Article

Anthropological Theory
0(0) 1–25
Can natives be settlers? ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499619868088
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settler colonial frontier

in Chile

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani
Pontificia Universidad Cat

olica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Martin Fonck
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig
Maximilian University, Munich, Germany

Paolo Perasso
Centro de Desarrollo Local, Pontificia Universidad Cat

olica
de Chile, Villarrica, Chile

Abstract
Under settler colonialism, dispossession is enabled by discursive strategies aimed at
curtailing indigenous entitlement to land. One such strategy is the mutual determina-
tion of the native-settler categories whereby the native status is bound to a condition of
ahistorical emplacement to specific tracts of land, while settlers can claim native status
towards the nation state as a whole. The settler-native dichotomy fails to account for
the possibility that settlement could be appropriated by indigenous collectivities as a
process constitutive of land attachment and a sense of belonging. This analysis of
memories and practices of indigenous settlement in the Mapuche frontier region in
Chile indicates that, unlike dominant narratives of emptiness and environmental trans-
formation reproduced under settler colonialism, indigenous settlement can unfold as an
unstable ontological achievement aimed at both transforming and maintaining the land’s
topological diversity and ability to partake in human social life. Indigenous settlement

Corresponding author:
Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Pontificia Universidad Cat

olica de Chile, Av. Vicu~
na Mackenna 4860, Macul (Campus
San Joaqu
ın), Santiago, Chile.
Email: pdigiminia@uc.cl
2 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

can work as a critical intervention against the reductionist determination of the cate-
gory of native through which indigenous land entitlement is delegitimized under settler
colonialism.

Keywords
settler colonialism, land, memory, emptiness, Latin America, Chile, Mapuche

‘The people who founded this place were all Mapuche. They came here as settlers.
At that time, there were winka [non-indigenous people], but also indigenous settlers
(colonos indigenas).’ With these words, Roberto, a Mapuche man in his sixties,
recounted the history of his community, founded by a group of displaced Mapuche
people in the aftermath of the Chilean military invasion of indigenous territories at
the end of the 19th century. It was not the first time during our shared fieldwork in
the southern mountainous locality of Maite that we had heard about the initially
surprising idea that some indigenous people were also settlers. Mapuche and mes-
tizo (mixed race) squatters flocked to remote areas of this recently annexed part of
Chile and occupied unclaimed state property in the hope of attaining land later on
through the legal means of colonization policies. At the margin of the settler
colonial project, settlement was not a prerogative of patrones (wealthy white land-
owners), as was the case for other areas of southern Chile; rather, it was a chal-
lenge that poor winka and Mapuche alike faced in the search for a better life.
To this day, the memory of settlement animates a pervasive sense of belonging
among both winka and Mapuche farmers. Yet, the fact that land attachment
among Mapuche people is built around settlement does not stop Roberto and
his neighbors from fully identifying with the category of Mapuche, an ethnonym
that can be literally translated as people (che) of the land (mapu) and refers to the
condition of being native. This ethnonym also serves as the most recurrent marker
of difference with non-indigenous people, usually referred to as chileno/as
(Chileans) or as winka, a derogatory term translatable as usurpers or foreigners.
The possibility that indigenous people can claim for themselves the legal status
of settler is certainly not unique to Chilean resource frontiers. In Latin America,
colonial displacement across the globe has historically produced the need for many
colonized groups to lay claim to landownership that was not based on the recog-
nition of their territorial connections, as was the case here with land redistribution
processes targeting campesinos or traditional farmers(see Klubock, 2014; Nuijten
and Lorenzo, 2009). The appropriation of settler status should not be surprising in
a context where survival is a primary motive. Such an appropriation, however,
emerges as more than merely a pragmatic choice. Being an indigenous settler, as
the remainder of this article will show, is a subjectivity built around a type of land
connection that challenges representations of indigenous people as problematically
Di Giminiani et al. 3

emplaced and as the genealogical subjects reproduced in settler colonial discourses.

In the heuristics of settler colonialism, settler and native statuses are mutually
determined. In legal apparatuses and discourses on national belonging, ahistorical
emplacement—in other words, the idea that land connections can take place only
as given, continuous and genealogical links with the land (Ingold, 2000: 134;
Povinelli, 2011: 23)—defines authentic native status. In contrast, settler subjectiv-
ities are articulated around affective land connections produced and constantly
reproduced by labour in a space imagined mostly as empty, devoid of meanings
and yet to be domesticated.
One of the central tropes through which settler subjectivities have come to be
defined is emptiness; a spatial imaginary that indexes a world of open-ended
opportunities and transformation (Dunlap, 1993; Nouzeilles, 1999; Veracini
2010). Ideologically, emptiness serves to maintain the fiction that land inhabited
by native people is, as any other form of wilderness, empty of socially meaningful
elements. This fiction has many of the features that Riles (2011: 75) has associated
with legal fictions, which is a particular form of storytelling that serves as a com-
municative tool to engender and foreclose new market opportunities. Seeing land
through such a lens of emptiness is the necessary condition for environmental
transformation and capital expansion to unfold with supposedly few or no
social effects. Emptiness is essential to the logic of settler colonialism in two
ways. Firstly, emptiness justifies the replacement of native with settler populations
by obfuscating the fact that replacement entails material elimination (see Wolfe
1999: 163). Secondly, emptiness validates processes of dispossession through the
discursive and material erasure of the particular historical engagements with
the land productive of indigenous social belongings (Coulthard, 2014: 13).
The idiom of emptiness is therefore essential to the curtailment of legitimate
native claims to landownership and the validation of ongoing processes of land
commodification and natural resource extraction. The compelling effects of colo-
nial discourses of emptiness exemplifies the particular power of settler colonialism
as an ideology capable of deeply impacting upon concepts that are constitutive of
settler and native subjectivities—in particular those connected with the notion
of ‘homeland’ (Povinelli, 2011; Simpson, 2016; Stoler, 2016). In this article,
we explore the discursive and material power of settler colonialism by focusing
on the mutual determination of settler and native statuses and its effects on the
legitimization of senses of belonging and claims to land among indigenous people.
The binary representation of land connections, either produced by settlers through
land or genealogically inherited by indigenous populations, constitutes a powerful
technology of power/knowledge as it articulates the ways in which indigenous and
settler populations can legitimately lay different claims to native status. As indi-
cated by Mamdani (1998), a key governmental problem in settler colonialism is
the conversion of foreign settlers into nationals, a discursive process necessary for
the legitimization of the settler nation. When settlers become natives, they do so in
reference to the whole nation state. As a consequence, natives can be such only in
relation to genealogically inherited territories, regardless of the erasure of land
4 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

connections brought by settler colonialism. The curtailment of native status as one

restricted to native or ancestral homeland, is not, however, a straightforward story.
Indigenous narratives and experiences of resettlement, like the one with which we
opened this article, challenge the restrictive representation of natives in settler
colonial states, and consequently entitlement to land, by articulating a form of
indigeneity based on the significance that settlement and the production of land
connections through labour holds for indigenous senses of belonging.
In this article, we draw upon memories and experiences of settlement among
indigenous Mapuche people to illustrate the potential of ‘indigenous settlement’
as a mode of critique against the native-settler dichotomy upon which the ideology
of settler colonialism is built. By indigenous settlement we refer to the ongoing
struggle to articulate indigenous land connections that are constitutive of social
belonging through the means and technologies of colonization. Albeit produced by
colonial dispossession, indigenous settlement, we argue, is capable of articulating
new forms of morally charged land connections emerging in the midst of painful
memories of displacement. The idea of indigenous settlement prompts us to
rethink settlement under settler colonialism through local terms and significations,
under which settlement is performed and imagined by indigenous people in frontier
regions. At the cost of oversimplifying differences between local experiences of
settlement and dominant discourses on settlement inspired by white European
imaginaries of emptiness, we draw upon the notion of plenitude as a general prin-
ciple that is useful for characterizing memories and experiences of settlement
among Mapuche people. Following Kolers’(2009) definition of plenitude as a cri-
terion for legitimate territorial entitlement, we define plenitude as an ontological
condition of land characterized by topological diversity and ability to actively
shape human behaviour. Plenitude partly pre-exists human action and partly is
maintained through human labour. Despite several shortcomings of the notion of
plenitude, which will be discussed in greater detail later in this article, this notion
remains valuable to help us envision a type of settlement that, far from constituting
a foundational and irreversible process by which emptiness is turned into pleni-
tude, is built around ongoing negotiations with and uncertain forms of care
towards non-humans, upon which social life in an inhospitable milieu for
humans is possible.
Insights from this article are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork carried out
between 2014 and 2017 around a rural area (sector rural), Maite, in southern Chile,
located in a densely forested Andean valley bordering with Argentina.1 Several
excerpts from local historical accounts reproduced in the following pages were
recorded as part of a collaborative book project authored by a group of local
residents and coordinated by the three authors of this article (see Perasso et al.,
2018: 250). This article begins with a theoretical review of the effects of the settler-
native dichotomy in processes of nation-building. The following section illustrates
how settlement is remembered and experienced among Mapuche residents today.
Next, we examine the main characteristics of indigenous settlement, with particular
emphasis on the notions of labour, care and plenitude. In concluding this article,
Di Giminiani et al. 5

we explore the implications of indigenous settlement in the context of current land

politics in Chile.

Being settler, being native: Land entitlement under settler

colonialism
Unlike indirect rule, in which power is concentrated in the hands of colonial
officials and bureaucrats, settler colonialism is built around the empowerment of
settlers, who are materially and discursively endowed with a central role in the
establishment of a new national order (see Wolfe, 1999). The ability of settlers to
spearhead the development of a new nation is made possible by governmental
consent over displacement and replacement of the native population, which is
publicly obfuscated through the imaginary of emptiness. As seen earlier, emptiness
refers to an existing wilderness to be domesticated by newcomers as much as to a
status of land and environment to be obtained in order to allow proper civilization,
as in the case of deforestation and agricultural expansion in places like southern
Chile. The imaginary of emptiness therefore serves not only to justify settler expan-
sion historically but also to curtail native entitlement to land by presupposing
the complete eradication of indigenous territorial connections. The imagined
eventfulness of colonialism (Povinelli, 2002: 154) is partly a realistic depiction
of the actual social and ecological changes brought on by settlers and partly a
discursive strategy that renders colonial encroachment a thing of the past.
As suggested by Veracini, the ‘tide of history’ argument—which is based on the
claim that colonialism constitutes an irreversible historical event leading to the
erasure of indigenous land connections—serves to question the authenticity of
present expressions of territorial belonging (2010: 41).
The ongoing effects of settler colonialism, among which is natural resource dis-
possession in native territories, are sustained by a sturdy and structuring logic
(Coulthard, 2014: 7; Simpson, 2016: 3). As Stoler (2016: 20) points out, such a
logic is responsible for the emergence and consolidation of ‘specialized lexicons of
legal, social and political terms, concepts, and enduring vocabularies that both
innocuously and tenaciously cling to people, places, and things’. The most relevant
social categories rearranged under settler colonialism are evidently those of native
and settler, which are necessarily in mutual definition. While in everyday life these
categories are expressed in multiple complex forms of subjectivities, their mutual
definition needs to be framed strictly so that native entitlement to land can be
socially and geographically demarcated. In speaking of the South African case,
Mamdani (2001: 657) has argued that the notion of ‘settler’ was introduced as a
way of characterizing a foreign population as conquerors rather than immigrants. If
settlers were to lose their status of outsider and become native to the nation state,
this would implode the natives’ need to become native to something other than the
nation state. Natives can therefore claim native status only in reference to those
tracts of land which they can prove they have a historically continuous link to.