Archives of Post-Occupation: Indigenous Peoples and the Biopolitics of Modern Chile

Abstract

This dissertation studies discourses on Indigenous peoples in the aftermath of the late-nineteenth-century occupation of the lands of the Mapuche people in Wallmapu (historical and unceded Mapuche lands) and Selk’nam people in Tierra del Fuego by the Chilean state. It examines how discourses of Native recognition and elimination organized distinct yet connected colonial projects of territorial management. It traces these discourses across photographic collections, poetry, narrative fiction, testimonials, ethnographic studies, and state records to approach them as “archives of post-occupation.” It argues that archives are key cultural technologies for producing relations of colonial control and resistance. Two interrelated questions guide this study: How do state operations of colonial control that have differentially represented and managed the territorial management of the Mapuche and Selk’nam peoples articulate forms of recognition and extinction? And how does the examination of different experiences of colonialism reveal Mapuche and Selk’nam’s paradoxical re-appropriations of the vocabularies of colonial control to assert their opposition to and negotiation with oppression? Chapter 1, “Extinction: The Selk’nam People and the Writing of the History of the Occupation of Tierra del Fuego” examines the deployment of the discourse on extinction that narrated the so-called disappearance of the Selk’nam people in the historiography of the Tierra del Fuego to trace the relations of oppression that reproduced capital accumulation and Indigenous forced displacement in the early twentieth century. Chapter 2, “Life with Extinction: Selk’nam Life in 20th Century Post-Occupation Tierra del Fuego” draws on photographic records and declassified letters to argue that extinction created the logics of a mode of life that negated but did not eliminate the Selk’nam people. Instead, it paradoxically organized Indigenous forms of living that continued to maintain relations with Selk’nam lands and waters under conditions of oppression. Chapter 3, “The Mapuche Diaspora: A Political Theory of Autonomy, Territory, Nation, and Difference” reads contemporary Mapuche political writing about forced displacement as political and cultural theories that articulate projects of Indigenous emancipation. Chapter 4, “Fütra Warria: The Cultural Dynamics of the Diaspora in the Colonial City” reads union newsletters and an ethnographic study of Mapuche settlement in twentieth-century Santiago to study residual discourses on Mapuche difference in Santiago that express the political and cultural transformation of Mapuche migrancy in the 20th century.