1This paper explores the ways in which Mapuche1 public thinkers (intellectuals, activists, artists) who live in Chile have been deploying transnational political and epistemological strategies in order to thwart state internal colonialism and the liberalization pressures exercised by the global economy. Drawing on several examples of recent Mapuche knowledge production, cultural innovation and political action, I shall focus on indigenous peoples' attempts at denationalizing Chilean and Argentinean histories and re-signifying their homeland within a supranational space. I shall examine how Pan-Mapuche activism (i.e. new forms of knowledge production and organizing transnational mobilization) contributes to create Mapucheness, that is, a renovated indigenous consciousness and a standardized indigenous culture within a redemarcated indigenous territory.

2In order to do so, I shall highlight the critical role mapping, painting and writing are playing in the de-colonizing and re-appropriating of space and time2. Looking at the territory both as possession and conceptualization of space3, I shall emphasize that Mapuche people's struggle for the recuperation of their land and reactivation/reinvention of their territoriality takes place both at a material and symbolic level. I shall focus on the extent to which representation actually works as enactment as well as performative utterance. I shall show that the indigenous intellectuals' radical critic of the nation-state paradigm and response to global capitalism develop through a double dynamic of transnationalizing / renationalizing and deterritorializing / reterritorializing. Throughout this paper, the concept of Wallmapu (wall: whole, mapu: land or country, i.e. Mapuche territory sensu lato) will be given special attention because of its significance as a critical notion in the re-building of indigenous peoples' nationality, polity and cultural nationalism within the transnational scene. We shall see how land as the cornerstone of former «Araucanian» agrarian agenda has been given way to concern with territory or Wallmapu as the central project of Pan-Mapuche Activism.

4As far as Spanish colonial sources recorded it, conquistadors and colonizers had always conceived of the Andes as the eastern natural border of what came to be called the kingdom of Chile. Stunned by the immensity of this chain of mountains and unable to grasp the specific geopolitical and cultural realities of the New World's southern confines, the Spaniards hastily erected the Andes as an impregnable wall. Directly connected with this early perception was the representation of Chile as a long and narrow land stuck between the Pacific Ocean and the majestic Cordillera. This spatial representation, product of the colonial chroniclers' and officials' accounts4, persisted during the early republican period (1810-1880) through the newly freed Creoles' diplomatic work, historical production and geographical inquiries5. On the other side of the mountain, in the Río de la Plata Gobernación, the dynamic was similar in many points6. Even though during most of the sixteenth century the inhabitants of the Buenos Aires jurisdiction looked northward at Asunción del Paraguay, they rapidly fixed their gaze on the southern border. The Straight of Magellan and the gigantic Pampas and Patagonia that gives way to the snow-capped mountains of the Andes thus became the natural southwestern limits of the Argentinean land. Nineteenth century diplomatic negotiations and legal controversies between the young Chilean and Argentinean states regarding the delimitation of their national territories definitely stabilized the Andes as a natural border. Needless to say, indigenous populations were not invited to join this great «butcher business». Conceived of as part of the wilderness that needed to be tamed as well as barbarians who were to be civilized or eliminated, the indigenous peoples were excluded, both de facto and de jure, from this process of territorialization of the Chilean and Argentinean nations. Even though there were still at that time sovereign peoples living within unconquered territories, they were evicted from the political and legal scenes before being smashed through military conquest.

5The idea according to which the Andes were and had always been a natural political and cultural border had become so evident to twentieth-century Chilean and Argentinean people, that the diffusion of the first indigenous maps contesting this representational order either came as a shock or was not taken very seriously. Uncovering the sociohistorical arbitrariness of the inculcation of this nationalistic geopolitical arbitrary, recent Mapuche cartography offers indeed an alternative view of the southern confines. Building on academic ethnological and historical research as well as on elders' testimonies and memories, it stresses the existence of indigenous networks that crisscrossed the Araucanía, the Pampas and northern Patagonia7. It also emphasizes the existence of a transcontinental pan-Mapuche web that used to articulate both sides of the Andes through multiple political, economical and matrimonial alliances. According to this alternative view of the Southern Cone, there was no other limit to the indigenous territory but the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But there is more. For some of these new cartographers and topographers went far beyond what cautious ethno-historians had been able to reconstruct regarding the formation of indigenous web as a consequence of Spanish conquest and Creole colonization. For some maps not only reestablish connections between both sides of the Andes. They also considerably reduce the height of the so-called impregnable wall and, in some cases, erase it. The Andes are missing from at least two recent maps published by indigenous communication agencies (Maps 1 & 2).

9But there is more. For indigenous intellectuals are not only redrawing Chilean and Argentinean maps, flattening the Andes and correcting common misspelling. They are also putting indigenous labels on those new indigenous territories. Let us take a look at a recent paper by Mapuche historian and activist Victor Naguil that condenses the latest Mapuche knowledge production regarding this particular aspect. Significantly entitled Ta iñ kizügunewün Wallmapu (Self-determination in our Country), this political essay on Mapuche autonomy includes a thorough description of Mapuche Territory8. According to Naguil's geopolitical vision, the Mapuche homeland (País Mapuche or Wallmapu) stretches from Chile's south central regions to Argentina's Pampas and North Patagonia. Wallmapu is made out of two parts, Naguil argues: the Ngulumapu or East side, presently occupied by Chile, and the Puelmapu or West side, occupied by Argentina. He thus refers to the existence of two sections within the Ngulumapu, namely: the southern part called Futahuillimapu, home of the Mapuche-Huilliche people, and the central part inhabited by the Mapuche people properly speaking. But there is more. For, according to Naguil, there is a Mapuche Diaspora that dwells in big cities. Indeed, 74% of the Mapuche population is urban and thus lives out of its historical territory. In order to reinforce the demographic weight of the indigenous peoples in the Wallmapu, this Mapuche Diaspora should go back to its roots, Naguil goes on arguing. He even proposes the creation of an office for returnees that would facilitate and foster the return of around 250,000 persons to the cradle of Mapuche civilization. Regarding the process of re-signifying of places and spaces, Naguil emphasizes the fact that it is indispensable to revitalize Mapuche toponymy. Besides obliterating Argentina and Chile when referring to the Wallmapu, Ngulumapu and Puelmapu, Naguil systematically changes Spanish toponyms. Seeking to re-appropriate, by his discourse, the Mapuche territory that had been confiscated by the Chilean and Argentinean nation-states since late nineteenth-century indigenous defeats, Naguil is obviously highly aware of the weigh of the words. Therefore, the process of semantic re-appropriating appears as an indispensable move towards political and administrative appropriation9. Insofar as there is an intimate relation between writing, territoriality and colonization10, it not surprising that Mapuche people are re-baptizing places and spaces. Looking at national territorial conceptions not as true representations of territory but as instrument of power, control and colonization, Naguil and other indigenous intellectuals set in movement a powerful cultural and political critic of the nation-state centric perspective. Like other indigenous activists, Mapuche intellectuals, fully aware of the power of naming, contest the representation of Mapuche in national culture and imagine a Mapuche-centric geography11. Just as the Incas had their Cuzco and the Mexica their Tenochtitlan, the Mapuche people, long considered as a «people without history and culture», now have their Wallmapu. Adapting Mignolo's idea, I would say that Indigenous peoples' maps are performances of de-colonization12. They represent a heliocentric revolution in the Clastresian sense of the term13. Therefore, by denaturalizing national geographies, the Mapuche intellectual production on historical presence and geographic specificity has had a powerful impact on domestic struggles.

10 With reference to that matter, I would add that the denaturalizing of national territorial divisions and borders is concomitant with a process of indigenous space renaturalizing. In recent Mapuche documentation, Wallmapu often appears as though it had always been out there. Insofar as Chilean and Argentinean national cartography has always been silent about Mapuche territorial conceptualizations and assumes that it is not maps that create territorial divisions but nature itself14, indigenous intellectuals have been constrained to produce an alternative knowledge that emphasizes spatial continuities, flattens geographical obstacles, and freezes indigenous geopolitics. Since Creole states' legal and political claim to indigenous resources and lands has been based on a doctrine of uninhabited territory15, indigenous intellectuals have had to document and display the historical existence and presence in radical and essentialist terms.  In order both to counteract national and international amnesia and to build a new national imaginary and agenda, some indigenous intellectuals have indulged in naturalized representations of their country. In other words, and adapting anthropologists A. Gupta and J. Ferguson idea, I would say that in many cases Wallmapu functions «more as a narrative device than as an objectively-present historical truth»16. It both creates boundedness and produced a coherent setting for the Mapuche transnational community-to-come.