Indigenous Research: The Path towards Mapuchization

Abstract

This article explores the process of decolonizing and indigenizing research from my perspective as a Mapuche woman. During this process, I examine how to approach and analyze colonial and patriarchal archives through an indigenous lens, leading me to consider a transformation of my work into an indigenous research endeavor. In this undertaking, I delve into the interplay of affective and political dimensions within indigenous research, recognizing them as catalysts for resistance and knowledge construction. I emphasize the significance of first-person research as a powerful means of empowering marginalized individuals and validating personal and collective experiences, countering Eurocentric epistemologies that perpetuate colonial and epistemic violence. Furthermore, I advocate for the recovery of marginalized knowledge and the integration of native epistemologies. As a third step in the process of decolonizing and indigenizing my research, I introduce the concept of ‘Mapuchization of research.’ This idea represents a process of reconnection with the ancestral knowledge of my people, where past and present come together. It intertwines several dimensions, including political, epistemological, and ontological, with the aim of contributing to indigenous research methodology, based on the knowledge found in Mapuche culture and history.

1. Introduction

The reflections presented in this paper are part of the doctoral research1 I am conducting, which aims to understand the historical articulations of race–gender and their relationship with the social construction of the Mapuche2 woman. However, although I frame these reflections within this work, they are related to a process that is much broader and deeper, as they are linked to concerns that have accompanied me throughout my life and find a form of expression in this research work.

I situate the proposed questions from the perspective of indigenous research, the journey of learning towards the kimün3 of my people, and what this voyage has meant as a Mapuche xampurria4 woman that has grown up in the warria5, as a product of a family history of dispossession. Thus, this intricate tapestry is woven between experiences, (un)learnings, feelings, and desires that I have been constructing as a patchwork that is still unfinished. If it ever will be.

I want to emphasize that my research is rooted in my personal biography, serving as its primary motivation. It provides the foundation upon which I have formulated the numerous questions and proposals presented in my dissertation, which I briefly outline in this paper. This approach allowed me to construct a more or less coherent narrative that connects two vital aspects, life and research, viewing them as an intertwined continuum. Thus, I delve into the question of where Mapuche women fit into history, a query that has fueled my curiosity since childhood, driven by a deep desire to understand the history of my people, particularly, the history of Mapuche women.

As I progressed in my academic and activist roles, particularly, as a feminist and social psychologist, my research transformed into an inquiry aimed at unraveling the complex web of colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist influences intertwined in the social construction of Mapuche women. This inquiry also encompasses an exploration of their far-reaching impacts, including their symbolic, socio-cultural, and historical dimensions. These aspects constitute the specific objectives that guide and shape my research.

Furthermore, to take the leap and transform my life’s concerns into an academic investigation, the pivotal role of two authors and their reflections within my theoretical framework cannot be overstated. Their work steered me towards various decolonial feminist readings and those authored by indigenous women. I am referring to María Lugones and Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi, whose analyses of colonial and gender systems provided an explanatory framework for the ideas that had been circulating in my mind as I approached the threshold of my research journey.

María Lugones’s insights into the modern colonial gender system (Lugones 2008), which she describes as a colonial imposition that permeated every facet of indigenous people’s lives, have been fundamental in shaping my understanding of race and gender. This epistemological breakthrough allowed me to position my research inquiries within a meaningful context.

Furthermore, Oyěwùmí’s (2017) questioning of Western interpretations of gender as transcultural, timeless, and universal served as the final theoretical impetus to inquire into how racial gender imposition might have occurred within the context of the Mapuche people’s history, especially concerning Mapuche women, and to examine the extent and effects thereof. From this rupture, which is rather an opening, I could focus my gaze in the search of such movements, as Lugones points out, to investigate the changes that “were introduced through heterogeneous, discontinuous, slow processes, totally permeated by the coloniality of power, which violently inferiorized the colonized women” (Lugones 2008, p. 92)6.

With this theoretical and experiential perspective, I take steps in my research, delve into the methodological field, define approaches and techniques, and make decisions, not without numerous uncertainties, as I imagine many people face when taking on the challenge of doctoral studies. Within these methodological boundaries, I propose a theoretical study based on the analysis of written documentary sources. These sources would be approached using the Foucauldian genealogical method, which emphasizes, among other elements, the productive effects of power to analyze discontinuities in a specific period (Foucault 1975). To conduct this work, and with the theoretical concerns mentioned as a foundation, I set the analysis in the period spanning from the arrival of the Spanish colonial enterprise (16th century) to the establishment of the Chilean nation-state (19th century).

These methodological decisions, combined, led me down winding paths that I aim to describe in the following pages. It begins by attempting to establish a starting point with a question about the archives I have been working with, as they constitute the primary source of my research. These archives are primarily colonial and patriarchal, meaning that they consist of documents written by foreign men, mostly Europeans: travelers, soldiers, politicians, historians, naturalists, or priests who observed and interpreted Mapuche society from their particular point of view of understanding, with all the biases that these perspectives may entail. During their review, I was prompted to question how I could read and analyze such texts from an indigenous perspective and from my perspective as a Mapuche woman.

Initially, as I mentioned earlier, I had not incorporated the perspective of indigenous research into the methodological section of my project. However, as I progressed in my analysis, the question became increasingly urgent: Could I transform my study into indigenous research? This question led to a search in which I focused on the methodological aspect, asking myself what it meant to decolonize and indigenize research and then what “Mapuchization” would mean, as a question that arose as this process progressed.

In this exercise, I present some ideas about three movements I have adopted in this journey that aim at decolonization as an epistemological rupture, indigenization, which involves incorporating perspectives and proposals from the indigenous knowledge systems, and what is discussed from this perspective regarding research. Finally, I will offer some reflections on the “Mapuchization” of my research as a proposal that materializes the previous statements, processes in which there will be a close relationship between the affective and political dimensions as a praxis of resistance.

2. Decolonizing, Indigenizing, and First-Person Research

“Then, what is decolonization? Can it be conceived merely as a thought or discourse”? Rivera Cusicanqui (2010, pp. 60–61) poses this question, and her response is clear: there can be no discourse or theory without practice. I present this idea because it directs us toward the concrete, towards an exercise that can be embodied, grasped. My interest lies in highlighting the micropolitical dimension, the decolonial micropolitical practices that we can conduct in our everyday lives, which hold the potential for subverting the colonial matrix that has constrained us. We have been colonized and forcibly whitened, bearing the weight of a history of violence on our shoulders. Thus, the act of decolonization on a micropolitical level signifies a challenge to the colonialism we have internalized. From that vantage point, we create escape routes for its transformation.

In this regard, I refer to what Hill Collins (2021) points out because our experience is crucial for understanding the colonial matrix of domination, allowing us to generate knowledge from that place, shifting from being objects to subjects (Curiel 2015, p. 54).

From my experience, decolonization and indigenization go hand in hand. Decolonization involves a rupture through which the indigenous permeates. In this regard, when discussing indigenous research, we encounter common characteristics and aspirations, considering that indigenous people share worldviews, histories, struggles, and resistances. However, this vast world also encompasses differences that are specific to each community, thereby imparting specificity to the ways of conceiving and constructing knowledge.

Of all the native nations in the Americas, it was the Mapuche people who resisted Spanish conquest for the longest period, as noted by Ruiz (2008). It is crucial to consider that the Mapuche people endured centuries of warfare, resisting for over 300 years. Initially, it was the Spanish crown that arrived in their territory in the 16th century but failed to defeat them. Instead, they had to sign a treaty recognizing Mapuche sovereignty, establishing a border and generating various exchange agreements. These agreements remained as political practices between the Spanish and the Mapuche during the following centuries, with periods of varying intensity in the state of war (Chihuailaf 2010).

Towards the latter half of the 19th century, with the establishment of the fledgling Republic of Chile, brutal military campaigns were unleashed to occupy the Mapuche territory (a similar objective pursued by the Argentine Republic on the other side of the Andes). These campaigns were justified by deep-seated racism within the Chilean elite, aiming to annihilate the Mapuche people, dispossess survivors of their lands, and confine them to “reductions”. This transformation also entailed restructuring their social and political organization, imposing Chilean acculturation and assimilation practices, even prohibiting the use of the Mapuche language and customs. Pairicán (2015) points out that this process marked a complete rupture in our history, signifying the end of traditional history and the beginning of our contemporary history.

In this context, during the 20th century, there was a significant exodus to urban areas by Mapuche individuals. Simultaneously, resistance movements were organized and reorganized throughout the century, closely linked to Chile’s socio-political processes. Autonomist struggles were revitalized in the 1990s, along with anti-extractive movements. However, these developments did not come without consequences, such as the militarization of the ancestral territory. As all this was happening, identification as Mapuche has grown to nearly two million people, according to the latest census conducted in Chile (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas de Chile 2018). Thanks to these movements, gradual decolonization efforts have been underway, and awareness of Mapuche rights and their status as bearers of these rights has been fostered (Pairicán 2015).

I return to the aforementioned ideas. Decolonization and indigenization cannot be understood within the framework of universalizing ideas that is deeply rooted in Western thought. In the context of knowledge construction or the revitalization of wisdom, these experiences incarnated in bodies and memories are crucial for forging paths of transformation. According to Kovach (2021), indigenizing research implies aligning this process with the epistemological framework of one’s own people and culture. This challenge suggests a triple exercise: decolonizing the frames of reference, both disciplinary and personal; indigenizing by incorporating the ideas and practices of indigenous thinkers who have reflected on the practices of knowledge production; and mapuchizing, which means seeking the proposals that are part of the culture of my own people to highlight forms of knowledge that have been silenced, denied, and subjugated through and since colonization.

Talking about decolonizing and indigenizing research involves subverting the Cartesian thinking that dichotomizes civilization/savagery, progress/stagnation, nature/society, mind/body, reason/emotion, and many other binaries incorporated by force. Rooted in a Eurocentric epistemological background, the entrenched binary thinking has had the sole outcome of perpetuating colonial violence, which has epistemic violence as one of its forms, defining what true knowledge is, or simply, what truth is, along with which voices are considered valid in producing it.

It is the metaphor (and also the historical reality) of the traveler, the colonial foreigner, who takes the form of the researcher in our contemporary era where the benefits of research serve the researcher and not the people who have been studied (Bishop 1997). It is the extractivist research that Kovach points out, emphasizing how it can lead to marginalized individuals who have been left disempowered and deprived of their rightful ownership of the knowledge that has been taken from them.

What happens to research when the researched ones become the researchers? asks Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2016). The answer to this question and to the critiques proposed by indigenous perspectives has then been to conduct first-person research. Doing so for and by ourselves, responding to our own history, which, in turn, involves a struggle for power. After all, who would relinquish their privileges? Specifically, in the scenario of epistemic violence, who would abandon the privilege of researching others? Who would define what that something and someone is like? Who would ultimately renounce the possession of truth?

For indigenous research, this exercise considers validating not only personal experience but also collective experience, emphasizing the rescuing of knowledge subjugated by colonial power. It involves the incorporation of native epistemologies and the advocacy of how and why we seek knowledge (Rainbow Tsinnajinnie et al. 2019). Additionally, within the context of colonial and patriarchal violence, it also entails problematizing and theorizing the intersections and effects that occur in the coalition of both systems of domination, rejecting the suppression of indigenous women in the field of knowledge construction (Arvin et al. 2013).

Thus, indigenous research implies and, as research is an action, I emphasize the verbs—rescuing, recovering, reappropriating, reinterpreting, creating… co-creating.

This first-person research also entails leaving behind universalizing theories, or as Escobar (2016) explains, it implies the end of big ideas. This approach would pave the way for what he calls the “epistemological pluriverse”, which is understood as the ways of perceiving reality from multiple cultures, perspectives, or subjective–collective representations, contrasting the assumption of the One-World World. In other words, it is a commitment to explore the amazing diversity of knowledge forms, according to the same author.

A challenging task, as Absolon (2011) points out, the endeavor of decolonizing research is not merely difficult but also risky, stating that “within the academy we are, at times, navigating chilly, intolerant, hostile and assimilating channels” (p. 151). In that process, many things can happen because, as she mentioned, researching, and constructing knowledge is a power struggle.

3. Researching as Resistance: Bridges between the Political and the Affective

Transcending the Cartesian and Eurocentric dichotomy of mind/body and reason/emotion implies incorporating the role of affect. This considers the union between feeling and thinking (“feeling-thinking” or “hearting”,) together with their political dimension as a mobilizer of actions that seek transformation in the research process.

Delving into the intertwining of the affective and political dimensions, I propose the following questions (Cayulef et al. 2023): From where do the motives for wanting to research arise? At what point in our lives have our interests in exploring certain things become lodged? How long do they remain within us until we finally dare to embark on the path in search of answers?

Before, during, and after, we feel.

Emotions have been permeating the different steps of my research practice. These practices have been imbued with emotions that have accompanied me throughout my life, shaping them. The feeling of emptiness, absence, or uncertainty resulting from the disconnection from Mapuche culture. Interest, curiosity to know more. Pain, anger at injustices. Desire to reclaim a part of my history.

In this sense, emotions serve as a bridge that connects the emotional and political dimensions, which, inseparable, traverse this research process together. This felling has been so powerful that it has evolved into my doctoral thesis. The reflections I offer there regarding Mapuche women gain significance within the context of the silencing, folklorization, and criminalization of the Mapuche people, as well as my own family history of diaspora. I grew up in the city, far from Wallmapu7, just as many thousands of others after the processes of land usurpation and dispossession conducted by the Chilean and Argentinian states. Where are they? Where have they been? Where are we?

Situated then in the diaspora, I trace my history to conduct research. From that diasporic or borderline place, as Anzaldúa (2016) would say, my story is being woven. The roots were lost, and as I grew up, a multitude of diverse questions began to visit me. These inquiries, as asserted by Galindo (2014), are deeply rooted in the colonial relationship that has been narrated through a masculinized history, depicting a dynamic between conqueror and colonized. “Where are the Mapuche women?” becomes a question of significant import within this colonial–patriarchal pact, and it has remained a constant presence, forming the central focus of the research in which I am currently engaged.

Thus, through a feminist decolonial lens, I explore the intersections of this pact, aiming to comprehend its effects and how the colonial–patriarchal machinery shook the culture and the women in the Mapuche nation.

I chose to engage with colonial documents because, as I was formulating the proposal, a range of methodological uncertainties arose. These questions extended not only to the methodological aspect but also entangled with the affective dimension, all while I was in the process of addressing the question of the place of Mapuche women in history. I do not want to replicate extractivist logics—I talked to myself—I cannot just arrive at a community or a group I do not know, introduce myself, state that I am conducting a study, ask for their collaboration, collect information, and leave. The determination to work with archives opened unforeseen challenges that have pushed me to the reflections I present in this paper.

As I advance in the process of reviewing colonial archives, I read passages that talk about the conquest of civilization and ordinances of extermination: “annihilating the barbarism”, “conquering the Indian”, and “killing all the Indian women”. Reading texts filled with the most brutal violence that has sustained a genocidal war can certainly be challenging. A violence that is not limited to centuries past, but still has a very real presence today. How do I approach reading these texts? I step back, I am filled with uncertainty, I look for consonances and resonances with other Indigenous researchers. I travel, explore, and listen in search of methodological approaches that make sense in this context. In this search, I came across indigenous research.

Emotions operate as the engine that mobilizes research. If the knowledge that has been raised as true and the practice of research have been violent, the research will be weychan8…—it will be resistance, because emotions are the bridge between experience, historical-collective memory, the action of resisting, and re-existing.

From indigenous research, we look for answers, with the historical wound on our bodies. I insist—researching is resisting, and resisting is fighting, and fighting is passion. Neutrality does not exist when they have tried to silence you yesterday and in the present. Objectivity is the language of the colonizer, of the colonial–patriarchal pact, attempting to silence us.

Constructing knowledge, therefore, implies a dispute for meaning, and in this scenario, what we construct as knowledge will contribute to the rupture of the matrix of the single truth, which allows us to move toward the question of the purpose of research. For what and to whom do our research, its results, and its discussions serve? As I tried to emphasize, in this way of thinking about research, the affective and the political are closely related, and both open the path to its ethical dimension, raising the question of what bell hooks (1994) referred to as commitment to social justice, thus addressing the responsibility that pertains to research, its processes, products, and reverberations.

In this manner, drawing on some reflections from McGregor and Restoule (2018) on indigenous methodologies, addressing responsibility is more than just assuming it as a researcher; it is about acknowledging the responsibility as a human being embedded in a network of relationships, where the one who researches holds power.

Assuming the above, that is to say, recognizing that those who research hold power, I think about the importance of addressing responsibility as accountability and as a giving back (Archibald and Parent 2019) as driving principles of indigenous research. Responding to those others who are ours, our people, our collectives, and thus, in the face of indifference, disaffection, or disconnection from hegemonic research, responding with commitment, respect, consideration, and reciprocity. In order to imprint these principles on the study, inspired by the ideas of Chilisa (2020), I propose to reflect on its effects: Does it serve the objectives of the communities? Does it contribute to justice? What are its benefits? Does it imply relevance and/or cultural belonging, considering the wisdom of the collective? Does it make their knowledge visible, revitalizing their wisdom? What happens after the conclusion of the research?

I must warn that I do not have all the answers, since they serve rather as guides that facilitate reflexivity and, as I have said, commitment. Some have helped me as a problematizing exercise to make decisions, for example, to opt for theoretical rather than empirical research. Others serve to reveal contradictions or tensions, such as those that appeared in the stage of methodological application that have brought me closer to indigenous research. Others have helped me to see the limitations of my project, including working with archives of the study period that are made mainly by foreign observers of the Mapuche people, which also implies an androcentric and Western interpretation of the events. Others were important for emphatical purposes, such as the final socio-political commitment of my research to contribute to the visibility of a silenced history. Perhaps there are many others that I still need to continue to feel–thinking about, understanding research as circular.

However, I would like to emphasize that it is possible to use other tools, to formulate other questions, to take other paths to build our research. It is to take Lorde’s (1988) warning not to use the master’s tools as an invitation to detach ourselves from the colonial–patriarchal axis; it is to embrace the “intellectual maroonage” proposed by Césaire (2016) as an escape from the powerful subjection of being accounted for and defined.

Returning to the previous considerations, researching from these perspectives entails committing to the pursuit of epistemic justice and taking a stance. Embracing a state of permanent rebellion and resistance. As Kovach explains: “It is a subtext of the journey [in search of knowledge]; resistance to being silenced and rendered invisible, insignificant, uncivilized, inhuman, non-existent, and inconsequential” (Kovach 2009, p. 91, in McGregor and Restoule 2018).

4. Towards the Mapuchization of Research

In my research, I propose three movements in the process of epistemological subversion: decolonization, indigenization, and mapuchization. Phases that should not be understood as linear, but as onto-epistemic frameworks that shape the research. I imagine them as “tributaries of disobedience”, that, as any river that has been interfered with by the human hand, will seek their course, sooner or later, to reach the sea. This is how I conceive mapuchizing: apprehending the dimension of collective being, where the ontological meets the epistemological, as an approach to the practice of research, to the practice of the inatuzugun.

This exercise also implies confronting our own colonization as a way of questioning ourselves (Villenas 2010) since this has become stagnant, not only because of the daily socialization processes, but also because of the disciplinary-formative and, of course, historical processes. By questioning ourselves, we can be aware of these positions and understand who speaks through us and the effects this has on our practices.

Talking about the ontological dimension, also means addressing the modern colonial gender system, which, as Espinosa-Miñoso (2016) points out, “produces, and imposes on us, simultaneously and without dissociation, an epistemic regime of hierarchical dichotomous differentiation that distinguishes between the human and the non-human, and from which the social classification categories of race-gender emerge” (p. 153). This process will result in an ontological rupture in the Mapuche society (Dillehay 2016), understood as a profound manifestation of human alterity (Quidel Lincoleo 2016), whose effects operate in the Mapuche people at a global level, affecting their ways of life, cultural expression, social, political, and geopolitical organization. It is from this place where we find ourselves, and it is from this place that we also embark on the search for Mapuche gen9 to reclaim the lost culture that has been torn away by the establishment of the colonial–patriarchal system, usurpation, and dispossession.

As I read about indigenous research, in my intention to indigenize my own, I resonate with many of its aspects. However, there are others that become tangled threads with which I must weave. Given the principle of honoring the values of the community and following its teachings, what do I do? An abyss emerges. How can I follow these principles if my experience has been, as I have said, dispossession? As was that of many Mapuche, who were forced to cut the threads that linked them/us to the lof10. How can I know the az mapu11 of my territory and assume the practices of a community that was left behind in time and space?

We are from the lof of those who have no “lof” reads the subtitle of Millanca’s book (Millanca 2015), and I take it from my bookshelf to read it again. My gaze finds the words of introduction by Machi12 Pinda Pichún, speaking about what it means to be xampurria:

Because we are unbreakable stone, like the beings that populate their stories, lamuen13, stones where the memory of the world is written after the catastrophe, an uplifted stone that resounds and remembers, that returns the language to the fecund and laborious power of ‘mogen’14.

(p. 12)

I hear my father’s words, telling my brother and me when we were children, “You are Mapuche, we are Mapuche, never forget that.” I recall my grandfather jotting down scattered phrases in Mapuzungun15, from what he remembered hearing at other times, in his childhood, in his youth, as his own acts of resistance against forgetting. I come back to it, and I think about the “porfía” (determination). To research–mapuchize is “porfía”. It is refusing to forget.

I think of Rivera Cusicanqui (2015) and his proposal of ch’ixi epistemology as recognizing the contradiction between two subject positions and the capacity to inhabit it creatively to free ourselves from it. From which “we could exorcise the binarism, and with it, the colonial disjunction that prevents us from being ourselves: a thought capable of activating liberating energies, through a kind of conscious and self-ascriptive (re) indianization” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2018, pp. 30–31). Mapuchize is, therefore, a learning and a way of making memory, rescuing the stripped knowledge, recognizing in this walk that we are being produced by the modern colonial gender pact. It is to assume ourselves in a kind of oppositional consciousness, as Sandoval (1991) states, in that we “sought subjective forms of resistance different from the forms determined by the social order itself” (p. 11).

In relation to the above, declaring ourselves as Mapuche-xampurria is a form of resistance, and from this acknowledgement, it is possible to find ourselves with ancestral knowledge, which in turn, is new knowledge, in a constant cyclical sense, where the kuyfi16 that is ahead of us, serving as a guide for the steps we are taking. We are looking from the past to the present and from the present to the past, where they are both transformed.

Therefore, embracing the contradictory, oppositional, warriache17 xampurria dimension, means declaring that “the indigenous were, and are, above all, contemporary beings” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010, p. 54), means that we navigate the interstices of the processes of colonization, recolonization, and permanent resistance.

Mapuchizing research, hence, is a re-encounter. In turn, it is a methodological tool that allows the deconstruction of power and the co-creation of knowledge. Co-creation is meant here in a much broader and much more complex sense, which not only accounts for a mutual relationship with another, with a partner with whom you may be developing research or writing a text together. I am referring to a co-creation that includes the ancestral knowledge that is housed in different places, in the books that speak of our culture, conversations, and memories, among so many other forms that knowledge adopts. With all that, we research, and with all this xampurria, we co-create.

So, I return to the colonial texts, and I take what Deloria (2002) raises when talking about indigenous historiography: “writing contemporary Indian history requires a creative weaving together of contradictions” (p. 21), understanding that this will be constructed from the reading of indigenous thinkers who confront Euro-American libraries, of non-indigenous people who recognize native peoples, and of individuals who will be in intermediate positions, work to develop their narratives with full awareness of difference and ambiguity (Deloria 2002).

I return to the texts, but also to a question I asked earlier: How should I approach reading them? I examine what Ñanculef (2016) describes as the Mapuche learning methodology, the inarrumen:

(…) it is ‘to observe’, it is the conscious and permanent concern of the Mapuche human being of every step they take, since every day, they create inarrumen; they observe the day, the night, the movement of the sun, of the moon, of all the details in their life (…) To observe, and to observe very slowly, to observe to discover what happens, what is behind something, because there is always something more than what our eyes can see, or think they can see (…) That is why the concept of inarrumen is an epistemology of realizing the world, of the total universe.

(p. 16)

Thus, Mapuche research, along with the political purpose of serving the fight, also contains an epistemic purpose: to serve the Mapuche kimün, to contribute to its rakizuam18, and an ontological purpose on the path of the (re)construction of the che19. Because those of us who grew up on the asphalt of the mapurbe20 (Aniñir 2009), in the outskirts of the big cities, do not observe the nature, the sun, or moonlight cycles, nor do we listen to the kimche21 to tell us about the epew22, to transmit the teachings. Those of us who grew up on the asphalt learned Spanish; we learnt about the great civilizations and that history always begins with the Greeks and Romans, and that the Mapuche were people from a past time.

In this scenario, the inarrumen, as the apprehension of the world, will be an act of feeling–thinking–acting, consciously. Inarrumen, and I observe the interstices of the texts, the borders, the between the lines, and while I do it, I feel, and while I do it, I resist, and I (re)construct myself as a Mapuche woman. Because finally, researching, from this place, is part of life itself.