Indigenous Chileans

Definition
The term ‘indigenous’ refers to Chilean ethnic groups whose ancestors’ presence in Chile pre-dates the arrival of the first Spanish colonists. It traditionally refers to mainland Chilean Indians, but is also extended to include the Rapa Nui, a Polynesian people native to Easter Island, an overseas Chilean territory. In reality, many of the indigenous groups in South America as a whole are quite loosely defined, and more commonly and accurately denote collective groups of related tribes who share a common language. For the sake of simplicity in what is in reality a range of very complex social tapestries interwoven throughout the centuries, we shall define them similarly here, while conforming with the Chilean government’s categorisation of indigenous communities.
The Chilean government currently recognises eight indigenous ethnicities. They are, in order of size, the mapuche, aymara, atacameño, quechua, rapanui, colla, alcalufe and yamana.

The Mapuches
The term ‘Mapuche’ can best be considered as an umbrella term to refer to the related groups of Picunches,  Huilliches, Moluche or Nguluche  and Picunche Indians who speak or spoke Mapundungun.  Over 85% of Chile’s indigenous population are Mapuches, making them the largest and most historically significant indigenous group in Chile. Approximately 900,000 live between Chile and to a lesser extent, Argentina.  In Chile, their traditional stronghold is the rural hinterlands of La Araucanía, where they represent up to 80% of the local population, but many today are now urbanised and live in the greater Santiago metropolitan area and other southern cities such as Concepción, Temuco and Valdivia.

The Mapuches were known for their military genius and fearlessness on the battlefield, and many of their leaders’ military tactics and strategies are still taught in military academies around the world to this day. The Mapuches famously resisted Inca expansion into their territories by defeating them at the Battle of the Maule and pushing them back to what is know the 6th Region. The Incas, unable to subjugate them any further south, referred to them as purum awqa, Quechua words meaning unconquered enemies. Later, when the Spanish came and demanded gold from the Incas, the Incas deliberately and cleverly told them that all the gold was to be found further south in the heartland of the fearless Mapuche warrior tribes, knowing from firsthand experience what deadly resistance the Spaniards would encounter. They also fearlessly and continuously fought and repelled Spanish and later Chilean forces in the Arauco War, which in lasting over 300 years, became one of the world’s longest running conflicts.

The most famous  leader of the war was the legendary Lautaro, who became Chile’s first General in uniting, organising and revolutionising Mapuche forces against Spanish rule, and even coming very close to permanently removing them from the area. He was the son of a Mapuche chief, but was captured by the Spanish as a boy and handed over to the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia to be his personal slave. During this time, he learned to speak Spanish and observed their military tactics and horsemanship, previously unknown to the Mapuches.  When he was a young man, he escaped and returned to his people. He then trained them in horse riding skills and advanced, personally designed military tactics for combating the Spaniards, based on his observations as a boy. He also gathered many previously scattered Mapuche warriors and raised a formidable army to fight the conquistadores. In recognition of his knowledge, he was elected deputy chief and by the Mapuche parliament that also voted on military action against the Spanish. Due to the tactics he had developed, Mapuche foot-soldiers, armed with only spears and axes, were able to defeat the Spanish cavalry, who also availed of lances and muskets, time and time again.

A key military victory for the Mapuche forces was the Battle of Tucapel, where a massive Spanish army was massacred, and Pedro de Valdivia himself was captured. According to legend,  Lautaro personally executed his former master Valdivia by carving out his still beating heart and eating it (this was a common method of execution in pre-Hispanic America, there are similar legends of Quechua warriors doing the same when fighting the Spaniards in the Andes and the Mayas in modern-day Mexico were famed for doing likewise, believing that doing so would give them their enemies powers). Lautaro was later killed at the Battle of Mataquito. He was decapitated and his head was exhibited in Santiago’s central square by the victorious Spanish forces. The notorious Lautaro Lodge (a shadowy and mysterious Masonic secret society formed in Europe dedicated to the overthrow of Spanish rule in Latin America) was named after him in honour of his success against the Spaniards. Another famous Mapuche warrior leader was Colocolo, the namesake of Chile’s most popular football team. The stories of local Mapuche generals feature on our Central Chilean Inca Trail tours.

In addition to their extraordinary contribution to national history, many words in Chilean Spanish and elements of local cuisine owe their origins to the Mapuches. The Mapuches have also made a sizeable contribution to the Chilean mestizo gene pool, with most Chilean mestizos having some Mapuche ancestry.

Unfortunately, problems of great social inequality in Chilean society see the Mapuches (and other indigenous groups) marginalised; Mapuches face discrimination, particularly when seeking employment and generally suffer from higher levels of poverty in their communities.

Furthermore, during the military dictatorship, Mapuche territory was privatised and sold to wealthy Chileans and foreign companies. The Mapuche claim to these lands remains a cause of conflict between the community and the Chilean government today. This expropriation of Mapuche ancestral lands led to a large-scale urbanisation of what is essentially a  rural indigenous community. The urbanisation of the Mapuches is in turn leading to a loss of language and culture among younger urban generations. In the face of these grievances, lack of representation in Chilean society and frustration at the slow pace of improvement in their circumstances, some Mapuches have unsurprisingly resorted to more militant activism.

To further complicate matters, Mapuche activists are prosecuted under Pinochet-era anti-terrorism legislation for protests involving vandalism or petty theft (a judge in Chile recently acquitted a group of Mapuche youths who had been prosecuted under anti-terrorist laws and held on remand for two years for stealing wood). Under these laws, public prosecutors can withhold evidence from defence lawyers for 6 months, and avail of anonymous witnesses whose identities are kept secret throughout trial. In 2010, Mapuche prisoners began a wave of hunger strikes in protest against the application of this anti-terrorism legislation to the cases of their more militant activists. After the UN expressed concern and the European Union intervened on behalf of the Mapuches by summoning the Chilean ambassador to the EU for an explanation of and resolution to the situation, the Chilean government promised to enter into dialogue. A top UN official, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also highlighted incidents of excessive force by authorities against Mapuche protestors.

The Aymara
The world’s Aymara population is estimated at 2 million, with nearly 1.5m living in highland Bolivia, approximately 440,000 in Peru and a little under 50,000 in northern Chile.  The Aymara have populated these regions since before the expansion of the Inca Empire, under which they enjoyed a great deal of autonomy as a subject people.

The Aymara in Chile are the second biggest indigenous group in the country and reside mostly in the Andean highlands near the Peruvian and Bolivian borders, the Atacama desert, the cities of Arica and Iquique, and nearby fertile pre-Andean strips in the Tarapacá and Atacama Regions of the north. More recently, Chile has received Aymara migrant workers from neighbouring Bolivia and Peru, including the Bolivian Carlos Mamani, one of the 33 miners famously rescued from a collapsed mine after 69 days trapped underground in 2010.

The Aymara may be unique in the world in their world view with regards to their concept of time as expressed through their language. It has been observed that Aymara speakers see the future as behind them, and the past in front of them, and ‘qhipa uru’, the future in Aymara, translates into English literally as “back days”, and the speaker may well point over his/her shoulder when describing it.

The Aymara language is also considered by many linguistic experts to be one of the world’s most intelligent languages for its immense flexibility, its capacity for neologisms, its particular usefulness in expressing abstract concepts and its four person system. While English and most other languages use the word ‘we’ or equivalent, Aymara has two separate pronouns, one which includes the person the speaker is speaking to (‘you AND I’/ ‘you AND us’) and one which doesn’t (us BUT NOT you). Aymara also uses two different verb forms to specify whether an event is/was personally witnessed by or personally known to the speaker or not. Because of this extraordinary attention to detail and the specific information even a simple Aymara sentence can convey when compared to, say, an English one, Aymara has been used as an intermediary language in computer translation tools with great success.

Although it is uncertain, and there are many other theories to accompany it, one theory suggests that the name ‘Chile’ itself comes from the Aymara word for snow ‘tchili’.  This may have originally referred to the snowy mountainous border regions inhabited by the Aymara between Chile and Bolivia or Peru, through which the Spaniards would have passed overland on their way south from Lima. The name Iquique derives from an Aymara word meaning “resting place”.

The predominant lingering Aymara contribution to Chilean culture is the Ekeko, curiously recognised and revered by superstitious Chileans -white, mestizo and indigenous alike– throughout the country. Ekeko is the pre-Hispanic Aymara spirit or deity of fortune, abundance and prosperity. He is traditionally an Andean highlander dwarf, traditionally dressed in a poncho and ch’ullu (the traditional Aymara woollen hat). According to tradition, he is loaded with miniatures of what his followers hope to receive from him; money, food, even cars. In Bolivia, Peru and northern Chile, he is also given offerings of lit cigarettes to be inserted in his mouth or coca leaves.

Coca itself is central to the culture of the Aymara people to this day;(the current president of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, is an Aymara former coca-grower) the Aymara have grown and used coca for hundreds of years. Its traditional use (medicinal, chewing and in tea) are established and legal in Chile and neighbouring Bolivia, Peru and Argentina.

They are also famed for their handicrafts in Alpaca wool, and examples of Alpaca handicrafts companies and associations run by Aymara women include ASOAYMA and Alpacalandia.

The Aymara people in Chile today face disproportionate poverty (the poorest village in Chile is Colchane, an Aymara village on the border with Bolivia) and illiteracy. Following the War of the Pacific, in an attempt to preserve the newly defined borders with Bolivia and Peru, the Aymara were subject to a campaign of forced cultural integration as part of the Chilean government’s program of chilenización. They have also been victims of gradual government and mining corporation-sponsored ‘relocation’. The Chilean government at the time gave multinational companies lucrative rights to resource exploitation in their territories and encouraged them to ‘civilise’ the local Aymara. As recently as the 1940s, Aymaras were obliged to learn and speak Spanish, and enticed with cheap housing to settle in the more prosperous cities. Under Pinochet’s attempt to modernize agriculture, new farming methods were imposed on the Aymara that went against their traditional farming methods and their concept of Suma Qamaña (literally, “good living”) with the Pachamama (akin to our concept of “Mother Nature”).

Finally, they lost their ancestral waters to the Pinochet government through 1979 regulations over communal indigenous land and the 1981 Water Code, which meant that water and livestock rights became separate from land ones. This deprived the Aymara of their previous property over water and even animals on their land. As a result, local authorities and mineral exploitation corporations, both national and international, were now free to access the water which had been carefully and harmoniously managed by the Aymara for centuries.

These schemes by past Chilean governments have all led to a forced urbanisation of the Aymara and a gradual erosion of their culture, language and way of life here in Chile (two-thirds of Chilean Aymaras now live in urban population centres,  many of whom no longer speak Aymara) which post-dictatorship Chilean governments have been making some effort to counter.

The Collas
The Collas, although considered a separate indigenous ethnicity by the Chilean government, are the descendants of a pre-Incan Aymara society who live mostly in the Atacama region. They famously fought with the Lupaca, another Aymara-speaking tribe during the Inca conquest. As their imperial overlords, the Incas were invited to intervene but strategically sided with the Lupaca. The Collas, counted separately in Chilean censuses, add another 3,198 to the overall generic Chilean Aymara population. Collahuasi, a famous mine in the north of Chile, means “House of the Collas” in Quechua, language of the Inca conquerors.

The Quechuas
The Quechua people are members of various different Andean ethnicities who speak a Quechua-family language, of which Southern Quechua is the most prominent today. Though their collective population is approximately 11 million throughout these countries, according to a census taken by the Chilean government, the Chilean Quechua population today amounts to just 6 175  and is largely confined to the Second Region. There are also Ecuadorian, Peruvian and Bolivian Quechua immigrants in cities such as Santiago, Iquique, Antofagasta and Arica.

Undoubtedly, the most famous Quechua group was the Incas, a Quechua-speaking people who, at the height of their empire controlled from southern Colombia to central Chile and large parts of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and north-western Argentina. It is in these parts where their Quechua-speaking descendants remain to this day. Although the Quechua, Aymara and Atacameños are distinct and unrelated ethnic groups, they share many cultural characteristics such as their use of coca and their languages have many common loanwords due to over a century of influence and interaction under the Inca Empire. Indeed, many Quechua groups in Bolivia and Ecuador only became Quechuas-speaking then or shortly afterwards.

This peaceful co-existence with the Aymaras and other Indian groups did not extend to the Mapuches however, who ferociously resisted all Inca incursions into their territory in the second half of the 15th century. As a result, the Incas, who had been attempting to expand into Mapuche territory south of the river Maule, retreated back to the rivers Cachapoal and Rapel in the O’Higgins Region, where they settled, farmed and established a fortified frontier effectively marking the southern boundaries of the Inca Empire with fortified hills known as Pucaras including one approximately 12 kilometres to the north of Rancagua, where they also built a tampu or resting house.In addition to this, the Incas built a wicker bridge in Rancagua which crossed the Cachapoal River just over 1 kilometre from where the highway crosses it today. The Santiago municipal council ordered the building to be repaired in 1545, and the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia crossed it with 60 well-armed soldiers in February 1546 on his way south, where he would later meet his death at the hands of his former servant, Lautaro. They also left a religious site on the outskirts of Santiago which doubled as an observatory and a pre-Hispanic burial ground.  You can find more information on the Inca Empire in Chile on our Central Chilean Inca Trail tours.

As the formal lingua franca of the Inca Empire and its subject peoples, Quechua has contributed more loan words to Chilean Spanish than any other indigenous language. Due to the wide-ranging influence of the Inca Empire, it has also contributed loan words to the Mapundungun, Aymara and Kunza languages. Despite this, it is estimated that there are less than 1,000 native Chilean Quechua speakers left today, who are typically pastors in the Loa River area.

The Atacameños
According to the INE (the Chilean National Institute of Statistics), there are just over 21,000 Atacameños living in Chile, mostly in the Andean Atacama Desert. Their traditional heartland extends from the Salar de Atacama in the west to the east towards the Bolivian border and into Argentina, but is concentrated around the oases of the Puna de Atacama.
The Atacameños lived mostly by agricultural and pastoral means, and built adobe houses, burying their deceased ancestors in their walls. Throughout their territory, they erected various defensive forts, some of whose remains can sill be seen today in the Atacama desert. Perhaps the most famous, the Aldea de Quitor near San Pedro de Atacama, was declared a national heritage site in 1982.These semi-urbanised defensive hamlets were originally built to protect their territories during various political and land disputes with neighbouring tribes resulting in regional conflict, possibly with other tribes from North-west Argentina.

Prior to the Inca and Spanish invasions, there was a period of peace during which the Atacameños formed an inter-ethnic alliance with their Aymara neighbours, leading to a climate of peaceful political coexistence within their common region. The Atacameños, like the Amyara, later became a subject people of the Inca Empire and historical interaction with both the Quechuas and Aymaras left influences from both cultures on their own.
The Atacameños are famed in Chile for their art, pottery and metallurgy which give us a fascinating insight into their culture. Examples of these are ceramic bottles of high technical quality, decorated with stones placed in the lips and smoking pipes, as well as burial urns and copper masks.

In their religious ceremonies and rituals, the Atacameño shamans used the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus, the South American cousin of the Peyote, likewise used by Native Americans in the USA for its hallucinogenic properties. Coca was later introduced to their rituals during the Inca conquest.

Sadly, the language of the Atacameños, known as Kunza, is widely considered to have died out in the 1950s. Nonetheless, Kunza is somewhat preserved in various place names in the Atacama Region along with some words in colloquial use and is still used ritually in songs etc by the Atacameño community today, who have otherwise switched to speaking Spanish.

Migration is quite common in Atacameño communities, with many Atacameño youths relocating to cities such as Calama in search of better economic opportunities. Although these migrations are often temporary, with the migrants intending to someday return to the communities from which they came, this may contribute to a further loss of culture among younger Atacameños. Atacameños also suffer from relatively higher levels of alcoholism in their communities.