Chile today and tomorrow

Inca Control.—Racial Divisions.—The Southern Tribes.—Araucanians.—Race Mixture.—Archæology.

Before the coming of the Spaniards to Chile, an important line of division already lay between the native folk who accepted the domination of the Inca and those who successfully resisted his rule. The physical sign of that division was the Maule River.

But both north and south of the Maule the various tribes differed widely in blood, in speech and habits and in capacity for the adoption of alien culture. Divergence of a marked character must have existed for a long time between the primitive, fish-eating coast dwellers and the people living in the great longitudinal valley, who, although they were in all probability originally hunters, had taken to the cultivation of such food staples as maize and potatoes. The coast dwellers were not all of the same race, although necessity induced somewhat similar living habits: T. A. Joyce shows that upon the strip between Arica and the Atacama desert were a colony of the Uros, whose real home was on the Desaguadero River leading south from Lake Titicaca, but who were planted on the Pacific littoral in accordance with the Inca system of transferring tribes. South of these groups were the wood and skin huts of another colony brought from Bolivia, the mitimaes of the Charca tribe, who buried their dead in a contracted position. South of Tarapacá were groups known collectively as Changos, living the same simple life but practising extended burial. The practical, industrious system of the Incas could do little with such folk except, probably, to levy a tribute of fish, and chief attention was turned to the fertile country of the central valley. Here agricultural life seems to have been forced upon certain regions through scarcity of game, for although guanacos, birds and a few small edible animals are found all the way from Coquimbo to Cape Horn, such creatures as the pudu and the huemul (small and larger deer) are found only in forestal belts. South America has never possessed any great quantity of large game animals, and Chile in particular has a surprisingly short list of indigenous quadrupeds, although she has always been well stocked with both land and sea-birds.

Today the “Indian” has practically disappeared from the major part of the coast and from the beautiful central valley of Chile. The 50,000 Araucanians who survive in the Temuco region (Province of Cautín) do not retain more than dwindling traces of their former customs; in the deep forestal area of Valdivia and Llanquihue, as for instance upon the island in Lake Ranco with its group of “Huilliches,” a few people are found under conditions still approximating to their pre-Spanish state. But in the extreme south where the freezing water-mazes of the stormswept archipelagos have tempted few newcomers, the native groups of Yahgans and Onas and Alakalufs are living in much the same manner as that described by observers three or four hundred years ago. Here and there, as near the newly developed farms of Tierra del Fuego, where the native folk have learnt herding, habits have been definitely changed, but in the main the folk of the Magellanic regions have been left in undisputed possession. The natural conditions under which they exist are not conducive to cultural development. The daily struggle for food absorbs all effort, and it is only when an outside civilisation armed with tools and machinery and modern economic knowledge has imposed its will that the effects of the inclement climate have been conquered. Despite missionary effort, the southerly native people, among the most primitive and most miserable tribes in the world, sharing the common fate of their happier kin of the pleasant lands to the north, have almost disappeared. Today the traveller traversing by local steamer the wonderful Smyth’s Channel and nearby inlets and fjords may see, as the earliest travellers saw, the open canoe of the “Indians” with a wood fire burning continually upon a tiny hearth of clay, paddled through the chilly waterways by folk whose dark skins are practically unprotected from the wind and rain. The Fuegians meet any passing vessel to beg for clothes and food as they begged from the Beagle, but contact with newcomers has taught them nothing but a new list of small demands. In the developing life of Chile they seem to have no place.

To discover the true racial differences between the native inhabitants of Chile before the Spanish conquest is a task requiring more evidence than lies as yet before us. It is rendered more difficult by the absence of temples or permanent dwellings and by the comparatively small witness yielded by graves. Only in the north, in the dry belt, are cemeteries offering a considerable bulk of remains; here are such sites as Calama and Pucara, near Chiu-Chiu, where Inca influence is plain although the residents had certainly attained to no more than a modest cultural status. The pottery found in the cemeteries of Arica and the Antofagasta sites is rough and simple; the weaving coarse. The houses were mere quadrangles of cemented rubble where, as at Pucara, ruins survive in the rainless country. These are, however, beyond ancient Chile. Nothing so advanced as this proof of settled communities is found south of Copiapó, and seekers must fain rely upon the evidence of shell-heaps and arrowheads, plus the records of early visitors and such help as is afforded by the life of indigenous folk surviving today.

The names of tribes as recorded or in use are not racial. The cloud of these appellations confuses the enquirer until he realises that Araucana is a Spanish derivative of the Quechua “Auca” or rebel; that Picunche means simply “People of the North” as Huilliche means “People of the South”; Puelche, “People of the East,” and Moluche, “of the West,” while the name Mapoche or Mapuche indifferently exchanged for Araucanian today is a local term indicating inhabitants of a certain territory. Joyce considers that the evidence proves existence of an agricultural folk in Central Chile before the Inca conquest, speakers of the Araucanian tongue prevailing from Atacama to Chiloé. Upon these people of sedentary habits had descended a wave of nomads from over the Andes, Pampa-bred hunters who as in many allied cases adopted the speech of the invaded land. The speech of the rebels or Aucaes survived Inca control following the invasion from Peru about the middle of the fifteenth century. Of the tribes found by the Spaniards a century later, the most northerly Araucanian speakers were the Picunche, a mixture of Pampa immigrants with remnants of the old “rebel” stock, the latter predominating; the Moluches, farther south, showed signs of descending in the main from the Pampa invaders, although among them were found agricultural groups where older habits had prevailed. In the Andean foothills were the Puelches, closely allied to tribes of the Argentine plains, who had crossed the lower mountain passes between Villarica and Corcovado.

Far south, three racial divisions are admitted. Two of these are commonly known as Fuegians, and these scant tribes, Alakalufs of the southwest and Yahgans dwelling in the most southerly part of Tierra del Fuego, are a much more primitive folk than the few and diminishing Onas, a taller, round-headed race allied to the big Patagonians, and inheriting from their kin a fair degree of hunting skill. A number of the Onas have taken kindly to a shepherd’s life since the creation of scientific Fuegian farms, but the Yahgans remain as they have always been known to history, a fish-eating, practically amphibious race, unreconciled to civilisation. The long-headed Alakalufs of the Chonos Archipelago have been forced, whatever their origin, into a mode of life much like that of the Yahgans, depending chiefly upon the sea for livelihood, using arrows and harpoons for killing fish, constructing canoes and showing skill as watermen.

Very finely worked arrowheads have been and are still being made by these southerly folk: Chilean specimens are among the best weapons of the kind found in the Americas. But neither the Onas nor Fuegians have ever constructed pottery, or know anything of the loom; shell-fish, seal-meat and fungus, forming their chief food, is frequently eaten raw. Alakaluf homes are huts of sticks, covered with skins, and carried by canoe from place to place. They have no chiefs, dwell in family groups, and we know nothing of their gods. They have as a whole resisted efforts to Christianise them.

Among the great body of Araucanian speakers dwelling in Central Chile at the time of the Spanish conquest a more definite culture existed. Religious beliefs were probably genuinely Chilean, since they are quite distinct from the ideas found on the other side of the Andes. The supreme Deity Pillan was a sky-god with his dwelling in the volcanos, and was propitiated by that world-wide institution the medicine man, here called a Machí. Faith still survives, but so completely has soothsaying been relegated to women that a case has been known of a male Araucanian dressing as a woman and keeping up an elaborate life-long farce in order to hold the berth. “Cures” of the sick by fumigation and various drinks, and yearly ceremonies under the sacred canelo (a kind of cinnamon) tree, called forth the major symbols of the Araucanian cult, but there were neither temples nor images of deities.

The aboriginal Araucanian may be credited with the invention or adoption of chicha, a fermented drink made of berries or maize (and after the coming of the Spaniards, of apples from the trees planted by colonists or missionaries); of the poncho, well woven of guanaco wool, or later of sheep’s wool; and of the cultivation of maize and the potato. Native to the West Coast, the potato grows wild today over the chief part of Chile and the adjacent islands, and formed a valuable contribution to the limited list of pre-Spanish foods. The use of certain seaweeds, with cochayuyo as the most succulent, in stews, was doubtless an aboriginal habit; it survives in South Chile, and in such coastal markets as that of Valdivia this dried sea-weed is sold and eaten in enormous quantities. The seeds or nuts of the Chilean pine formed another part of the old diet. The method of cooking food in stone-lined holes in the ground is a native custom that remained in use among both “Indians” and Creoles in the more remote districts until recent times. There seems no doubt that the game called by the Spanish “chueca,” played with a ball struck with curved sticks, is genuinely Chilean; it bears a strong resemblance to hockey. The bolas with which the Chilean huaso (cowboy) is so efficient was not known on the West of the Andes until after the Spanish conquest. But with the speedy adoption of the horse and rapid increase of cattle this implement from the Patagonian pampas became widely used. Within thirty years after the entry of Pedro de Valdivia into Chile the horse had spread throughout the inhabited part of Chile, and mounted Araucanians, hardy and expert, were giving battle to the cavalry of the Spaniard.

The Araucanian fought to retain his independence for over three hundred years. It was a contest in which he was doomed to fail in the long run, but he received from his enemies unstinted appreciation of his courage. The famous poem “La Araucana” written by Ercilla, a soldier in Valdivia’s army, embodies a Spanish concept of chivalry rather than that of the Mapuche; his noble Indian is a mediæval Spanish knight, and the verses frequently quoted as proof of Araucanian virtues display chiefly the convention of generous sentimentality infusing the European literature of the sixteenth century. But undoubtedly the Araucanian possessed qualities that all the world agrees to admire: he defended his own, and showed tenacity and ability in that defence. From a series of tribes living loosely in family groups, obeying no overlord in times of peace, the native folk evolved a strong fighting confederation. The Toquis, or wartime leaders, supported by their Ulmen or district chiefs, developed genuine skill in warfare, and turned the whole of the tribes living south of the Maule into a mobile fighting community. The task was rendered easier by the old nomadic habits of a large part of the population.

The hostile relations between the earliest Spaniards and the Araucanians became crystallised with succeeding years, a feeling constantly renewed by women-hunting and house-burning raids upon the Spanish colonies, followed or preceded by ruthless attacks upon the Indian camps. The repeated treaties and parliaments arranged by the Spanish authorities with the Indian leaders during later colonial times were little more than symbols of optimism.

As far as Spain was concerned, good intentions towards the original owners of the Americas were frequently pricked to action by the priesthood, consistent advocates of the indigenous folk. When Charles V, pressed by Bartolomé de las Casas, published in the year 1542 the “New Laws” relating to the treatment of American natives it was with a determination to secure the Indians’ well-being which was only surpassed by the determination of the colonists to make the greatest possible industrial use of these folk. “Our principal intention and will” declared the king, “has always been to preserve and augment the numbers of Indians, that they may be taught the articles of our holy Catholic faith and may be well treated as fellow men and our subjects, as indeed they are.” The strict accompanying rules against enslavement or overwork of the Indians, and the minute instructions to the Audiencias and Procurator Fiscal were avoided with dexterity in the colonies from Mexico southwards, and not all the efforts of the missionary padres could render them effective, although these and similar laws were repeated by successive monarchs, and notably by Philip III, at the instance of that famous apostle of the West Coast, Father Luis de Valdivia. It cannot be said that, with regard to the Araucanians, this backing was either badly needed at the time or requited with gratitude; but it was followed by missionary efforts aiming at Christianisation of these wild and stubborn people. The Father Nicolas Mascardi, working in South Chile about 1670, “merited the crown of martyrdom that he received”; nevertheless the good Philippe de la Laguna took up the task, converting “Puelches and Poyas” in the mainland region opposite Chiloé, but making, apparently, little impression of permanence. The intransigeance of the southerners saved them for a time, for the more amenable Picunche and simple Changos, accepting the foreign yoke, rapidly diminished—the survivors losing caste with such finality that Ocampo, writing of West Coast conditions in 1610, declared that the Indians were generally downtrodden by the Negroes imported to supplement them as workers, “with ill-treatment both of word and deed, so that the Indians called the Negroes their lords, and the Negroes called the Indians dogs.” It should be said that Ocampo’s comment applied more to Peru than to Chile, where neither climate nor rich mines warranted the introduction of any large number of African slaves.

Today the Araucanian who resisted Spanish control is not in better case than the docile native of the more northerly part of the West Coast. Their definite overthrow as an independent people dates from 1882, when Chilean troops seasoned by the campaign with Bolivia and Peru marched across “la Frontera” and put an end forever to Araucania as a native stronghold in the middle of republican Chile. By this time Valdivia and Llanquihue had been colonised, and Araucania stood, fenced against north and south, in the way of free communication and development. A land reservation has been allotted in the province of Cautín, its limits beginning about half a mile outside the town of Temuco. Here dwell some 40,000 to 50,000 Mapuches. The majority are nominally Christianised, and in addition to the state schools, there are a couple of well-run British mission establishments near Quepe, where farming and handcrafts are taught. The younger folk take fairly readily to instruction, but on the whole the Indians prefer to withdraw themselves from contact with all foreigners, to live in the native rucas, huts of mud and thatch, to prepare food in the ancient manner, and to work only when a little money is needed to buy provisions. The women are adepts at the loom, weaving beautiful ponchos or mantos, and boldly patterned and tinted rugs and saddle-cloths. Now and again one meets in the streets of Temuco a group of Araucanians with rugs for sale: there are two or three women and the male head of the family, who is credited with doing no work but with careful shepherding of his household. The women have a certain good looks; the faces are extraordinarily broad, pale bronze in hue, with a touch of red on the cheeks; the hair is straight and black, plaited and bound with bright ribbons. The dress consists of a fold of cloth wound round the waist and held in place by a gaily patterned belt; a bodice, and a large shawl fastened with a big silver topo or pin. A wealthy woman will wear silver ornaments across the forehead, in the ears and on the neck in addition to the almost indispensable topo, and no Araucanian will sell these adornments from the person, although in hard times they may be taken to the pawnshop.

Racial purity amongst these survivors is not to be expected. There had been a considerable mixture of blood between North, South, and the Transandine groups before the Spanish entry, brought about not only by wars and migrations, but by the custom prevailing among the indigenous folk of Central Chile of seeking wives outside the tribe. During the colonial period numbers of white women were systematically seized and held by the Indians, the resulting admixture of blood accounting for the comparatively blond strain seen in some of the Araucanian families.

Correspondingly, there was a certain absorption of native blood into the Spanish towns and settlements, Indian girls and children having passed into the possession of the Europeans from time to time: but racial traits have in both cases yielded a great deal to environment, and the mixed-blood youth of the Spanish sphere of influence is not remarkable for sympathy with the dwindling remnants of the Araucanian tribes. The child of the soil appears to be doomed here for very much the same reasons as the Red Indian is doomed in the states of the North American Union: he is irreconcilable and sullenly proud; has been conquered by slow pressure plus the spread of alcoholism and disease; and in spite of honestly-meant legislation on the part of the present rulers of the country, is progressively stripped of his remaining property. During a session of the National Congress in Santiago in early 1921, the Deputy for Temuco, Dr. Artemio Gutierrez, made a strong protest against the “constant victimisation” of the Indians by grasping exploiters. He attacked the municipal authorities for failing to defend the Araucanians, declaring that spoliation, even the robbing of the native huts, was permitted, and complained that although the State Government exempts the Indian from taxes the municipalities do not. “The Indians are not even masters of the two, four, five or ten hectares they operate, for they are only in control through the grace of the State,” he declared, adding that many of these folk cross to the Argentine to escape their home troubles. Conditions of the kind seem almost unavoidable in a country rapidly filling up with a new population, against which the old resolutely sets its face; nothing perhaps is more typical of this attitude than an incident occurring at the ceremony in connection with the opening of the railway into Temuco town some years ago. Amongst the personages of the vicinity invited to attend the entry of the first train were the local Indian chiefs: they came, with an entourage of followers, bedecked in feathers, with fine ponchos, mounted upon fast horses, and were placed in a long double row, facing the line from either side. The assembly waited, fidgeted, talked; but the Araucanians sat motionless on motionless steeds, their swarthy, strong-featured faces set like wood. Presently the smoke of the engine was seen in the distance, and with a piercing shriek of the whistle Temuco’s first railway train rushed forward. The people swayed, applauded, crowded to the rail’s edge, exclaimed excitedly: but not an Araucanian moved so much as his eyes to glance at the steel monster. It thundered forward and passed; the crowd pushed across the track, waved hands and shouted; the Araucanians sat their horses, did not turn their heads to send a look at the people or the train, and in a few moments turned off and without a word or a change of expression galloped away. The ancient rebel refused to take the least outward interest in the white men’s doings.

One sees in Chile a mirror of what is happening or has already happened in the major part of the Americas—the gradual extinction of an embryo civilization. Whatever beginnings the Chilean race had made towards the development of a social system, the evolution of a tongue and a cult, have been fruitless. In other continents the impression is given, very frequently, that the existing culture is built upon an older form, that it is the first seed of an ancient civilisation that has eventually flowered through whatever inner struggles and changes: in the Americas the developing civilisation has been introduced and superimposed, the young shoot of earliest native growth cut short and fatally withered.

The archæology of Chile does not offer a field for study comparable with that of Mexico, Peru or Central America, with their splendid ruins of temples and burial grounds containing ceramic treasures, textiles and human remains. Because there is less that is spectacular, the Chilean area has been less adequately studied, and there is much work still to be done. Valuable researches have been made by the indefatigable José Toribio Medina, author of “Aborigines de Chile,” published in 1888, and by R. E. Latcham, author of “Anthropologia Chilena,” while the devoted energy of Dr. Aureliano Oyarzún in the field of physical anthropology is of the highest interest. Dr. Oyarzún has published many ethnological monographs and directs an excellent ethnographical Museum at Moneda 602, Santiago. A second collection in Santiago, containing much Peruvian pottery obtained during the War of the Pacific, is housed by the State, while a third is in the University buildings, possessing many specimens from Easter Island. Concepción owns a small but well-kept archæological museum, but the scarcity of purely Chilean specimens displays the gap in present knowledge.