Rodenkirchen when they call contemporary Chilean violence “Chilean racism as colonial violence.”³⁴ Here we see the entwinement of colonialism and Chilean racism manifest in the myriad state dispossessive projects from the emergence of the Chilean Republic to contemporary intensifications of neoliberalism and extractive capitalism.

This framing identifies contemporary anti-Mapuche racial projects in Chile as having historical precedents prior to the very founding of the nation. Although the Mapuche sustained political and territorial sovereignty through more than two centuries of Spanish occupation, they did so under duress, within the coercive colonial frameworks of more than forty treaties and parliaments. Even so, with the Chilean and Argentine legislative and military moves for independence in the second half of the nineteenth century came these states' violent assertions of a bounded and totalizing national sovereignty. As with other settler-colonial occupations, the newly independent states practiced a form of colonial violence not only in the service of the territorial occupation and objectification of bodies and land for the sake of property and “resource” extraction but also as a method of consolidating a national identity through the construction of discourses on racial difference.³⁵ Specifically, the discursive roots of the codified difference between Chileans, for example, and the Mapuche were conceived at the site of the land and the body, which were seen to be metonymically related. The Argentine scholar María Fernanda Libro writes, “Indigenous corporeality has been historically constituted as a territory of possession and dominion. From the rape of women committed by the conquistadores/colonizers to the ears severed to certify the quantity of indios dead in combat, through a metonymic operation the body has been conceived of [by the state] as a space to dominate.”³⁶ In other words, possession and dominion over the Indigenous body as “indio” was metonymic possession and dominion over land as territory. The physical and psychic marking and possession of the body (or parts of the body) were corollaries of the state's taking possession of land.

This colonial metonymy is the discursive precedent to a structural “recursive dispossession” because it asserts not only this substitution of body for land but also that the substitution was made “on the basis of some material, causal, or conceptual relation.”³⁷ It is through this metonymic operation that the state simultaneously conflates the Mapuche body with land while materially severing the two. What makes this possible is the imposition of colonial logic that retroactively produces both body and land as possessable through their formation as substitutable objects: “indio” for Mapuche and “tierra/land” for mapu, signs that accrue specific meanings directly from the Spanish colonial project. That is, the sense of “indio” is formed in relation to a particular Spanish imperial definition of “tierra” and therefore of its proper subjects. Metonymy is, here, an organizing colonial logic as it first assumes and then asserts the significance of its objects and their relation. The very possibility of the metonymic operation by which the Mapuche body can be made a substitute for land, where the two are made correlate objects, is founded on a recursive colonial logic in which the settler becomes a proper subject. This metonymic operation, Greek (µɛτωνυµία) for “change of name,” is mobilized in the production of land and body as “proper” colonial objects, and the ontological possibility of possession. Robert Nichols calls this production of lands and bodies as proper, and therefore possessable, objects a “recursive dispossession.” Rather than property being prior to theft, “theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated.”³⁸ Thus, the state’s dispossession is the production of property recursively imposed upon the land and body to make each a possessable object. The Mapuche hunger strike, as we will see, reveals this metonymic operation as producing a fundamental difference between the recursive settler-colonial constitutions of the land and body as possessable, and a Mapuche eco-constitutive subjectivity, where mapu is both subject and constitutive of Mapuche subjectivity. In other words, land-as-mapu—a vital and active agent—is in a coconstitutive relationship with people-as-che, while colonial possession requires the “property-generating theft” of this metonymic operation by which the removal of Mapuche as “indio” from the land as possessable object is made possible.

This reified difference was between the settler logics of “civilization and progress” and the “barbarism and savagery” of the “indio.” For example, in 1859 in the influential Chilean journal El Mercurio, the Mapuche were described as “entirely uncivilizable” because “nature has spent everything in developing his body, while his intelligence has remained on par with that of predatory animals.”³⁹ The author goes on to write that it is “in the interest of humanity and for the benefit of civilization” that the state “chain or destroy” the Mapuche.⁴⁰ This association between the Mapuche and nature was also a direct discursive link to a distinction between the predatory, and therefore threatening, animal and the human, forming the mobilizable racial difference that Sylvia Wynter has called a “genre” of the human.⁴¹ The prior metaphorization of the Mapuche as predatory animal enabled the metonymic operation described above. At the heart of this settler assertion is that, while the Mapuche must be removed from the land in order for settlers to possess the land, they were also rendered dangerous to and outside of humanity and therefore deprived of the ability to acquire an object like “land,” colonially conceived. What we are left with is the territorial aporia, the fundamental incommensurability of colonial and Mapuche conceptions of land and/as body. While this insight does not undo state dispossessions or the material violence of its metonymy, it defies the colonial logics that validate and reify the right of possession, thus marking it as a necessarily repeated and violent imposition.

After the wars of Chilean independence (1813–26), the new republic briefly recognized a boundary between the nation-state and Wallmapu in the Parlamento de Tapihue (1825), a meeting of Republican officials and Mapuche leaders of Wallmapu's four major regions, or Butalmapu (great territories).⁴² This tenuous (mis)recognition was itself a signal of imminent colonial dispossession. Less than twenty years later the state launched its largest and most immediately deadly genocidal campaign in what is often called the Ocupación de la Araucanía or Pacificación de la Araucanía in Gülumapu (popularly known as Chile), and the Conquista del Desierto in Puelmapu (popularly known as Argentina), which continued through 1885. The very names of these campaigns discursively direct action toward a landscape—that is, toward a settler-colonial cultural construction of the land as “Araucanía” and “el Desierto,” rather than as the spiritual and geo-nominative Gülumapu and Puelmapu.⁴³ Additionally, the force of these campaigns, the “ocupación,” “pacificación,” and “conquista” (occupation, pacification, and conquest) meant massive Mapuche genocide, territorial (dis)possession, displacement, and imprisonment. For the colonizer, the land and the Mapuche were thus conflated so as to codify the racial difference as the difference between the civilized human and the uncivilizable unhuman, “justifying colonization, violence, genocide and the reduction [sequestration on reservations] of the indigenous peoples as part of a war of civilization against barbarism.”⁴⁴

The “Pacification of Araucanía” (1860–83), subsequent state parcellations of Mapuche territories via a string of Decree Laws (1930, 1931, 1945), and dictator Augusto Pinochet's infamous Decree Law 2,568, or “Liquidation of Mapuche lands” (1979), were all part of a project that we see continued today through state-sanctioned military occupations, the ongoing state of exception in Mapuche territories, racialized narratives of criminality, and the extractive capitalist logic of “just expropriation” for the “common good.”⁴⁵ From Patricio Aylwin's exacerbation of the dictatorship-era antiterrorist law (1991) and the state terror campaigns of “Operación Paciencia” and “Operación Huracán” (2003–18) to the (impeached) billionaire president Sebastián Piñera's tenuous and morphing iterations of the “Plan Impulso Araucanía” and President Boric's continued militarization of Mapuche lands, this project has persisted.⁴⁶ What all these acts of genocide and dispossession have in common is the imposition of colonial logics onto the body and the land and conflation of the Mapuche body and land in the service of these logics. All these state projects enact forms of Mapuche “elimination” for territorial possession. The “Campaña de los pueblos” (1876), for example, according to the Chilean War Ministry, was a conscious and intentional state project to inflict an immediate and direct violence on the Mapuche body-as-land that would force a long-term dispossession in the service of Indigenous elimination for territorial expansion.

The ministry describes their attritional dispossessive tactics as:

We see here the direct reference to a totalizing and incessant terror campaign with the intent of securing “safety” for settler occupation through Mapuche death and territorial dispossession. This passage reveals that the dispossessive practices of the Republican state involved both direct and attritional violence that targeted not only life-sustaining Mapuche relationships with land, such as being able to grow and harvest crops and raise animals, but also the kind of relative peace necessary for a generative sociality and the practices of care found in the entwinement of the two. There would be “promises of peace” made and unheeded—an oft-used tactic of colonial sovereign assertions and treaties, for such promises of peace can only be made by a state that assumes settler occupation as a precedent of sovereignty and thus cannot be the foundation upon which negotiations are made. Further, the state's framing of encounters with the Mapuche as “war” had already established the terms of these encounters. The state was explicit about its violent coercion of Mapuche “behavior,” which suggests that any Mapuche response asserting territorial and corporeal autonomy, such as standing one's ground or planting and harvesting one's crops, was a punishable intrusion on the state's acts of possession meant to establish sovereign territorial precedent. Thus the hunger strike also asserts corporeal autonomy by way of identifying the dispossession of land as the source of hunger itself. The colonial “ground” of the dispossessive project targets the body to possess the land and targets the land to dispossess the body of its relationship with the land by which it is corporeally sustained and culturally constituted.

Within this violence that manifests as dispossessive acts of terror, the Mapuche hunger strike is itself, as Ángela R. Boitano Geuttner asserts, an “inscription that takes place in the symbolic network.”⁴⁸ This is because, as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the symbolic is the realm in which the subject “conceives of himself as part of a collective” in relation to the Other through language, and therefore, Geuttner continues, “death will change the shape of the world not for itself but for others.”⁴⁹ The Mapuche hunger strike, then, as the action of a subject constituted by land-as-mapu, also performs an intervening geo-graphy, or earth-writing. Thus the occupation of Mapuche land by the colonially constituted human as Man, or the ontological genre of the Human of Western modernity as theorized by Sylvia Wynter, makes objective racialized difference an assertion of Chilean national identity through its negation of Mapuche corporeal and territorial autonomy. These logics of elimination deem genocide and reducción imperative.

The Mapuche hunger strikes are in direct relation to these ongoing state dispossessive projects; they are targeted acts of defiance against the imposition of Mapuche deaths by the state and refusals of its discursive constitution of Mapuche life. It must be made clear here that the hunger strike is not solely or primarily to be read as resistance, as the mere fact of Mapuche presence by the act of wresting one's life and manner of dying from the state always already stands in direct opposition to the assertions of Chilean sovereignty. This argument against conceiving of the hunger strike as resistance is one that categorically refuses its framing solely as a response to colonial violence. Rather, I argue that the Mapuche hunger strike as a generative act of presence is made possible not at the moment of response to colonial power but as a continuation of Mapuche being and kimün sustained and morphing since before the colonial encounter, as the continuation of an active presence rather than generated in reaction.⁵⁰ Within the logics by which the state stakes its claims of territorial sovereignty, Mapuche presence itself becomes always already oppositional, an assertion reified when such presence is framed as solely constituted by resistance.

As in any racial project, its “ground” is formed by both the accrual through citation of racist narratives attached to racialized bodies and the institutions and infrastructures that temporally and spatially—that is, territorially—organize these racialized bodies. This is a clear example of what Gilmore, Weheliye, Mariñan, and Rodenkirchen, quoted above, all argue: that racism should be understood as the biopolitical function of race, that the enactment of racializing narratives serves as a recursive founding precedent for state sovereignty and territorial expansion. These territorial and ontological structures are fundamental to Chilean settler logics that claim European whiteness through Indigenous corporeal and administrative genocide—which is to say, through the persistence of violent dispossessions as well as by discursive and legal “extermination” through official state performatives like “Today there are no Mapuche, because we are all Chileans.”⁵¹ Such claims, as in the continuation of the antiterrorist law in President Aylwin's 1993 Indigenous Law 19253, fundamentally bar the Mapuche from legal claims to the rights of citizenship without incorporation, the constitutional recognition as pueblo nación, and thus to territorial rights.⁵²

In addition to this condensed history of anti-Mapuche racialized colonial violence, let us also briefly consider the morphing structures of an ongoing Mapuche resistance and struggle, but keep in mind that “although the Mapuche were immersed in the struggles of the Chilean people, this had its specificity in the different epochs of the Republic; the purpose of Mapuche struggles, although they conceived of social justice as reparation, was also in the service of reconstitution.”⁵³ This is significant when thinking about the future of the Mapuche autonomy movement and its public presentation in the linguistic and embodied gestural performativity of Mapuche hunger strikers. “Reconstitution” is not a regressive utopia but a continuum of new formations that emerge from within and in relation to the entwinement of colonialism and capitalism. Mapuche resistance of the colonial period culminated in what is referred to in history texts as the “levantamiento mapuche de 1881,” an uprising that, by the force of violent coercion, split Mapuche communities among those who might generally be considered territorial autonomists, those who remained neutral, and those who sided with the state in its efforts at acculturation. This was, as is often the case, due to the need for survival, a coerced decision especially ascribable to the spatial sequestration of a largely agrarian people within reducciónes and economically linked diasporas to urban areas. These reductions, for example, were “given” to the Mapuche as agrarian properties through a grant titling process, “a ridiculous logic according to which the titling process was a kind of ‘gift’ made by the State to the Mapuche, and not the recognition of the old or historical occupation.”⁵⁴ Such a sovereign territorial move discursively translated the land first into state property so that it might later be “gifted” to the Mapuche. This territorial aporia, where land is simultaneously colonial possession and the sustaining site of Indigenous life, is at the heart of an ongoing Mapuche resistance and refusal and later is fundamental to the hunger strike as assertion of territorial sovereignty.

As the major impetus of the Ocupación was to acculturate or otherwise eliminate the Mapuche, many subsequent modes of Mapuche resistance were oriented toward what the winka (non-Mapuche) dictatorship-era performance collective CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) have theorized as “expanding livable space.”⁵⁵ Some of these actions, which emerged in response to occupation and in relation to colonial capital, were the 1932 declaration of an Indigenous Republic; a self-managed Indigenous credit fund created during the 1930s; the proposal for an interministerial association of Indigenous affairs focused on Mapuche struggles for land, education, and economy; and the (re)settlements established during Salvador Allende's 1972 Agrarian Reform period.⁵⁶ Simultaneous to these actions for material survival were the intellectual, discursive, and embodied gestural formations of the Mapuche autonomist, feminist, and decolonial movements, from the countryside to the cities, and involving academics, activists, and community leaders. Implicit in these formations was and is the reclamation of Mapuzugun to generate new autonomist cultural and territorial formations. As the editors of Awükan ka Kuxankan Zugu Wajmapu Mew: Violencias coloniales en Wajmapu write,

Much nuance is present in these opening words to the collection, which are important for understanding the symbolic and material force of Mapuche hunger strikes and the strikers' words. Colonial violence, of course, is a concept not found in Mapuzugun, the Mapuche language, and is therefore symbolically represented by a cultural understanding of “violence” that arises from various human social tensions. The evocation of the concept of colonial violence from kuxankan is also its transformation and appropriation into a Mapuche cultural and social framing. There is something generated here, too, by the violence that exceeds kuxankan and thus lies outside of language in the realm of embodied experience. What the editors assert in the face of such ongoing racist dispossessions and codified difference from the civilized human as described above is not the ubiquity of the violence of human social tensions but the fact that “Mapuche life is not exempt” from this violence—that is, that the Mapuche are to be understood as human in relation to but not emergent from such violence. Such an inversion calls into question the primacy of the colonially (violently) formed “Human,” and thus also “civilization” and “territory” or land.

We might understand, then, the colonial violence that exceeds kuxankan as also exceeding the Mapuche conception of the human and of acceptable social relations. What is identified here is not an aspiration to or an implementation of a colonial conception of the Human but rather the formation of the concept within Mapuche kimün (knowledge). All of this is to say that the combination of the performative gesture of the hunger strike, the statements of the hunger strikers, and Córdova's move to death strike, is a symbolic reconstitution of both “mapu-che” and “mapu.” This reconstitution emerges from the hunger strikers' embodied textual and gestural language that can only be misrecognized by the state as resistance in its defiance of the colonial metonymy of body and land. Thus the critical assumption of a Mapuche political “resurgence” is one that prioritizes acts of resistance in relation to continuous waves of state violence. What the hunger strikes suggest, rather, is that in order to decenter the state from Indigenous life we must attend to that which exceeds resistance: those dynamic and generative acts of refusal that prioritize Mapuche kimün and eco-constitutive subjectivities.

2. The Body Is (Not) the Land: Mapuche Hunger Strikes

In her 2019 novel, El tren del olvido, Mapuche-Tehuelche activist and author Moira Millán tells us that etymologically the Mapuche are “gente de la tierra” (people of the land) and that one must understand the “tierra” (land) not through a normative settler-colonial conception of “land” but rather as mapu.⁵⁸ It is here that “tierra” as a translation of mapu signals the generative gap between the material world and the word through which the world is known, formed, and reformed. The terms mapu, tierra, and land do not “map” onto one another. In the colonial imagination, “tierra” ontologically substitutes for “mapu.” In Mapuche kimün,⁵⁹ the sense of mapu pushes through the translation and leans into “tierra” and “land.”⁶⁰ “Tierra,” as a Mapuche utterance, must also be read as “mapu,” and thus speaks to a territorially specific worldview in which the Mapuche body is in relation to the land. By this logic, if the body is land or the land is body, then it is such only within a specific, grounded Mapuche relationship between land and body, an expanded ecology of mapu, one that is inclusive of this sense and exceeds the limits of the rural/urban divide or bordered nation-state. The body, in this sense, is not land; “che” is the body-in-relation-with-land as kimün, a relation in which bodies become a spiritually, temporally, and spatially (that is, territorially constituted) “people.” As such, the hunger strike emerges explicitly from the body-land relationship in the context of Mapuche territoriality (Wallmapu). The action and effect of the hunger strike, wresting of one's mode of dying from the state through the practice of willful self-destruction, is thus not only an assertion of Mapuche corporeal autonomy but the symbolic and material presence of a specific relation, or land-as-mapu.⁶¹

This alter-, or perhaps ante-formation, of land-as-mapu immediately transforms the significance of the relationship between body and land but fails to “map” onto the colonial deformation of “tierra,” thus requiring “a sustained struggle,” as Mapuche linguist and elected representative for the Chilean Constitutional Convention, Elisa Loncon Antileo writes:

From this Mapuche feminist perspective, the Mapuche woman's sustained struggle, in relation to incessant coloniality, is for the sustaining and future of a Mapuche “life.” It is a fight that enables the education of future generations (through inarrumen, knowledge through observation) and therefore against the forces that daily threaten this life and future. The struggle is for the sustaining—of territory as care for the life of nature, and of mapu as body, territory, land, and nature—not for reclamation, as if such knowledge had been wholly lost or an antecolonial territory could be retrieved. Rather, this sustaining is of the mapu that has been and is under constant threat of dispossession because mapu is misappropriated as tierra, land, and territory within colonial and capitalist logics.

In her words above, Loncon twice invokes and highlights the “life” of land in parallel syntactic structures. For instance, “the life of nature” is connected syntactically to the fight for territory as both material and epistemological sustenance. Further, the claim that “Mapu has life” signals the vital presence of land-as-mapu by which “its children” are sustained. Mapu, here, is a subject that “has” life and children. We should understand this series of vital relations, the material relations legible also in these linguistic relations, as mapu che, or people of mapu. What is particularly poignant in Loncon's phrasing is the parallel between body and mapu; the syntactic proximity shows the coconstitutive relation among the Mapuche woman, her sustained struggle for the future of her children, and mapu as “the source for the sustaining of its children.” We should here note a genealogy of nonreproductive land-body relations in Mapuche memory in both Machi and epupillan (two-spirit) grounded subjectivities.⁶³ Further, the children of mapu exceed human reproduction and are rather all the coconstitutive beings—plant, animal, human, insect, mushroom, sky, water—in balanced ecological relations required for future generations of these. Millán also writes that mapu “has life,” a claim identically phrased in Loncon's quotation above; Millán further argues that mapu “is a newen, [an] energy, force, [and] every form of existence that creates and feeds the magic circle of life.”⁶⁴ That mapu has life and, as Loncon states above, sustains, creates, and feeds this life, further reveals the interrelation between mapu and che as coconstitutive. This is a critical intervention in the colonial metonymic operation described above, for the fact that mapu “has life” and also “creates,” “feeds,” and “sustains” life reveals it as a relational subject rather than a substitutive object. Rather than asserting land-as-mapu as property prior to the dispossession of Spanish and then Chilean settler colonialism, Córdova's performative restitution of Mapuche ancestral territories as Ñuke Mapu and Millán and Loncon's presentation of the vital coconstitution of mapu and che establish landedness, or place-based peoplehood, as a precedent of relation rather than possession.

In his recent report on Machi Córdova's health and well-being while on hunger strike during the COVID-19 pandemic, the social anthropologist Paulo Andrés Castro Neira describes Machi Córdova's attribution of the pandemic to a cosmic ecological imbalance and its relation to his imprisoned body:⁶⁵

We see here, as in Millán's framing of Mapuche being above and Loncon's “sustained struggle,” that imbalance is a disruption of body and land relations and thus of “harmony” as a relational phenomenon. These relations establish territorial and corporeal precedent beyond the concept of territorial possession, an important distinction when considering Mapuche hunger strikes in relation to the ongoing dispossessions of the state. Kutxan is the root of kuxankan in Violencias coloniales en Wajmapu = Awükan ka kuxankan zugu Wajmapu mew, mobilized here to signify colonial violence as imbalance that causes illness.⁶⁷ It is important to understand this “system” as an indirect target of the Chilean state that directly affects the Mapuche world because the state's epistemology, or normative understanding of itself as a sovereign nation, is not the eco-logic of mapu and/as che. The state's ecological devastation emerges from its refusal to consider ecology as a matter of relations of complex life systems, rather than of tierra or land as property and resource. Mapu, as elaborated above, is an expanded notion of land as in a constitutive relation with life (nature, people/che, spirit), a multiplicity that exceeds and, by doing so, defies the national and legally demarcated assertions of land as property and resource and thus as the “ground” on which Indigenous dispossession can take place and continue. The Chilean state's facilitation of global extractive capital on the land-as-tierra has dire effects on this expanded ecology of mapu. As Ida Day notes in her reading of the “re-enchantment of nature” in Huilliche-Mapuche poet Jaime Luis Huenún's poetry collection Reducciones, “Since scientific ecology refers to the study of physical interrelations in an ecosystem, it does not address the root of the ecological crisis, which is the disregard for the sacred nature of life.”⁶⁸ Illness or disease, in a Mapuche cosmovision, is an effect of an ecological imbalance within the eco-logic of mapu, that is, the effect of an imbalance in the relationships that sustain health as balance in mapuche kimün (Mapuche knowledge) and küme mongen (well-being/being-well).⁶⁹ Although mapu is not mappable onto tierra, the material effects of capitalist extraction facilitated by the racially justified intensification of military occupation in Wallmapu and Mapuche imprisonment slip beyond symbolic frames.

The disjunction between settler-colonial conceptions of land through which sovereignty and state authority are asserted and Indigenous practices of grounded being—by which, as Byrd notes, “Indigenous bodies matter as the embodiment of land . . . [and] are always already political orders in the settler eye”—is the space of political force within which the hunger striker asserts presence by manifesting imbalance as a sickness of relationality.⁷⁰ And for a Machi such as Córdova, whose duty is to the community and to mapu understood as an integral part of a far-reaching ecological “system” of relationality, this ecological (im)balance is particularly important. Although we might understand the Mapuche hunger strike as an act of corporeal autonomy, self-determination, and an embodied and discursive precedent for territorial repossession, the state's formation of the Indigenous body structures Mapuche/settler relations as incommensurable. That is, there is an uncrossable gap between Mapuche expanded conceptions of “land” as “mapu” by which a “people” is constituted, and the state's conception of land/tierra from which the Indigenous and territory can be owned, extracted, removed, and severed. Córdova's hunger strike makes his body the site where this incommensurability is made visible, and the state's claims to territory and/as nation are unsettled.

At the core of the Mapuche hunger strike as defiant political practice is thus, as Macarena Gómez-Barris writes, an “identifying with ongoing coloniality and dispossession [as a] means of survival [and as] the basis for a furious refusal and disidentification with the history of material and symbolic losses and efforts at forms of recovery.”⁷¹ This “identifying” should not be misunderstood as the becoming of a Mapuche subject via coloniality but a representational strategy that emerges from a Mapuche conception of being in the hunger strike itself. It is in this inescapable, postcolonial relationality that the hunger strike as colonial demolition occurs.⁷² The state defines the body through a biopolitical racial apparatus that sees the Indigenous body as land. The Mapuche hunger striker simultaneously reveals the corporeal effect of the violence of the state's dispossessive and extractive policies and asserts a material presence as relational coconstitution that defies, as Byrd writes, “an Indigenous alterity that does not and is not matter precisely because colonization stripped the ground from beneath our feet.”⁷³ It is in this rupture, in the presence of the hunger striker's relation to land-as-mapu as precedence and of hunger as the visible severance from the sustaining of mapu, that the aporia of tierra/mapu and the indio/Mapuche emerges as a material difference.

Mapuche hunger strikes also point to the ongoing colonial dispossessions that force the Mapuche from their lands and into extreme poverty, as in the Republic's explicit mobilization of “hunger” as war tactic and the contemporary Chilean state's territorial dispossession via extraction, which destroys ecologies and diminishes sustainable arable land. In this way, the hunger strike highlights the ongoing violence of the state's various tactics of “elimination” through the refusal of food or sustenance from the state's formation of land as possessable object. Further, the state's historic and ongoing parcellation of Mapuche lands and their sale to private and multinational corporate owners that pollute, displace, and devastate local and regional ecologies have the immediate material effects of military occupation and criminalize Mapuche for their mere presence on militarily occupied lands. Thus, life-sustaining material resources are also restricted or barred, as in the prohibition of planting food crops between the rows of harvested trees in the vast pine tree plantations. As Libro writes, “Reduction to a small plot of infertile land transfers to bodies not only through the bloody repression of these processes, but also because of the precariousness of life to which this outrage has condemned [the Mapuche].”⁷⁴

To know the force of Córdova's hunger strike is to engage his act as one of a collectivity that emerges from the anti-Indigenous actions of the state and in a genealogy of Indigenous acts of corporeal autonomy. Put another way, Córdova's hunger strike reveals its force through our understanding of both the historical colonial processes that demand such extreme responses and the previous acts of asserting material presence that enliven the autonomist movement's calls for territorial restitution.⁷⁵ As Mapuche-Huilliche activist and autonomist leader Héctor Llaitul notes, “It's the last thing we can do to demonstrate; our body is all we have left with which to protest.”⁷⁶ What is at the heart of this demonstration is the colonially imposed question of whether the Mapuche have bodies or land.

Mapuche activist and CAM (Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco) founder and ex-member José Huenchunao identifies this logic when he specifies what a non-settler-colonial relationship with Mapuche territory must be:

As we see in Huenchunao's words, the constitution of Wallmapu/Wajmapu, or all Mapuche territory, as “our territory” does not deny the fact of settler-colonial occupation, nor does it ban non-Mapuche peoples from also living there. Rather, this framing insists on the integration and practice of Mapuche kimün rather than the multiculturalist inclusion and state recognition that continue the processes of elimination and sustain the devastating logics of land as tierra and Native as indio. The hunger strike establishes this Mapuche presence as territoriality that defies these settler assertions. This is to say that the Mapuche hunger striker's body-as-territory is a relation that precedes the nation-state and is specific to Mapuche cultural codes, principles, and ideals, thus barring the efficacy of national recognition and instead requiring the decomposition of the nation-state. Millán's and Loncon's framing of Mapuche being provides an understanding of a grounded relation of body and land, and this ontological conjunction can also be said to be a framing of Mapuche territoriality. By such framing we understand the Mapuche, and therefore the hunger-striking body, as fundamentally defying “the ways the settler-state regulate[s] . . . proper kinds of embodiment (‘bare life’) but also legitimate modes of collectivity and occupancy” and what Mark Rifkin calls “bare habitance.”⁷⁸ Theorizing the Mapuche relation of body to land as a specific ontological condition reveals its fundamental opposition to the racial capitalist logics of settler colonialism that determine the body and land as possessable and therefore as sites for infrastructure and extraction. What emerges is Mapuche presence and the coconstitutive relation with land-as-mapu as territorial precedence.

Conclusion

Before and during his hunger strike, as Neira describes in his report, Córdova had been struggling with his inability to attend to his duties as Machi due to his captivity in prison and, subsequently, the slow degradation of his physical and mental faculties caused by starvation.⁷⁹ After his release from Angol prison for medical reasons, as he lay in his bed at the Hospital Intercultural de Nueva Imperial in Araucanía just outside of Temuco in southern Chile, his role as Machi to the community and its territoriality in planetary relation were foremost in his mind. His only demand for ending the hunger strike at this point was the ability to return to his rewe, a “requirement for initiating medical procedures and bring[ing] back the right equilibrium for the community in times of danger or calamity.”⁸⁰ Córdova's role as Machi to maintain healthy balance within the dynamic ecology that is mapu has proven impossible under the constant embattlement of settler occupation, but as Cristina Romo, Mapuche spokesperson for Córdova, quotes him as saying, his hunger strike was “a grain of sand in the struggle of the Mapuche nation.”⁸¹ After the thirty hours he was allotted by the state to return to the community's rewe and perform a ceremony, Córdova was returned under military escort to a prison hospital in the Centro de Estudio y Trabajo (a penitentiary in Vilcún, Araucanía) to continue his recovery and await transfer for completion of his eighteen-year sentence. Romo relays Córdova's insistence that this is but an instance in the ongoing Mapuche struggle for territorial restitution and sovereign peoplehood: “The progress is not satisfactory in its entirety, but I have carried out this hunger strike . . . with the ultimate goal of advancing step by step.” It is evident in Córdova's words, quoted here and above, and his demand to return to his rewe that his hunger strike was not focused on prison conditions, nor on the criminal charges that put him in prison, but on the restitution of an expanded ecological relationality and thus corporeal autonomy (and vice versa). These demands combined, as Córdova states above, are for “the restitution of our ancestral Mapuche territories and the settlement of all historic debts owed by the Chilean state to all indigenous peoples.” For Córdova, per the Mapuche cosmovision, the expressive, dying body as weaponization of life has a planetary effect, from the relation of self to spirit, to community, pueblo-nación or “[Mapuche] nation and native people,” and the planetary balance of ñuke mapu (mother earth).

Although there are many distinct Mapuche political projects, autonomist movements such as CAM seek territorial autonomy. And although Córdova is not affiliated with CAM, his duties as Machi are grounded in, and thus require, corporeal and territorial autonomy and self-determination. He and other Mapuche hunger strikers over the years—such as Patricia Troncoso, who is the mobilizing center of Gómez-Barris's 2012 article “Mapuche Hunger Acts”—have sought cultural presence through self-determination and autonomy that is territorially focused and emerges from a specific Mapuche ontology—a people/che—formed in the entwined relation of body and land-as-mapu described above. After seventy days of hunger strike, Córdova reaffirmed the force of the strike when he said, “If I die, don't let your guard down. Keep fighting until our ancestral Mapuche territory is returned to us.”⁸² These words recall Troncoso's January 22, 2008, open letter, where she writes: “From here, I want to encourage you to continue defending us from this predatory economic system that is seeking to pillage the little bit of nature we have left[.] [It is] inhumane because any economic project in our Mapuche territory is considered more valuable than we are, and [it is] immoral because the only human goals it leaves us are money and consumerism.”⁸³ Troncoso here explicitly recognizes the equation by which the value of Mapuche territory and bodies lay in their being made object/commodity, an epistemological and material structural reordering by which Mapuche life, and thus land-as-mapu, is made absent by the state's substitutive metonymy. This structural reordering is also an explicitly material concern in juridical land restitution, for as Piergiorgio Di Giminiani argues, “By transforming the ancestral territory into land with market value, restitution claims have paradoxically introduced new forms of displacement.”⁸⁴

The force of Córdova's hunger strike and those that came before and after, their political leverage, lies in this antagonism between colonial logics that determine the Mapuche body and that of the people/che as landed possessions, and the assertion of territorial presence made by these dying bodies themselves. There is a slippage that happens in the state's metonymy where the removed Indigenous body (or part of body) stands in for territorial possession. The existential substitution made by this metonymy begins to decompose in the face of the state's simultaneous (im)materialization of the Indigenous body as inhuman and uncivilizable while still under the force of the acculturating projects of an ongoing colonialism by which “indios” might be made Chilean. It is thus that the Mapuche hunger strike expresses “the desire and call for justice and, at the same time, the recognition of the impossibility of its realization under the political conditions in which these violent performances take place.”⁸⁵ The fact of Córdova's ending his strike to return to his rewe is an act attesting to the impossible desire for reclamation in the face of state territorial possession that remains total for as long as colonial logics cause an imbalance in ecological relations and retain the force of onto-epistemological domination. Even so, what is generated by the hunger strike and Córdova's subsequent, although brief, return to his rewe is Mapuche landed presence and/as territorial precedence, a relation that defies state biopolitics and unsettles assertions of national sovereignty.

Acknowledgments

I wrote this essay while in the unceded territories of the Lenape and Haudenosaunee, of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois Nations, as well as the lands of the Blackfeet and Shoshone-Bannock Nations. Holding this fact present changes the way I write, research, and teach—how I live, the quality of my relations, and how I remember my life. As I am not Mapuche, I am not capable of arguing about the intracultural significance of Mapuche kimün. I hope I have here made a worthy and useful intervention in my sincere attempt to honor the Mapuche peoples and their knowledges with careful inarrumen and good faith. I want to thank Delali Kumavie for her critical interlocution at all stages of the writing of this article, Roger Hallas for his close and generous reading, Ramsey McGlazer for his critical engagement, and the anonymous reviewers for their generative comments. Chaltumay, gracias, eskerrik asko, thank you.

Notes

Works Cited