Modernity/coloniality and conflicts over indigenous rights in the Chilean South

Officially annexed by the Chilean state in 1883, the region of the Araucanía is a classic settler society.  In recent years it has been fraught with often-violent conflicts between Mapuche indigenous people, who are autochthonous to the territory, and the state, European-descended landowners, and corporations over land, natural resources, development, and indigenous rights.

I will explore the links between state violence, democracy, and indigenous rights claims. These are usually described in terms of the confluence between neoliberalism and multiculturalism, but, drawing on the work of Anibal Quijano, Arturo Escobar, Maria Lugones and others, I make a case for the relevance of the concept of modernity/coloniality in understanding this reality.  I argue that conflicts that on their face are about material claims are in fact infused with epistemological struggles, the subordination of indigenous knowledge claims, and debates over law and legitimacy.

The concept of modernity/coloniality serves four purposes in understanding these conflicts.  First, it brings into sharper focus how neoliberal-multicultural policies reflect and perpetuate colonial exploitation and function as part of systemic racism. Second, it makes the role of racism in sustaining the contemporary global economy explicit. Third, in its attention to ongoing material dispossession as well as the subjugation of indigenous knowledge claims, it is more in tune with indigenous theorizing (and creates room for the imagination of alternative modernities based on subjugated forms of knowledge). And finally, it helps us understand that when the state responds to Mapuche demands with violence, it is because their demands/actions represent an assertion of rights that challenge that model, both the material interests it holds up and the epistemological assumptions that justify it. Not only do Mapuche resisters not consent to neoliberal multiculturalism, they challenging the epistemological assumptions at its base.