Documenting Territorialidad: an intercultural approach to the provenance of Mapuche land records

Abstract

Using critical place research and documentary methods, this article examines the Mapuche territorial cause in Chile and exposes the deficiencies of state-produced Mapuche land titles, known as Títulos de Merced, which are required for and (mis)used as evidence by Chile’s Indigenous land restitution program. The Títulos de Merced were granted to Mapuche families during and after the military occupation of Wallmapu (Mapuche territory), as documentation of their relocation to reducciones (reservations) between 1884 and 1929. However, these approximately 3000 titles do not fully represent Mapuche land claims. Instead, they were used by the newly formed Chilean state to reduce Mapuche territory to approximately 5% of its ancestral span, leaving undocumented much of the territories that communities were effectively using before the reduction process––what Mapuche claimants refer to as tierras antiguas or ancestral lands. Despite this, CONADI, the government agency that administers the land program, defines these titles as the primary sources of documentary evidence to prove Mapuche land dispossession. Therefore, not only are the Títulos de Merced not enough, but they negatively impact Mapuche land claims by purposefully reducing, once again, Mapuche ancestral territory, this time discursively. Mapuche claimants are paradoxically forced to validate claims to their ancestral land through documents that were designed to legitimize their dispossession. By examining the insufficiency and inappropriateness of the Títulos de Merced as evidence for Mapuche territorial claims, this paper proposes the intercultural practice of documenting territorialidad—the expression of cultural, economic, and spiritual Mapuche practices over the territory—in addition to colonial demarcations of land, as a form of producing/using evidence for Mapuche land restitution claims. Suggesting the mapu (land/territory) as provenance and territorialidad as evidence, this alternative documentary practice unsettles the Títulos de Merced as the only legitimate form of evidence for Mapuche land claims and theorizes interculturalidad—the recognition of and dialogue between diverse ways of knowing coexisting within the same territory—as a framework for thinking about provenance when working with Indigenous land records.