The life and culture legendary indigenous populace of South America to be showcased at Americas Society.

Though not thoroughly organized as a nation, the Mapuche – the indigenous people who populate the region that is now southern Chile and Argentina - had (and still have) a rich culture in arts and crafts. Some examples of this is being showcased at  the exhibit Moon Tears: Mapuche Art and Cosmology, presented at America's Society from January 28 to April 18. The show is being curated by Dr. Thomas Dillehay, the anthropology chair of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

A specialist in the art and culture of the indigenous people of South America, Dr. Dillehay has participated in various programs there, including the excavations in Chile's Monte Verde, where remains found (dating over 12,500 years) have challenged the current theories about the first arrival of humans in the continent.

Previosly known as Araucanians by the Spanish conquistadors, The Mapuche bravely resisted being subjugated by both the Incas and the Spanish colonizers – In fact, the fight between the two lasted for over three centuries. “They are the largest living ethnic group in the southern cone of South America,” says Dr. Dillehay over a phone interview from Nashville. “There are about one million Mapuche living in mainly in Chile, but  are in Argentina, and about a half of those in reducciones (reservations) while the other half live scattered around rural or urban populations.”

The collection being shown at this exhibit was ceded by  Santiago-based Jacqueline Domeyko Cassel, who Dr. Tillehay describes as part of a family “prolific scholarly students and admirers of the Mapuche culture, who has continued a long line of collecting and studying that culture.” Included in the show (which only represents a fraction of the family's collection) are jewelry and  silverware that “ add symbolic and cosmological meaning to the Mapuche, textiles – ponchos, headbands, woven belts, blankets and rugs, some weaponry as polished stone axes and religious items,” explains Dr. Tillehay.

“It is very interesting to not about the Mapuche is that  more so than any other indigenous ethnic group in the Americas, they resisted more successfully outside influence,” says Dr. Tillehay, who will be presenting a lecture during the exhibit's opening.

“They first came in contact with the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia in 1550, and over the next thirty or forty years there were sporadic warfare between the Mapuche and the Spanish, and eventually the Mapuche drove them out for nearly 300 years in different parts of south central Chile, and were not finally and effectively defeated until the mid-1890s,” says Dr. Tillehay. “And then it took another 15-20 years for the Chilean army to wrap up matters militarily and politically control them.”

He adds that the Mapuche were “the only indigenous ethnic group in the Americas whereby  the Spanish crown established a formal treaty with them, because they could not defeat them.”

by Ernest Barteldes