Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mes del vientoMonth of Wind

2024; Indiana University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15366936-10926984

1547-8424

Cece Roth-Eagle,

Gender, Health, and Social Inequality

She takes us to her camino.The land exhales into springtime. The romp of the breeze and cry of the condor. Grasses form muddy puddles below our feet, the melt of snow-capped mountains. It smells of soil.I know that I can't be without being here. At the beginning, it cost me to understand this dream. It makes me happy to have had this call to return to the territory.Under its rows of poplar trees, Amancay's pathway shimmers while she speaks. She had never seen this path before she started dreaming of it as a girl, where we now stand in a patch of balsamic sunlight. Amancay grew up in a tourist-laden town in Patagonia, but in her pewmas, she walked the poplars.I had fear of my identity. I used to resist anything new. To know that your life was not what you thought it was, that your history was not what you thought it was.At the age of nineteen, Amancay's uncle brought her to the ancestral territory for the first time. On that visit, she walked the camino of her dreams.Sentir que tenés un lugar en donde podés desarrollar tu vida. Yo pienso en mi hijo. Y así, en todas las futuras generaciones para vivir. Estamos cerca de dejarle un lugar a nuestros hijos.To feel that you have a place where you can develop your life. I think of my son, and all the future generations to live. We're closer to leaving a place for our children.Pewma, in Mapuche culture, is not just a dream. It's a revelation. Her face laces in shadow as the canopies shift above us.A year and a half ago, at the age of thirty-three, amidst a communal reckoning and the peak of the pandemic, Amancay became the lof2 Kinxikew's youngest and first female longko.3I understand that sometimes, the forces of a territory make one return. It's very clear that I had to be here. I still don't know why. Today I am longko, but I don't know if that's the reason.○ ○ ○Flor is telling me a fábula. A journalist and researcher specializing in social-environmental issues and my advisor on this project, Flor and I spend our time in the car closing the cultural, contextual, and idiomatic gaps that I have yet to grasp after three months in Argentina. She also tells me Mapuche fables.We pass between Río Negro and Neuquén on the highway and the coarse Patagonic scenery tumbles beyond the panes of our windows.When her lover becomes ill, a Mapuche woman mounts the cerro in search of an herbal remedy. Once on the mountain peak, the cóndor tells her that the price for the medicine is her heart.She agrees, saves her lover's life, and ascends the mountain once more. Soon after, the vulture is seen flying away with her heart in his beak.Amancays are a yellow flor del bosque.4According to Mapuche legend, the red drops of its center signify the blood of our heroine's heart.Es patriarcal, Flor says as she pushes on her sunglasses.○ ○ ○In 2006, the Argentine government declared a state of emergency to halt Indigenous evictions across the country. Provinces were instructed to survey territories with their local native communities and ideally, officially recognize their claims; while the law has been extended three separate times to provide provincial governments time to initiate the process, it never reached politically taut regions like Neuquén (Yanniello 2020).The Mapuche lof Kinxikew have faced two eviction attempts in the last decade from proprietors who believed they had private ownership of ancestral lands. I visit Amancay and her community on November 14, 2022. In accordance with Ley 26.160, the historic relevamiento de la tierra begins.○ ○ ○As Flor and I pull through the gate and onto the territory, there is an outpour of people from the proveeduría, the circular operations building for camping administration. Framed in glass panes, it outlooks Lago Nahuel Huapi and Manke Ruka, the nearest mountain: Home of the Vulture.Amancay's mother, Nora, greets me as I open the car door.La escritora, she says as she kisses both of my cheeks. The writer.We cross the grass to Amancay's partner as he grapples with a hose. ¡Mucho viento! he yells over the shake of the trees. Much wind!The primary meeting of the land survey has adjourned, so the group mills about and we lap them, kissing both of their cheeks. The lof Melo, a smaller and more recently established community, are under the protection of the lof Kinxikew and participate in the relevamiento to certify their territory. I met with them during a previous visit to Patagonia. Vientísmo! they call to me.In our car ride, Flor had explained to me that November is el mes de viento, the month of wind, across Patagonia. The heavy clouds twist on the skyline; the snow-drenched peaks seem to teeter.Flor offers me her cup of mate as we wait outside of the proveeduría for Amancay. Es demasiado amagro para vos? It's too bitter for you? she shouts and I shake my head.As far as I can tell, the cultural and social hub of Argentina is the practice of communal-infusion through "taking mate": sipping the herb through a silver straw, or bombillo, after combining it with lukewarm water. The cluster of people pass mate between each other.Many Argentines claim its conception originated from European settlers in the 1800s. But like most things, taking mate was born within Indigenous populations and previous to the constitution of the State.We're told that she's ready, so Flor and I push our way through the draught and into the darkened room. A paper map hangs on the wall: the product of today's meeting. Colorful lines and crude drawings identify areas of the territory.Lafún y La laguna del toro; Río pedregoso y Piedra de soldados; Arroyo las vueltas; Camping Manke Ruka; avistamiento del cuero; usurpador Ovrun.The Lafún and the Lagoon of Offering; Stony River and the Rock of Soldiers; the Returns Creek, Camping Manke Ruka; the sighting of the leather; and the Ovrun usurper.They have to prove to the State that they were here, long before the State ever existed.○ ○ ○A lesson in Mapudungún, the Mapuche language.El Wallmapu. Ancestral territory of the Indigenous nations of the Mapuche which crosses the highlands of the Andes.Los mapu-che. People of the land.Mapu-dungún. Language of the land.As the Mapuche longko and researcher Wenteche José Quidel writes,"We are not only referring to material land, because that exists in the concept Pvji Mapu. Mapu is a term that implies all the dimensions of life within the universe. That is to say, we can understand the cosmos as Mapu" (Matías Rendón 2018).Another word: winka.Los conquistadores of the sixteenth century. Originally signifying the white race. It stems from the word Inka referring to a different colonizer, a different empire that once arrived to El Wallmapu.El Wallmapu is a region spanning the base of the Southern Hemisphere, extending through parts of Chile and Argentina long before the first winkas invented their territorial delimitations.El Wallmapu is not a territory, explicitly; its aboriginal people now steward only 6 percent of its terrain. It holds the history of conquest, and the modernity of its material exploitation. Private sectors want to convert its mountains to mines of gold and silver, its biodiversity to monoculture forests. How can we conceptualize of a place that once was? That has within it buried an ancient knowledge and collective memory?Amancay is trying to remember.○ ○ ○Yo sabía que mi destino iba a llegar algún día, pero nunca pensé que iba a ser tan rápido.Amancay sits in a chair across the room, the quivering land framed behind her head in the windowpane. She began by giving her formal introduction in Mapudungún, which is how she initiates all meetings. The room is lined with family members who sleepily half-listen; her three-year-old son, Toki, circles her with a plastic gun. The room is cool and dark and cast in the shadow of Manke Ruka.Authority elections were coming up. I talked to my family first. My dad said, "I'll go with you," and my mom said, "Me too."I believe that to be an authority, or to have such strong authority, you need a solid base, which is family. And that base was always there in the worst moments and continues to be there today.My uncle brought me to the community; he told me, "You have to come with me."My uncle brought me here and made me know my family because I didn't know them, and he made me know my identity.I could see with my eyes a dream I had since I was very young, a dream of the path.I am grateful for everything he gave me and for the place he gave me here in the territory, but I also have to be honest that he hurt me a lot.Because at one point, he felt that I was like him.In 2020, her uncle was banished from the community, resulting in Amancay's ascent to the role of longko.○ ○ ○From across the room, Amancay's other uncle tells us the fable of the boleadora, which was found on the grounds of the territory. A bola consists of a cord tethered to rock weights; initially a weapon to entangle the legs of prey, it was a popular tool across Indigenous South America.When the winkas arrived to Bariloche, boleadoras became a form of protection and defense. Fue la última resistencia tuvieron, Amancay says. It was the last resistance they had.○ ○ ○The Conquest of the "Desert," from 1878 to 1885, was an Indigenous genocide by part of the Argentine military, commanded by General Julio A. Roca. The South's native populations were to be exterminated for the betterment of a developing Eurocentric state. Roca's forces conducted concentration camps, torture, assassination, enslavement, and desparecidos, or disappeared persons (Melfi 2015). Today, there exists a delegitimization campaign sustained by racist ideals and nationalists with the false premise of extranjerización or "foreignization" of Mapuche communities: that is, that they are Chilean usurpers without ancestral claim to El Puelmapu5 (Crespo et al. 2021).It was impossible to remove us completely. And those who resisted were sent to live on top of El Cerro, like my family, because the Nahuel Huapi National Park became criminalized. The park put our family in the category of settlers and gave us a precarious permit to occupy the passages. They gave us a little piece of paper saying that we only had the status of settlers and that we had to pay for the grazing of our animals.We became nothing. And on top of that we had to pay them. We needed to adopt a new way of living, of eating, because here the farmers already had plantations and animals, and suddenly they closed everything with wire fences. They turned us into their own employees. . . . Many of our family ended up being the women who took care of their children, or the men who had to put up the fences in our own territory.Then, on top of that, they had to hide their identity. They spoke Mapudungún. They did ceremonies in places where nobody could see them. It was a loss of cultural history that cut with my grandfather. He taught us everything that has to do with the knowledge of the territory, he knows everything. But never about identity. We never had a lesson of Mapudungún, he never told us anything that they did [in terms of] being Mapuche.Children and adults alike learn Mapudungún and practice the spiritual and medicinal traditions of their ancestors as acts of cultural restoration. But much of the knowledge has been generationally lost in an attempt at survival.○ ○ ○On our drive home, Flor pulls to the lip of the highway which cuts through la meseta, or plateau. Its shrubs and sands unfold flatly. All I can hear is the scorch of the wind on this hard place.Beyond, peaks clot the fondo,6 engulfed in mountainous shadow.This is where the battles once took place, where conquistadores met Mapuche, firearms en contra de boleadoras. Mapuche en contra del Estado.Fue la última resistencia tuvieron.It was the last resistance they had.Back in the car, Flor tells me that nothing has changed: the heart of the conflict is still firearms against bolas for Patagonia's disputed frontier.○ ○ ○The beach rocks shift under our feet.As we walk the shoreline of the Lago Nahuel Huapi, Flor distinguishes plant species for me. El sauce, the willow that mirages in the breeze; las rosas mosquetas, sweetbriars which won't ripen until winter comes. On our drives, flowering retamas ornate the highway in yellowing buds. But they're not native to this area, and neither are the pines that engulf the bosques or the poplar trees that lined Amancay's pewma.Planted in the 1970s to quickly reforest the farmlands of the steppe, Douglas firs and other pine species now burn faster and enhance climate-induced wildfires (Bilbao 2022). Patagonia's vegetal biodiversity could be reduced entirely to pine in the next hundred years (Leitch 2017).○ ○ ○Argentina's nineties marked the emergence of a new political and financial strategy: neo-extractivism and agro-exportation. The diffusion of neoliberal ideology encouraged privatization of land (at the cost of the displacement of Indigenous communities) and the lack of governmental interference and publicly funded programs. The growth of an exportation economy matched rising demand for commodities in the West (Harvey 2005).With the false promise of financial satiation after prolonged economic crisis, the Argentine State initiated its expansion into, and exploitation of, rural lands deemed previously unprosperous: El Wallmapu (Svampa 2019).○ ○ ○Another fable.Amancay's abuelo, José, once rested upon the rocky shore of the Lago Nahuel Huapi and beside the slope of Manke Ruka.The ground began to shift under him and he realized that, rather than perching on the usual gravel, the beachfront was leather. It was alive.Then, it tossed him into the center of the lago.○ ○ ○In Mapuche cosmovision, ngen are the spiritual forces of El Wallmapu. They reify in order to communicate. In this case, the ngen-ko serves as a sacred reminder. Amidst environmental crisis, Mapuche belief systems propose alternative methods of coexistence (Yanniello 2009).Biodiversity is threatened today by large speculators and large political forces that do not care about anything at the cost of being able to generate more money. For us, it is not money: it is life that we remember.There is no love; life is not worth anything to them. The important thing is to have more and more property, more and more money, and above all, they don't care about anything.On the other hand, our proposal is kvme felen.There are other proposals of life, where the first priority is love, caring for others and caring for nature. We see ourselves in a space surrounded by life, and that life is in the lake, the mountains, the forest.We are working for a totally different political project, another form of social construction.Life is not about competing, life is about living and being happy, isn't it? Because that is what we were born for, but no. You see so many injustices, you see so much evil in people.○ ○ ○The Patagonic region of El Wallmapu is in stages of exploration: deposits of gold, silver, and uranium; petrolic exploitation using hydrofracking techniques; deforestation and monoculture forests. But with threats of overexploitation and ecosystemic collapse, communal mobilization has stopped advances of these initiatives in recent years (Rodriguéz Pardo 2011). And yet, still they come.Twenty kilometers away, in the central and northern zones of the Neuquén province, new petroleum reserves have been found underneath the territories of Mapuche communities.○ ○ ○This alternative social construction takes form as the Manke Ruka camping site, where the community offers an affordable, educational space; guests receive lessons on Mapuche ways of life and ancestral practices of caring for the land.They are also planning an outreach program for farming, where agricultural processes will be made accessible, where people can learn where their dulce de leche comes from, as Amancay puts it.Roca made a map.He decided how he was going to distribute all the territory, but he also decided a place where he was going to create national parks, that is, places protected by an institution.It turns out that when he thought and divided all the territory, we were still here. And still, they continue to replicate that logic in the Mapuche territories.They teach park rangers that we have to conserve the native animals of the place, but when they meet and come to work where we live, they realize that there are people and that, for them, we are an attack against all that biodiversity.We bring our knowledge ancestrally.But it is difficult for them to understand our relationship with the territory. They see us as a great threat and, despite the fact that today there is a relationship between the national parks and the Mapuche people, how can we understand these two logics of protecting the territory?Therefore, it is constantly constructing itself through a dialogue that is exhausting. Sometimes they forget and end up fining us for something that we don't consider valid.I am the one in my community who is always trying to ensure that my people do not have a conflict with park rangers.El Consejo Intercultural de Comanejo attempts to incorporate this native knowledge into the stewardship of the land by including Mapuche board members. But in general, conservationists distrust Mapuche means of land stewardship because it falls outside of Western frameworks of knowledge and practice.At one point as she speaks, she turns to Flor: La cara. The face. She laughs, asking if I'm understanding.Entiendo todo, I assure her, even as an outsider with questionable language comprehension. Even if I'm not entirely certain that I'm telling the truth.○ ○ ○I wander the sleet-shined streets of Bariloche, which slope downward to Avenida 12 de Octubre and the long road paralleling Lago Nahuel Huapi. The view sprawls, mountain ranges consumed by the frail blues of a cold sky and the dappling water. I stand listening to the slow lap of waves cresting coastline.Bariloche self-advertises as the "Little Switzerland" of Patagonia. It's a tourist hub of outdoor sporting gear, gothic-style villas, chocolaterías, and neon hotel signage promising vacancy.Bariloche-goers seem entirely made up of either the retired or backpacking postgraduates. But the town is surrounded on all sides by poverty, nearly half of which are Mapuche communities.Virulofche. La gente del otro lado de la montaña. The people on the other side of the mountain. The name "Bariloche" toponymies from Mapudungún.In the town's plaza, tourists gaze out over the bruising skyline. I'm looking for an allusion to the cultural hurt behind "Little Switzerland's" neat image: and then I find, in the center of the plaza, a Roca statue mounted on a horse and drenched in the red graffiti of blood.Anyone want maté-cito? Flor asks.We sit at a picnic table outside. I was told that Bariloche finally decided to give me a beautiful day, and it's true: we are in short sleeves and sleepy under the sunlight's sweet gaze.Amancay taps out a heartbeat on her chest: Toc-toc, toc-toc. The noise of a heartbeat is distinct, isn't it?I listen to the thud of her palm and the tap of her tongue against the roof of her mouth—her pulse turned outward to me.Our heart beats differently at certain moments. When it is calm, it makes toc-toc, toc-toc.When one is with a lot of emotion, it makes tac-tac-tac.Amancay is describing the kultrún she plays, a sacred Mapuche percussion instrument that replicates heart sounds. The leather of the drum is painted geographically and seasonally: norte, oeste, este, y sur; otoño, primavera, invierno y verano.When I was nineteen years old, my uncle brought me here. I was studying tourism at that time. He made me meet the rest of my family.Amancay's grandmother died giving birth to Amancay's mother, Nora, so her grandfather, José Quintriqueo, gave her away.He [her uncle] always knew me, he always saw in me the possibility that I could accompany him in also generating a change in the territory. And from that moment on, everything changed . . . everything changed.Her younger self, the one who existed long before she knew her Mapuche heritage, she affectionately refers to as Mankey.7 I feel that girl here with us, as Amancay describes making music under the hum of the life all around us.I was always very fearful as a girl.I realized that those insecurities didn't let me be who I am, so Mankey has to let go of those insecurities because she can do a lot.I am capable of generating well-being for many people; I feel that I can make an impact on many. So I have lost my fear and that loss of fear has made me able to do many things that I would never have believed I was capable of.I had never thought I would be so valued and so loved for having, at least, changed someone's life a little bit. Mankey's going to have to know that in the future.A horse wanders by, picking at the grasses.But Mankey always saw a dream when she fell asleep.The paseo of her dreams was a point of entrance for the evictors that came for the land. It was also the pathway the community took to reenter the territory upon their return.○ ○ ○Amancay and I sink into the verdancy around us. I ask her if she was named for the fable of the Amancay. But no, no; her mother just liked the flower.Es romántica, she tells me, and she smiles.She's preoccupied with the idea that no one is documenting this period of great restoration, and histories are disappearing, just as they did with her grandfather.Can she describe the moment she met her family? Saw her land? But she can't tell me of her homecoming—she's lost it all to memory.You recreate it like a fable.What I am proposing to you is that you also give yourself the audacity to interpret it as you would have imagined it. I trust you.Kvme felen, in Mapuche cosmovision, proposes an alternative way of life to the capitalist system.It does not contain territorial exploitation, cultural devastation, or spiritual eviction; no hyper-consumption and overproduction and materialism.This way of life asks for the restoration of equilibrium. It suggests the ability to understand ourselves as inseparable from nature, as well as our own capacity for agricultural self-sustenance. The delicate web of nature is revived; love's gentle balance centralized (Confederación Mapuche del Neuquén 2010).It feels like home without property, like a great return of environmental consonance. It is how El Wallmapu once looked, long before any winkas. It is the toc-toc, toc-toc of the heartbeat of the world, made tranquil again.That is how her homecoming felt to me.○ ○ ○Our spirit does not always go with this body. Sometimes it leaves and goes places where we like to be. He loved to be here, despite all the damage. He fought a lot for it and so his pini keeps coming back.Amancay breastfeeds her son while she describes her election to longko. It did not follow the cultural trajectory of spiritual appointment: rather, it was a democratic process that came during communal crisis. Her uncle and former longko was exposed as having sexually abused eight minors within the community.It was done to eight people, boys and girls, some of them are still young and some of them are already adults, but it ruined their lives. What's more, they decided to file a complaint in the middle of the pandemic.It is very difficult for them to be part of our community circles, it is very difficult for them to think about a family project, to think about a productive project.Today, they have been able to recover, that is, they have their partners, they have their children, but nevertheless, I still see a certain pain in them that I don't know how to remedy.We had to expel him from the community and tell him never to come back to the territory. But there is still an open wound.For me it was very painful, the process has been very intense for me as a person, as a niece.Because I loved him a lot.The communal response to this was the democratic election of a nearly all female, generationally youthful council of leadership.I believe that change comes from the youth, right?Both she and Flor seem fixed on telling me that it's me who's just a girl, solo una chica. But in moments like these, as she switches her son from one nipple to the other, she seems impossibly young for the cost of the world she is building.We want him to go away and leave us alone once and for all. We need that tranquility. We decided to rebuild a community circle that he was in charge of destroying.And for that he has to go, and thank you.○ ○ ○Amancay pats it out gently for me against her skin. Toc-toc, toc-toc, she's clicking her tongue and the canopies lift in the wind. She knows the sound of a tranquil heart, and she plays the kultún in search of it.On the last day of the relevamiento, the community takes lunch outdoors, with tortas fritas and mate. Amancay is laughing:Yo no estoy cansada, ni estresada, y ni hice nada. I'm not tired, nor stressed, and I didn't do anything.She seems relieved to be able to rest placidly with us at our picnic table. We pass our mate and watch the waxen sky. A fire snaps under the grill; people sprawl on the grass with their hats over their eyes.This survey is not going to guarantee anything.On an outbreath, Amancay confesses that, in just the same way that provincial governments permitted eviction attempts despite the federal law forbidding it, the territory is still under threat until a law of communal property is passed through the State.This type of law threatens Bariloche, a place rooted in private property and burgeoning real estate.Solo un freno. It's only a brake.But there's so much joy tossed up into this weatherly pause from the month of wind. We watch her son drag around a fallen branch while the whole landscape seems to undulate.The only way is a law of community property that allows us generational continuity, so that it is not cut. Right now, I don't know if I can pass it on to my son.That is the only thing we are asking for. Because if not, the truth is that they are coming.They are coming for the air; they are coming for the minerals.○ ○ ○The group calls together for an afafan, and I feel honored to be present.The afafan is a communal ritual that comes in the face of great celebration, gratitude, loss.They circle and throw their fists in the air: Marici Wew! Marici Wew! Marici Wew! Diez veces estamos vivos, diez veces venceremos. Ten times we are alive, ten times we win.When we scream, we understand.Before the relevamiento, the community had gathered at their Lëfün, a sacred ceremonial space that protects from the snow, rain, and wind. Amancay and her young nephew describe to me the slant of the morning light, the sacrificial crescents, the delicate reciprocity with spiritual forces; why they bring maitén and manzano as offerings. But this sacredity should not be described by me: you'll just have to have the audacity to interpret it as you would have imagined it.La única lucha que se pierda es la que abandona. The only fight you lose is the one you abandon.○ ○ ○It's the month of wind in El Wallmapu, and private sectors move in on petroleum deposits; land is sold and bought and sequestered. But there are boleadoras to be found, little girls who dream of paseo.And it's spring, so the year's flowers begin their blossom; trailing highways, lost in forests, even sprouting within Bariloche's corners of dirt.To me, this seems lucky.Because in El Wallmapu, flowers come with fables.○ ○ ○Mari mari pu lamgen, mari mari kom pu ce, ince Amancay Quintriqueo pigen. Ince longko tañi lof Kinxikew, Ka kiñel mapu Consejo Zonal Lafkenche de la Confederación Mapuche del Neuquén.Pewmagele kume nuxan ka kvme kuzaw.Hello, all my brothers and sisters. I am Amancay Quintriqueo. I am the longko of this community, the community that is a part of the Zonal Council of the Lafkenche of the Mapuche Confederation of Neuquén. And I hope that we can have good work here today. That the conversation can be circular.