Like a slender knife set between sea and soil, Chile cuts thinly through the South American continent, with blade rich in lakes and plains, mountains and rivers. Further south of the country are marshes and forests, fringed by the snow-capped Andes Mountains, bordered by the Bio-Bio River, and home to a proud, stalwart tribe who have lived and resisted invasions for hundreds of years.

Before the Spanish came, before the Incas settled and built their palaces, there were the Mapuche, the People of the Land. All their movements, rituals, and lives revolved around the earthly elements. Even their language, Mapu-dugun, an oral Language of the Land, emerged in the wake of moving earth and the sounds of its inhabitants, from the chirps of the birds, to the patter of rain on the rocky slopes of the Andes. As one modern Mapuche poet puts it: This soil is inhabited by the stars. The water of imagination sings in this sky.

Fierce and warlike, the Mapuche seemed to be the least likely to have deep, religious ties with the earth they worked and lived upon. The men were trained to be warriors, or hunters, during days of peace. They were not cannibals, but had a customary Proculon, where a brave captive was slain with a club, and his heart cut out and eaten by the participants to acquire his courage thereby. They would also cut off limbs through the use of sharpened shells, and roast and eat them while the still living victim watched.

Whatever their strange practices, the Mapuche were linked to the earth, and their economy was based largely on hunting and slash-and-burn agriculture. They gathered wild plants; hunted and bred llamas, guanacos (small llama-like cameloids), and other minor cattle; gathered urchins, crabs, mussels and kelp; and hunted seals to make tough leather helmets and armor.

They also depended on wild plants for sustenance, and thus gathered strawberries, myrtle, berries, and pine kernels from the woods. They cleared their forests to plant corn and potatoes, while cultivating beans, quinoa (a unique Andean grain), marrowfats, chili peppers, pumpkins, and beans in their gardens.

When harvest time came, the Mapuche performed the Nguillatun, an annual celebration to thank their deities and ancestors for the blessings of the previous year. The Nguillatun would take place during the full moon, and would last for four days. It was celebrated in a ritual space molded in the shape of a “U” opening to the West, the sacred part of the world according to Mapuche legend. During the Nguillatun, priests and participants would engage in rituals, dances, prayers, sacred songs, horseback rides, and earth offerings, where they spread tobacco and the blood of sacrificed animals over the soil that had served them well.

The Mapuche lived as such, with prayers and feasts intertwined with the land, and with wars alternating with periods of peace. In a few centuries, however, the Spanish arrived, subjugating the Incas, taking nearly all of South America, and waging war on those who resisted. The Mapuche proved to be the greatest, strongest opposition, and it was their defense that sustained the tribe against the Spaniards during the Arauco War.

Despite all invasion and attack, and despite being greatly weakened, the Mapuche endured, leaving in their wake 50,000 dead Spanish soldiers, and 60,000 injured or killed auxiliaries. Mapuche soil became known as the Spanish Soldiers’ Cemetery of the Americas, and the still unyielding invaders baptized as “huinca” – the Mapu-dugun word for “thief.” The Spanish eventually paid the Mapuche, but the damage had already been done, and had only just begun.

Today’s Mapuche are subsistence farmers, raising cash crops such as wheat, barley, potatoes, sugar beets, and oats, but living on far less land than they ever had. They still till their soil, plough their fields, and harvest their grains – and their pride endures. They are forever the People of the Land, speaking the language of the earth. They have fought bravely for their territory, and believe that they are fighting it still. In all areas, in all the centuries that have gone, they are the farmers, molded of the stars of the earth, warriors of an ever changing world.

For more on the Mapuche, visit http://www.soa.org.uk/resource/articles/araucanian.htm.