Whose Sovereignty? Mapuche Women’s Participation in the Feminist and Indigenous Movements

In the twenty-first century we have witnessed a surge in publications by Mapuche women; the poetry of seven Mapuche women was compiled into an anthology exclusively dedicated to female poets in Hilando en la memoria (Cuarto Propio 2006); centuries-old epeu (stories), told by men and women, appear in Kumedungun/Kumewirin (LOM 2010); and recently, the stories of Mapuche women activists in the twenty-first century were detailed in Mujeres y pueblos originarios: Luchas y resistencias hacia la descolonización (Pehuén 2016) and Zomo Newen (Pehuén 2017). Collectively, these texts reflect the plights of indigenous women in a neoliberal and neocolonial Chile, and they also reaffirm Mapuche women’s powerful presence in a centuries-long movement for indigenous rights by way of the written and spoken word. Despite this increased visibility, however, the history of Mapuche women’s writing, particularly that of female leaders of the 1930s and 1940s, remains greatly unknown. The following women: Isolde Manquilef (1919-2020), Herminia Aburto Colihueque, and Laura Nahuelpan (1917-2015) published political essays and poetry in Mapuche and student-directed newspapers, they participated in and led political organizations, and they engaged with indigenous and non-indigenous men and women on issues of education and women’s rights. All three women were knowledgeable of Mapuche culture and epistemology (e.g. Herminia and Laura were bilingual Mapudungun/Spanish) as well as in the dominant, non-Mapuche society (e.g. Laura and Isolde attended the Liceo de Temuco para Niñas). All three women advocated for Mapuche girls’ education and included anticolonial stances in their writings.

Despite these three women’s public roles and writings in the first half of the twentieth century, their discourses and stories remain greatly unknown among scholars and school-aged children in Chile. Their writing has not been analyzed together and in some cases, not at all. As the work of Rita Segato (2011), Patricia Richards (2016) and Margarita Calfío (2005, 2009a;b, 2017, Kalfio 2019) show, lacking attention to indigenous women’s leadership reveals continuous coloniality/ modernity/patriarchy within decolonial scholarship. Indigenous women leaders in the present continue to be misunderstood and misrepresented, for example, as associated with cultural work while men tend to be linked with political work (de la Cadena; “Academia Constitucional”). The unique impact of this study, then, involves historicizing Mapuche women’s political and written work, amplifying the scope of modern Mapuche histories and subjectivities, thereby encouraging engagement with indigenous women, in the past and the present, as “subjects and voice of their own stories” (Hernández-Ávila 1996, 14).

Based on archival research of feminist newspapers, these three women’s writing and interviews with their descendants, the project demonstrates that Mapuche women’s leadership was supported by the predominantly male-led Mapuche movement because it was understood as strategic in the context of the feminist movement. I argue that the women’s discourses and leadership strategies reflect a commitment to the Mapuche movement as well as to feminist ideals, thus bolstering the collective movement and simultaneously opening spaces in which they could develop their own individual career paths and voices.