Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines how Mapuche interlocutors in urban Chile make sense of themselves, their surroundings, and the duty of keeping the world alive amid landscapes of collapsed temporalities, where settler colonial atrocities do not stay in the past but continue becoming part of the present.

Paper Abstract:

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the unconquered Mapuche people of the Southern Cone dispossessed of the vast majority of their territory. Driven to the city by settler colonial violence and deprivation over the course of the twentieth century, Mapuche interlocutors in Santiago de Chile continue living in awareness of calamities that began long before they were born and which they see extend into an indeterminate future. Their daily lives are carried out on landscapes of collapsed temporalities, as settler colonial atrocities do not stay in the past but continue reshaping themselves in the present; by taking new forms in the more-than-human environment, the settler colonial project remains always unfinished. This paper examines two of these junctions in Mapuche thinking about the past and its enduring consequences: the history of a haunted tree growing atop mass graves and buried treasure, and the perception of recent Latin American migrants vis-à-vis historical settlers. This further sheds light on how indigenous interlocutors make sense of themselves, their surroundings, the temporalities that bind everything together, and what it takes to persist in the ‘end-times’. Amid their own dire predictions, within a desertifying urban environment they have long found inhospitable, Mapuche persevere in doing what they know, or ‘the real business of human life’ (Graeber 2013: 223): the making of moral persons who will carry on the duty of keeping the world alive.