Liliana Ancalao
Translated from the Mapuzungun/Spanish by Seth Michelson
Memory of the Sacred Land
With tremendous responsibility, I share here these words, as a human being on this planet, as a woman, as part of the Mapuche people—a people who, after a massacre, are coming together slowly after being shattered.
I am from here, the South, the beginning of the world—a place that today is called Patagonia, a place that today is marketed to tourists as the end of the world.
I live in Comodoro Rivadavia.
My father, Ancalao, and my mother, Meli, arrived very young to this city, forced from the countryside, run off by material poverty. They were forced to abandon a limited space assigned by the Argentine state after the War of the Desert. They were forced off that land because it was insufficient to sustain everyone, forced to swap the time of sowing and of calving for a job, salary, schedule, and bosses.
From that beautiful couple, we six children were born. By the time I was born in 1961, my family had settled in an oil camp. At that time, the company that oversaw the mining of that fossil fuel was Dutch. My father was an oil worker for thirty years and my mother was a housekeeper for administrators of the company.
As children, we spent our days playing on metal bridges beneath which flowed little rivers of water, oil, and petroleum. We walked through blackened earth around abandoned wells. We, the forgetful.
Today, the basin of the Gulf of San Jorge, in which is situated the city of Comodoro Rivadavia, continues to be a site of oil exploitation, with oil extracted from the ground and from an undersea platform.
Today, they control our use of water, and they periodically cut the supply to certain neighborhoods until the reserves are restored. The administrators of the natural resource justify the water cuts by blaming them on breaks in the pipelines, but we all believe it is due to the oil companies in the region using exorbitant amounts of water to mine oil.
And we’re all caught in this—those of us who don’t need to work for the oil companies and the many who do—playing a part month after month, year after year, for income, social security, retirement, all of us witnesses to the plunder of the earth.
It’s the trap of capitalism.
In the south of this continent, my history was born—the history of the Mapuche people.
In my history, there’s a before and an after to the time that the eldest remember as “the loss of the world,” a before and an after to what western historians call “the Conquest of the Desert and the pacification of Auracanía” in approximately 1880 of the Gregorian calendar.
A before and after to the moment when the first bullet from a Winchester smashed through the universe. That rifle that capitalism purchased for the Chilean-Argentine army in an attempt to eliminate us.
They had to kill us to sink their deforesting, desertifying, predatory, contaminating talons, their “civilizing” talons, into wall Mapu, our land. And they killed us in many ways: by shooting us, by bleeding us out, starving us, separating us from our children, erasing our memory.
That moment, when the world was lost. When they trampled the land. When they destroyed the bridge of the mountains with borders, when the plantations sank their wired fenceposts and carved up the land. Little more than a century ago. They silenced our language, undid our political organization, dismembered our amorous unions, scattered our relatives, delimited our spaces, brought a religion and an education oblivious to nature.
Our history has always been tied spiritually to nature. Our relation to nature is not only one of extraction to collect its fruits, but also one of veneration. We renew ourselves cyclically with its power. Power that we respect and encourage by practicing our rituals.
Our history has always been tied resiliently to the history of the planet. Our oral memory remembers accounts of floods, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes that flipped space, shaking it enough to make us think it was our end. And the practice of our rituals, the nguillatun—that space-time to which we made offerings and supplications—returned us to the cycle of life.
The cataclysm of war and the depredation of the land belong not to the history of the planet but to the history of humanity. That death was spawned here with the winka, with their cosmovision that considers man the king of the planet; that considers rivers, birds, and air to exist in servitude; that considers the land an economic resource.
Today, we all know that the agony that began little more than a century ago in the South began much earlier in the rest of the world. We know, too, that the destruction accelerated in the previous century. In the previous century, century of vertigo, in which we here and present were born.
In the history of my people, I was born two generations after the War of the Desert. We, the Ancalao Meli, like so many other Mapuche children born in the city, were unaware of the agony of the land. We didn’t know who we were, from what people, what roots, what history. The state had been busy erasing our memory. This was part of their plan for integration.
We were born in the time of amnesia. We were young children and teens without memory. That amnesia so convenient to states born of slaughter and robbery and convenient to military dictatorships, too.
The year 1992, which signaled five hundred years since the opening clash, marked a milestone in our awareness, and those of us questioning our identity began to act to reclaim our memory.
And memory continues to bring us illuminating answers.
I now know I am Mapuche, that Mapuche means “person of the land.”
I now know that the language that was born of my people, there at the beginning of the world and since the beginning of the world, is Mapudungun, which means “language of the land.”
I now know that the kultrún, our sacred instrument, represents the planet—the wenu Mapu that is the atmosphere, and the trufken Mapu that is the surface, and the minche Mapu that is the underground. That on the kultrún are represented the four cycles of the seasons since the Wiñoy Tripantu, the new year in our southern hemisphere in the month of June.
Now, the forces of nature are cut by wire fences, cables, and ducts.
Minche Mapu run through with tubes
Trufken Mapu peopled by brutes
Wenu Mapu suffocated by gas
Now that they deny the planet is sacred.
This version of the history of the Mapuche people reaches us in this millenium, stirring memory to circulate anew.
Peoples’ memory should return to that stage in which the Land was sacred so as to recuperate their rituals and restore our power. The power that we need to face their predators.
Because that time, the world wasn’t lost.
While Francisco Pascasio Moreno, hero of the Argentine naturalists, was organizing the exhibition of our skeletons in glass displays in the Natural History Museum in the city of La Plata; while he was generously donating 7,500 hectares of our land to the Argentine state for the creation of a protected area like a national park; while the winkas were wondering how to defend nature from themselves, some of their prisoners of war were able to escape.
They fled from cities, from the houses of the wealthy where they’d been handed over like slaves, from concentration camps, from privatized countryside, and made their way back to the places where their communities had once been.
The stories we’re now recovering illuminate us.
There is always an elder to share what remains in his memory of his family: a man or a woman, sometimes a child, lost in the immensity of an unknown landscape. A hungry, thirsty, tired human being who wants to go back, reunite with his loved ones, but begins to feel he never will because of his body.
Then a nahuel, a tiger, appears . . . or a pangue, a puma; sometimes a bird, the ñanco. A newen—a natural power, compassionate, who guides the lost, who listens to his words of pain, brings him food, leads him to water, accompanies him until he is safe.
And there, in the midst of the human being’s gratitude for the land, emerges the taüll—the sacred song of that auspicious power, the treasured taüll that reminds us that the Mapu stayed with us, even after the cataclysm of war.
Not too long ago, I heard the song of the forest in the voice of a very young machi. A deep and beautiful song that caressed the belly. We were all very moved by breathing that sacred moment, beside a river, Kurru Leufu. And the voice of the machi broke and began to cry, and the song of the forest was a weeping, grave and somber.
In that moment, a spiritual awareness of nature embedded itself in me, an awareness of being part of a delicate, powerful, and now damaged fabric.
As I prepare these words, I remember, touched, that tomorrow we’ll gather as we have for several Saturdays now in a neighborhood of the city to sing.
To learn songs for daily life. To learn sacred songs that correspond to our lineage. Songs to venerate the power of the land, its newenes.
We’ll continue to recover our memory.
fill Mapu kiñekisungey ka inchiñ ka tüfa püllungey,
all of the land is one soul, and we’re part of it.