FORUM: DECOLONIZING MAPUCHE HISTORY AND AC TION

Mapuche Mnemonics
Reversing the Colonial Gaze through New
Visualities of Extractive Capitalism

Macarena Gómez-­Barris

On September 11, 2014, a series of performances, marches, inaugurations, and

media events marked an important turn in Chile, forcefully interrupting forty years
of national amnesia about the legacies of former dictator Augusto Pinochet’s state
violence. The experiences of the detained-­disappeared and the tortured and the suf-
fering of these groups’ relatives showed up in multiple arenas, effectively opening up
new public spheres in which to express the effects of the military coup and the sub-
sequent dictatorship (1973 – 89). As this issue of Radical History Review notes, look-
ing back on the Pinochet period opens up what Steve J. Stern, in 2004, first called
the memory box even further, especially in terms of outlining the mechanisms of
forgetting, their imbrication with neoliberalism, and the production of representa-
tional systems that occlude knowledge about subterranean histories.1 The moment
of the fortieth anniversary also allows the Pinochet era to be placed within a longer
genealogy of military and police violence that was targeted against dispossessed
populations and that came prior to and persisted after authoritarianism.
In this essay, I address how indigenous memory haunts the Chilean nation
as a past-­present index of unaccounted-­for discursive and material violence. This
extends far beyond the forty-­year window of memories about state terror and leftist
“dissident” activity, although as many labor historians have documented, the twenti-
eth century has been filled with antilabor massacres. The term past-­present indexes

Radical History Review

Issue 124 (January 2016)  doi 10.1215/01636545-3159988
© 2016 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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for me the continuum of colonization within a web of extractive capitalism that

began in the 1500s and has persisted through the past forty years of neoliberalism
until the present, an extractive capitalist complex that, despite shifts in its mode
of production and representation, continues to unequally structure both relations
between humans and relations between humans and other species. Yet, within the
Chilean context, this web has been historically challenged by Mapuche, Pehuenche,
and Huilliche peoples, not only in terms of militant push back but also importantly
in the realm of an embodied archive of cultural memory. To understand Mapuche
cultural memory, we must recognize culture not as epiphenomenal, or as secondary
to processes of colonization, but as the location of innovation and engagement that
produces social and sacred connections to the natural world.
Given the historical importance of the visual as a way to document and con-
test the presence of indigeneities in the Americas, I analyze how we might begin to
think about cultural memory in relation to Native self-­representation against domi-
nant regimes of visuality. Visual cultures have positive and negative dimensions as
weapons of the state, on the one hand, but also as a mode of archiving indigenous
mnemonics, on the other. I discuss two films: first, Francisco Huichaqueo Perez’s
2011 experimental film Mencer: Ñi pewma, which looks at the pine forest mono-
cultural plantations that have displaced indigenous peoples from their territories,
and, second, Esteban Larraín’s 2004 film El velo de Berta, a film about the political
struggles and vernacular practices of Huilliche peoples against the building of the
Ralco Dam. These films render the primary industries that have been at the center
of extractive economies during the period of neoliberal violence since 1973. Fur-
ther, these films are representative of a larger genre of global indigenous representa-
tions that imagine how the ancestral forests, the Maule River, and the nonhuman
world have deep resonances as mnemonic symbols of indigenous cultural resistance.
Mapuche, Pehuenche, and Huilliche cultural memory rewrites official histories of
settlement, the logics of developmentalism, and the principles of extractivism, which
in effect extend the definition and periodization of state violence that characterized
my earlier work.2

Constructing Illegibility
Colonial and modern visuality functions through a set of ocular constructions and
visual claims on territory. Bruce Braun describes European exploration and settle-
ment in northwestern Canada as legally constituted through the visual, a mode of
looking that legitimizes and authorizes colonial imposition.3 Braun writes how settler
representations of landscape produced a history of colonial seeing that constructed
the land and indigenous populations either as completely other or as absent, rather
than depicting indigenous lives “within the frame” of their homeland territories.
First Nation Peoples are often visualized as backdrop within romantic paintings and
within photographs that evacuate landscapes of indigenous habitants. These lands
92  Radical History Review

in fact are connected to deep indigenous cosmologies and relationalities that exist
beyond the capacity of capture of the colonial gaze.
In Seeing like the State, James C. Scott describes the high modernist van-
tage point that catalogs from above as a way to organize the projects of modern
statecraft. In high modernism, making populations legible becomes an important
mode of governmentality, where scientific knowledge and classification techniques
produce knowledge about the land and populations in order to rule over them.4
Scott indicates the problems with the developmental logic that has resulted in what
he terms “disaster planning,” the result of the imperialist viewpoint that observes
and legislates from above without understanding the complexities of the systems
in place below. The scientific perspective often does little to order and improve on
human and natural life as it intends, he argues, but instead decisively contributes to
failed schemes that especially dispose of rural subjectivities and diminishes its life
possibilities. These two takes on the visual, one about the produced invisibility of
indigenous populations through the settler representational imaginary and the other
that rules over populations and lands through modern governmentality, form the
theoretical backdrop for my discussion about forms of indigenous representational
legibility as its own form of cultural memory.
Within the structures of recognition that operate within Chile, the Mapuche
have largely been invisible and made to operate within the legacies of a colonial
power order that has rendered indigenous peoples as racially inferior. At the same
time, the state has made indigenous peoples the subjects of legislation about ter-
ritories and subversion, contradictorily legitimating occupation through legislation
that dispossesses Native peoples of their territories and citizenship rights.5 Mapuche
peoples have been forced to function within a national visual order that depicts
them either as invisible racially inferior peoples or as hypervisible in the realm of
cultural folklore, which constitutes indigeneity as past-­oriented and inconsequen-
tial to the liberal nation’s future.6 This anti-­Native visual regime produces Chilean
settlement as the normative historical condition and naturalizes Native territories as
the site of neoliberal extraction.
Indeed, the history of occupation and settlement in the southern territories
shows the extent of this problematic contradiction. During colonization, Mapuche
peoples were often pictorially represented in colonial portraiture as militant warriors
who, with the indigenous hero Lautaro at the helm, successfully fought and defeated
the Spanish Crown. While it is important to note that Mapuche communities main-
tained their autonomy until 1886, when the Spanish defeated the indigenous resis-
tance in a period euphemistically referred to as the “Pacification of Araucanía,” dis-
courses of heroism have historically covered up the more violent representation of
the realities of occupation and massacres that took place in the Bío-­Bío region from
the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Representational romanticism veils
the stark reality below the surface of the construction of whiteness at the heart of
Chile’s mestizo modernity.
 Gómez-Barris | Mapuche Mnemonics   93

Colonial Occlusion
Colonization during the nineteenth century also functioned through settler legisla-
tion that refused legalization of indigenous territories yet gave land grants freely to
foreign-­born European immigrants. Through a series of immigration incentives, the
Chilean government promoted white settlements from France, England, Poland,
Spain, and especially Germany. For instance, following the Selective Immigration
Law of 1845, more than six thousand families from Germany were granted immi-
gration papers and land titles within the southern territories of Chile. These settlers
founded a host of new cities, while the state established a permanent military pres-
ence that continued to expand its influence in the region. Thus the legal apparatus
was used to maintain occupation in indigenous territories and expand the settler
project while reducing indigenous capacity by shrinking the ability to sustain com-
munal life.
In the nineteenth century, reducciones, reservation-­like territories, vastly
minimized communal land holdings at the center of extended families and their
social organization. This dramatically fractured the Mapuche peoples into three
thousand dispersed communities and threatened the very basis of Native organiza-
tion. In the subsequent process of capitalist expansion in the region, impoverish-
ment, and proletarianization, Mapuche communities were faced with the possibil-
ity of extermination. Though most Chileans could stand to engage the seriousness
of this unjust history in relation to our own complicity, much of this is not news.
My point in outlining the conditions of this multiple onslaughts is to suggest that
throughout such elimination processes, cultural memory has historically functioned
to maintain community ties and to produce new forms of political autonomy. Such
autonomy functions outside the radar of the state legibility that Scott describes as
taking place in high modernism.

Cultural Pliability
For instance, alongside the lonko, or male chief, the role of the Machi female spiri-
tual guide was increasingly significant in this new landscape, where female media-
tors reinforced new codes of conduct as protection from social, economic, and cul-
tural disintegration. As Ana Mariella Bacigalupo analyzes, Mapuche female agency
can be located in the figure of the machi, a touchstone figure for a set of mnemonic
practices that respond to material restrictions.7 By offering medicinal arts, healing
herbs, incantations, and local bodily knowledge, as well as the syncretic incorpora-
tion of elements of Catholicism, the machi became the center of Mapuche commu-
nal life and creativity. As Bacigalupo writes, the machi “must simultaneously operate
according to the traditional prestige systems of their communities while gaining
legitimacy as healers and religious intermediaries in the dominant wingka [indig-
enous] world.”8 Within a racially subjugated paradigm, and the gender stratification
that is the modern colonial project, state violence has historically been met with
forms of indigenous knowledge that negotiated between changing worlds.
94  Radical History Review

Raising submerged histories of machi knowledge and praxis illustrates the

degree that discussions of the memory of state violence and its social formations can
be expanded. While indigeneity is informed by tradition and cultural practices, it has
also been situated in complex tension and negotiation with state power, male author-
ity, regional identity, and gender identities. Bacigalupo concludes that “heterogene-
ity and transcultural dialogue are always present even in the most traditional forms
of Mapuche cultural expression such as machi lore and practice.” 9 These forms of
transcultural dialogue and mnemonic exchange complicate the aftermath picture
of state violence that is often described in relation to Chilean authoritarianism.
Considering the paradigms of fluidity and adaptation that are apparent in the role
of the machi during occupation, cultural memory becomes not solely a repository
of wounds, traumas, and victimization of authoritarianism but also an activator of
forms of expressive resistance to colonization.
Historically, in the face of acute violence, cultural memory functioned as an
important realm of autonomy for Mapuche communities against the material and
representational practices of colonization. Throughout the twentieth century, the
struggles over land and land titles continued, culminating in the Christian Demo-
cratic land reform process of the mid-­to late 1960s and Salvador Allende’s accel-
eration of that process during the Popular Unity period in the early 1970s. Though
Mapuche activism was present in rural peasant struggles at every level, indigenous
rights were minimally acknowledged as a visible realm of political and representa-
tional engagement.
The dramatic legislation put in place by the Pinochet regime to further sub-
divide, privatize, and liquidate indigenous communal lands is an essential piece of
the kinds of continuous injustices committed particularly against indigenous peoples
of the southern territories. Here it is important to mention that democratization, the
main conceptual and temporal marker of the new memory studies literature, does
little to consider how the transition processes left in place the legal architecture that
has been used against indigenous communities. Specifically, the Anti-­terrorist Law
(No. 18.314), put into effect shortly after Pinochet took power to defend the military
state against “internal acts of subversion,” has been used against Mapuche social
movements throughout the past thirty years.
Against the encroachment of national and multinational forest and hydro-
electric industries, Mapuche political organizations began to take direct action.
For instance, sit-­ins, mass marches, and land takeovers proliferated in the South,
in urban centers, and in Santiago. The visibility of these social actors resulted in
the state representing Mapuche actors as terrorists, which effectively doubled the
sentences for certain offenses, conditioned pretrial release, allowed the prosecution
to withhold evidence from defendants for up to six months, and permitted convic-
tions based on testimony given by anonymous witnesses. Such anonymous witnesses
have been called “faceless witnesses,” since they dubiously appear in court behind
 Gómez-Barris | Mapuche Mnemonics   95

screens so they cannot be formally identified. During this period, media and police
accounts rarely have understood the epistemologies at work within the struggles
that were about defending autonomy, land, cultural memory, and a mode of think-
ing about the future outside the market logics and developmental paradigm that has
currently been offered.
Since the 1990s, Mapuche cultural memory has also been configured through
the new media technologies and forms of visuality that have become increasingly
accessible to indigenous populations. Specifically, grassroots media and documen-
tary have played an important role in documenting the struggles against state and
military occupation through formats that are linked to an imaginary of Mapuche-
ness that is not confined to the disappearing past but holds onto cultural memory as
an alternative to the neoliberal paradigm implemented by the Chilean state.
Thus, while state visuality inherits the hierarchical perspective of coloniality,
where vision means power and rule over subjectified Native populations, indigenous
peoples constantly make worlds both within and altogether outside the logics of
visibility. Like the machi figure that maneuvers between the visible and invisible
realms, cultural memory has a more capacious, innovative, and activist dimension
that cannot be separated out as merely resistance or counterlogics but is a form of
living that acknowledges indigenous relationships. In the next section, I analyze
films that describe such modes of relationality.

Turning Back the Monocultural Gaze

Within the genre of indigenous video that has emerged in the hemisphere, and
the expansion of the indigenization of visual media more globally, Mapuche film-
maker Huichaqueo Perez’s work contributes to an exploration of the imaginary of
cultural memory.10 In 2011, with funding from the Fondo de Fomento Audiovisual,
Huichaqueo Perez made the thirty-­t wo-­minute independent film titled Mencer: Ñi
pewma, which in Mapudungun means “bad dream” and refers to the upside-­down
world, the dystopic dreamscape of the postcolonial Mapuche landscape.
Mencer: Ñi pewma opens with the colonial portrait of a Mapuche longkwa,
the male figure of ritual and spiritual leadership who historically presided over the
center of community life. This colonial portrait is a reminder that Mapuche repre-
sentation was first visualized as a technique of Spanish colonial power, rather than
as a self-­authorizing system of representation.11 From the first frames of the video,
Huichaqueo Perez reminds the viewer that visuality itself has a colonial history and
that the colonial gaze continues to structure and frame the perceptions of the viewer
in relation to indigeneity. In the next sequence, the gaze is disrupted when the cam-
era pans pine forests from the ground level, with the soundtrack of the kultrung’s
(Mapuche’s) sacred drum echoing in the background. The layering of the sound in
the backdrop invokes a cultural past that is not easily usurped into the colonial nar-
rative of Spanish conquest and obliteration, since the drum is a powerful instrument
96  Radical History Review

of contemporary Mapuche religiosity and its cultural and political resistance. The
sonic, in this sequence, opens up the capacity to sense the landscape that is imbued
with the cultural memories of Mapuche sacred praxis.
For much of the video we return to landscapes and pine forests, where the
viewpoint shifts from high above the treetops to a view that travels through the
clean symmetry of the monocultural forest. In an early scene, long stretches of dimly
lit radius pine and eucalyptus plantations conjure the vastness of imported trees on
Mapuche territories, as the camera pans through individual trees and then views
from above to reveal thousands of acres of monocrop cultivation. The pine trees are
a symbol in the film for the privatized agroforest industry, the main trope of neo-
liberal governmentality. Since 1994, silviculture has become the primary industry
in the eighth region of southern Chile, and it has fundamentally reorganized the
subsistent dynamic between local populations and the natural world, as well as dis-
placed Mapuche peasant populations.
Unlike similar documentaries that emphasize precarity and displacement
as the primary motifs of indigenous experience, Huichaqueo Perez’s film focuses
on how viewing and approximating Mapuche cultural agency matters in relation to
complexly rendering the continuum between the colonial past and the neoliberal
present. For instance, throughout the experimental video, the director focuses the
viewer’s attention to localized spaces of mnemonic meaning in sites that represent
histories of indigenous struggle against settlement and occupation. Steady shots
of the Maule River reference the iconic body of water that was first diverted and
then blocked by the building of the Ralco dam in 1996. The dam reduced the local
water table, in some estimates, by half, displacing dozens of Huilliche communi-
ties that had lived or had been resettled in the upper Bío-­Bío region. Huichaqueo
Perez’s camera literally tracks the landscape and bodies that have been affected by
an extractive political economy that has wasted away the lives of Mapuche peoples.
The film also documents urban and rural protests that emerged as a result of
the acute presence of multinational corporations and the militarized state, marking
the height of the “environmental” conflict between the settler state and indigenous
mobilizations as part of the struggle over the Ralco dam construction. Importantly,
the video suggests that this was an urban as well as a rural struggle, since mul-
tiple shots of Mapuche protestors in Santiago register the urban heart of indigenous
migration and the street as the familiar site of a permanent engagement with the
military. As military huanacos (military tanks) spit water cannons at the activists,
Mapuche bodies present multiple geographies of conflict including Santiago and the
southern Bío-­Bío region that concentrates the majority of the Mapuche population
in South America.
Filmed on Super 8, Huichaqueo Perez uses a montage of archival foot-
age of the National Cemetery in Santiago, overlapping sequences from the 1970s
period of state authoritarianism with images from more recent funerals, the result
 Gómez-Barris | Mapuche Mnemonics   97

of Mapuche activist deaths after 1996. In the most recent conflict, dozens of young
Mapuche have been killed in the struggle against the encroachment by the military
state that has been met with new collective methods of dissent. While the image
of the “disappeared-­detained” functioned in postdictatorship Chile as a technique
to visualize human rights atrocities, here a series of black-­and-­gray unidentifiable
sequences do not cohere into a linear chronology of Mapuche victimization. A lon-
ger, cyclical, fragmented story of Mapuche death appears as an evocative reminder
of the accumulative violence of the colonial trace.
In these ways, the nonnarrative, experimental, aesthetic documentation of
Huichaqueo Perez works from a decolonizing impulse to gesture to an outside of
colonial histories. Rather than restore the conventions of documentary filmmak-
ing by smoothing out visual meaning through perfect compositions or by offering
fully contextualized narratives, Huichaqueo Perez’s work instead uses the represen-
tational strategy of experimentation, false starts, pauses, and stringing together of
seemingly unrelated sequences, without making any particular point. These strate-
gies proliferate the range of possible meanings of indigeneity and cultural agency.
This video language moves beyond the limitations of overdetermined representa-
tions that render indigeneity to the realm of folkloric primitivism, thereby refusing
the gaze of multicultural liberalism.
Joanna Crowe describes how liberal multiculturalism allows for certain
Mapuche cultural forms to circulate, while turning away from and making invis-
ible the more political versions of indigenous resistance.12 Genres such as poetry
and handicrafts find easier entrance into a neoliberal market and do not necessarily
visualize the suite of affects of political ressentiment that emerge on the street and
in confrontation with police and military blockades. Huichaqueo Perez’s approach
to political affect and events on indigenous territories is not chronological or about
information divulging that is characteristic of documentary conventional styles. By
showing scenes of indigenous territories and urban Mapuche subjects alongside
nonchronological time loops, the experimental aesthetic itself ruptures with the
representations of indigeneity as tame, conformist, past-­oriented, and romantically
constricted within a normative idealization of indigenous tradition.
Born four years into the dictatorship as the son of a Mapuche migrant and
a nonindigenous, or huinka, mother, Huichaqueo Perez describes his identity as
of two origins and two cultures, essentially as an inauthentic subject of indigenous
identification. By naming his own dual location as one that comes out of the condi-
tions of mestizaje (national ideology and discourse of racial mixing), authoritarian-
ism, neoliberalism, and the present-­past shadow trace of colonialism, Huichaqueo
Perez turns away from the neoliberal state’s monopoly on multicultural discourse
and celebration.
Huichaqueo Perez’s experimental visual work moves the viewer through lim-
inal historical and geographic spaces of the Bío-­Bío region without claiming authen-
98  Radical History Review

tic wholeness or indigeneity as an essentialist ethnic identity. His experiments con-

jure a resistant Mapuche world, rather than one that is known or apprehended by
colonial visuality and its own symbolic and material structures of violence. Without
offering singular responses, Huichaqueo Perez’s works seem to ask: What routes
provide openings outside of genocidal statecraft? And how are these outsides visu-
ally articulated? How can cultural mnemonics counter the logics of death and reduc-
tionism that prevail in extractive capitalism on indigenous territories? In the next
section, I turn to a visual record of the 1990s activism of Mapuche and Pehuenche
peoples. In particular, I focus on the figure of Berta Quintreman, who inhabits a
mode of confrontation and living within the natural world that challenges the idea
of “the disappearing Native,” female passivity, and the masculine heroism of resis-
tance narratives. Berta confronts the physical and symbolic proposed elimination of
communal territories by challenging the state, corporate, and legal mechanisms that
literally use the functions of state planning in their attempt to absence or obliterate
indigeneity. The visual mode of experimental documentation, then, functions at the
local level and international media circuits to produce an archive of dissent.

Berta’s Acts
Larraín’s El velo de Berta chronicles the efforts of eighty-­year-­old Berta to salvage
Pehuenche territories from Endesa, the Spanish-­owned hydroelectric company that
designed the then impending developmental project of the Ralco dam. Available on
YouTube, the documentary features the protagonist Berta, an outspoken activist, as
she confronts corporate heads, state functionaries, and civil trial judges. At a key
climactic moment in the film, Berta stands squarely in front of bulldozers as they
carve out roads in the dam construction zone. As the story unfolds, Larraín’s camera
follows Berta and her son and daughter-­in-­law through the legal, court, and police
impasses of their daily lives and the travesties they face as they struggle to defend
their territories against the multinational corporation in the most acute period of
land title negotiation at the end of the 1990s. The film, then, documents Pehuenche
communities at the crest of the privatization event, the moment when land subdivi-
sions and deregulation would begin to convert thousands of Native territories into
corporate landholdings.
During the late 1990s, the struggle over land rights coalesced against build-
ing the largest hydroelectric plant on the continent, a project that subsequently dis-
placed tens of thousands of indigenous peoples in the name of national progress.
This is what Enrique Dussel refers to as the “developmentalist fallacy,” the founda-
tion for modernity’s exclusionary principle that organizes social life through hyper-
rationalization and an ever-­expanding marketplace.13 Modernity often presents
hydroelectric power as the only possible route for the future of humanity, obscuring
the rights of indigenous peoples while also imagining nature as possessing minimal
agency in the age of technology. In a way that is antithetical, the hydroelectric plant
 Gómez-Barris | Mapuche Mnemonics   99

is in fact the eradication of indigenous and nonhuman futurity, since it does not
contend with the longer-­term problem that extractive capitalism faces in relation to
dwindling resources.
Though there are important scenes that visualize and give voice to Berta’s
larger acts of dissent, it is not in the realm of grand solutions or grand designs that
the film traffics. Indeed, it is only through the smaller moments of possibility in Ber-
ta’s daily life that the viewer is able to find a way into an imaginable future. Whether
Berta enters La Moneda Presidential Palace in traditional dress, warms her hands
over a fire and hearth, or sweeps the leaves off her porch while talking about the
changing color of the landscape, there is an embodied enactment of meaningful
histories that finds articulation through her subjectivity.
In the accumulation of these modes of being and dissent, the viewer sees
a past-­future contingency that is embodied through the living acts of a Huilliche
woman. “Sweeping off” the extractive economy, Berta begins to symbolically engage
a way of being in relation to the natural world that exists in diametric opposition to
the linearity of developmentalism, on the one hand, and the greed of the extrac-
tive economy, on the other. Through these countless small acts, the film builds a
narrative about the kinds of temporal imaginaries that emerge within a Mapuche
worldview, marking a vital contradistinction to the deadening logic of the bigger
structural forces imposed from the top down by the Chilean state. Being in relation
to the Maule River and its bank, walking along dirt paths, and making a fire are all
daily acts that require a direct material engagement with the cyclical unfolding of
the natural world and a relational orientation that is dynamically linked to, rather
than opportunistic of, an immediate environment. These small acts indeed accu-
mulate and function in a visual plane of meaning different from the visualizations
of brute military force showered on indigenous activists. Such moments articulate
a relational knowledge that literally opposes the legal and military apparatus that
sits in vertical positions of authority in relation to these Pehuenche and Mapuche
communities.
The work of cultural memory in the film is to deconstruct the ideology that
indigeneity, and specifically Mapucheness, is a leftover anachronism of the past
and instead provide a way to imagine Mapuche and Pehuenche epistemes as in fact
paramount to the possibilities of a future. When all else is destroyed, what kind of
humanity remains? Berta insists on the conditions for Pehuenche cultural memory
by maintaining a close connection to the land in the Alto Bío-­Bío region, the water
resource – r ich lands by the Maule River. She works the land and resources from it,
lives within it, and makes a modest life for herself and those around her. Unlike the
narratives of precarity, marginality, and subalternity, Berta is visualized as an active
maker of the future.
Like the increasingly militant challenge that Thomas Klubock writes about
in relation to the forest industry, the mobilizations in the upper Bío-­Bío region were
100  Radical History Review

organized around indigenous identification with memory of land historically rooted

in a nonpossessive understanding of territory.14 The sense of a particular ecological
imaginary in relation to the river and territories alongside the riverbank emerges
through the words of Berta toward the end of the film. Confronting a room full
of lawyers and corporate representatives before forcibly signing over her property
to Endesa, Berta gestures to herself as she says: “Esta mujer esta sufriendo por su
tierra, por su río. Me están destruyendo la tierra inutilmente. Trienta anõs llego este
año. Sí hubiera sido Chilena no hubiera quedado así.” (This woman has suffered for
her land, for her river. You are destroying the land unnecessarily. Thirty years this
year. If I was a Chilean, things wouldn’t be this way.) And then adding emphasis to
her critique of developmentalism, she states, “Uno hay que tener mente y hay que
tener cinco sentidos para poder tener su mente limpiamente” (One has to have the
mind and five senses to keep a clean mind.). In this quotation, Berta’s act is one of
several acts of enunciation and visibility in relation to the diminishment of a Huil-
liche future. Her enunciative practice invokes the integration of the human senses in
its relationship to a much larger cosmological viewpoint. The title of the film, then,
visualizes and reveals the significance, not of the colonial authoritative, legal gesture
of ultimately signing away communal land holdings, but of the embodied reper-
toire of cultural memory. Through the phenomenological orientation that emerges
in Berta’s speech, another way of sensing and being in relation to territory emerges.
While I have focused in this section on Berta’s activist participation and ori-
entation to land, nature, and the vernacular enactments of cultural memory, my
concern is to represent Mapuche agency, not overly through one figure alone, but
in relation to a sensibility that orients away from the logics of developmentalism,
uses cultural memory as a weapon of resistance, and orients toward the river, the
land, and her own inhabited daily acts. These two films meet in Mencer: Ñi pewma,
wherein Huichaqueo Perez inserts footage of Berta at home, tending to her fire and
cleaning out a bowl. In a short sequence, Huichaqueo Perez animates the scene with
painted-­over footage, a technique he used in prior films. This animated vernacular
that reaches across both films to experiment with the specificity of relational living
cuts through the developmentalist fallacy by visualizing the signification of Mapu-
che ways of being and remembering the natural world.

Toward Conclusion
Alongside criminalization discourses that reproduce the basis for state violence, the
persistent work of the colonial gaze is to mark out spaces of extraction through a
high viewpoint that dehumanizes indigenous peoples. The counterseeing of experi-
mental film and documentaries not only illustrates the ongoing colonization of the
southernmost territories in the Bío-­Bío region but also reveals the very problem-
atic of visuality as a discourse of power. Indeed, neocolonial vision and vantage
points can be undone through new ways of imagining indigenous cosmologies and
 Gómez-Barris | Mapuche Mnemonics   101

Mapuche, Huilliche, and Pehuenche perspectives whose orientation to land differs

from that of the extractive state, the elite criollo population, the technocratic corpo-
rate forest managers, or multinational corporations like Endesa. These other visual
imaginaries move toward a paradigm of ecology and sociality that begins with indig-
enous cultural memory in order to open up how we understand the time frame of
historical justice at the forty-­year anniversary of the other 9/11.

Notes
1. Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998, bk. 1 of The
Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
2. See Macarena Gómez-­Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); and Gómez-­Barris, “Witness Citizenship:
The Place of Villa Grimaldi in Chilean Memory,” Sociological Forum 25, no. 1 (2010):
27 – 46.
3. Bruce Braun, “Colonialism’s Afterlife: Vision and Visuality on the Northwest Coast,”
Cultural Geographies 9, no. 2 (2002): 202 – 47.
4. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
5. See the important volume on Mapuche historiography by Héctor Nahuelpán Moreno et al.,
Ta iñ fijke xipa rakizuameluwun: Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país Mapuche
(Santiago: Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2012).
6. Joanna Crowe, “Mapuche Poetry in Post-­Dictatorship Chile: Confronting the Dilemmas of
Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2008):
221 – 40.
7. Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, “Rethinking Identity and Feminism: Contribution of Mapuche
Women and Machi from Southern Chile,” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 32 – 57.
8. Ibid., 43.
9. Ibid.
10. Steven Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1998); Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, eds., Global Indigenous Media:
Cultures, Poetics, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
11. See Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean
Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Poole describes how
in the Peruvian context the colonial photograph, alongside other “scientific” modes of
observation and visuality, organized a visual economy of race that produced taxonomies of
difference. Poole specifically identifies how early nineteenth-­century photography organized
representations within the Andean indigenous world, typologies of difference that also apply
to image collections circulating throughout the Pacific, especially within the colonial routes
of meaning making between Europe and South America.
12. Crowe, “Mapuche Poetry.”
13. Enrique Dussel, “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism,” trans. Javier Krauel and
Virginia C. Tuma, Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 465 – 78.
14. Thomas Klubock, La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
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