“The homosexuals, they are the ones causing the problems in our community. Their sins in the city make life [in the country] harder for the Mapuche,” is the first introduction I had to Mapuche religious practices in rural Chile at an Evangelical Christian church with my host family. While sitting next to my four year old host sister in the front row, I cringed in my seat as I listened to the sermon.  I was not only physically afraid, but also deeply confused because of what I learned shortly after this experience from a Mapuche educator. Teaching a group of US college students, he explained that historically, Mapuchi spiritual leaders (or Machis) were “men, women and homosexuals – yes it did not matter, homosexuals were welcomed and supported in Mapuche religion.” Yet, when I asked a variety of Mapuche people during my time in Chile about related issues no one ever mentioned anything about differing views of gender and sexuality in the Mapuche past nor when or how a shift occurred. As a queer, white woman who had grown up in a Southern Baptist household, I began wondering: How did this change in understanding and practice occur?  How does the refusal to remember alternative sexualities and gender fit with the well-known efforts of the Mapuche to reclaim their cultural history?

My project begins to answer these questions through interviews and participant observation with Mapuche and Chilean individuals involved within Intercultural Education. In Chile, Intercultural Education is a state funded and designed program that aims to promote indigenous identity by including indigenous history and culture in schools. Yet not all aspects of indigenous identity are equally supported; indeed some, such as traditional Mapuche ideas about sexuality and gender are actively excluded. This is particularly interesting because the Mapuche are known for their radical opposition to state power, and their effective action and organizing to maintain their indigenous lands and identities. I argue that the erasure of the traditions of alternative gender and sexuality is a result of the interconnected influence of the state and church (often in educational settings) since the colonial period, and that the Mapuche could be more fully emancipated/decolonized if they worked to reclaim their traditional flexible constructions of sexuality and gender. 

I conducted this project in spring 2012 during an SIT study abroad program titled “Education and Social Change” based in Santiago, Chile. After studying the ways in which political, economic and social factors within Chile produce inequality for two months, the program looked at the specific inequalities experienced by the Mapuche population, and then each student chose an individual research project for the remaining six weeks of the program. My decision to explore the question of Mapuche conceptions of gender and sexuality came out of my positionalities as a queer, white, American, female student.  Having grown up in a Southern Baptist culture, I have seen and experienced the effects of having a “sinful” identity within Evangelical Christian spaces and I wanted to understand how a community that once valued a non-binary conception of sexuality had become exclusionary toward these alternative sexualities. I experienced this exclusionary attitude during my time in Chile, although not directed specifically at me. Though everyone was always welcoming, I never felt comfortable enough to tell any of my host families or contacts that I identified as lesbiana. To tease out how Mapuche thought about gender and sexuality, and how effort to build up Mapuche culture addressed gender and sexuality, I spent four weeks of concentrated ethonographic research and immersion in the field site of Chapod, Chile, a small Mapuche town in the Araucania state.

The Mapuche are the largest and most prevalent indigenous group in Chile. The Mapuche, translated as “people of the earth,” are famous for being particularly autonomous and powerful; for example, they are the only indigenous group that successfully fought off the Spanish during conquest and they entered into treaties that lasted for 300 years. However, throughout the past two hundred years they have both assimilated into the Chilean state (which often entailed Christianization) and worked to retain some autonomy; depending on the political regime of the Chilean state. 

Historically, the Mapuche placed spiritual and religious value on differing gender and sexual identities. According to Ana Bacigalupo, Mapuche perceived gender and sexuality as a performance; no matter anatomical sex, male and female Machis could take roles as women, men or third gender.  This means that though in Western terms someone would be born and labeled as a certain sex, to which we ascribe gender; in Mapuche terms their gender identity would be defined through the way in which they performed certain roles and behaviors. In this way, the distinction of gendered roles is based on an individual’s gender performance, rather than anatomical differences. Sexual relations were also defined by fluctuating gender performance rather than anatomy.  Accepted sexual partners were not defined by opposite physical sex, but rather the way in which the individual performed his or her gender. This construction of sexual and gender identity among Mapuche shamans contrasts sharply from the gender construction presented from a Chilean point of view; a construction which is built upon and reinforces binaries of gender tied to anatomy that creates only two ways to embody gender: male or female. 

Currently, these historical and traditional understandings of gender and sexual identities are basically non-existent within reclamation policies and programs. State level support for indigenous people emerges out of  neo-liberal muliticulturalism that celebrates difference without critiquing hierarchy and systems of power.  Projects funded by the government for Mapuche welfare focus on the economic benefit of being indigenous through ethno-tourism or market-oriented farming initiatives, but do not encourage an autonomous Mapuche identity that is separate from a Chilean state identity; the only valued way of being Mapuche is that which can be helpful to Chile as a whole, or which fits comfortably with “Chilean-ness”. 

The Intercultural and Bilingual Education program I studied in Chapod is an example of this type of policy. This program reclaims indigenous identity by teaching nominal language classes and celebrating easily digestible forms of Mapuche cultural difference, instead of exploring the politics of Mapuche history and the very different understanding of the world embedded in Mapuche cosmology. The focus on language signifies that indigenous identity can be about learning the language, but not about actually reclaiming histories and power. Furthermore, Christianity is taught today in most public IBE schools, continuing the assimilation of the population by imposing Christian beliefs on indigenous cosmovisions and morals. 

When I interviewed the religion teacher in the Chapod school–a historically Christian school that had adopted the IBE curriculum, she specifically demonstrated the imposition of “Christian” ideals within the Mapuche school. She encouraged students to model correct male behavior for students who had more feminine dispositions. From a traditional Mapuche view, this embodiment of both male and female attributes would be a sign that such students have Shamanic powers, but in this space—purportedly a space that celebrates Mapucheness—this embodiment is shamed. When I asked her during an interview about Mapuche ideas surrounding sexual diversity, she stated that, “There has always been and still is respect for individuals, no matter who they are in the community.” She said she taught her students to ‘respect’ all people no matter their identity, yet she simultaneously encouraged them to assist in changing students who did not fit into norms.  She actively erased not only Mapuche’s historical openness to a more fluid understanding of sexuality and gender, but also the ability for students to act, let alone identify, in a non-heteronormative way. 

Though the historical constructions around gender and sexuality existed in the Mapuche culture, there is a lack of mobilization around acceptance of sexual diversity. Mapuche are well known for their radical activism against exploitation of oil and water by large companies on historic Mapuche lands. But even while this is an affront to the state and capitalist enterprise, it does not challenge the deep logic of Western culture. And the IBE programs and ethno-tourism that are said to promote Mapuche identity do so through the logic of neo-liberal multiculturalism that does not aim to fully accept indigenous diversity, but rather recreate Mapuche identity  in a way that fits with state assumptions of citizenship.  The historically fluid understanding of gender and sexuality among the Mapuche has been actively expunged because only aspects of identity which fit into Chilean conceptions of citizenship are even imaginable to both Chileans and the Mapuche today. For the Mapuche to fully liberate themselves from the shackles of colonial thinking, they must find or create a space for re-discovery of contentious parts of identity instead of continually reinforcing colonial ideas of indigeneity. Although the Mapuche are known for their radical opposition to state power, the most radical step they can take would be to reclaim their own constructions of sexuality and gender. 

References

Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella. (2007). Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing Among Chilean Mapuche. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Richards, Patricia. 2010. “Of Indians and Teorrorists: How the State and Local Elites Construct  the Mapuche in Neoliberal Multicultural Chile.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Journal of Latin American Studies 42: 59-90.

Sigal, Pete. 2009. “Latin America and the Challenge of Globalizing the History of Sexuality.”American Historical Review Forum December: 1340-1353.

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