Those are a lot of questions indeed. The Mapuche conflict is older than our republic, but it has change in time: the idea of conservation of a culture was not in the mind of the Spanish conqueror and either in the young Chilean nation. So, there are things that must be set apart, because we can´t judge people from a hundred or two hundred year ago based in the moral structure that we now maintain. The idea of a culture that must be protected because of its relation with our identity, is a modern idea. We first had to became a modern nation (incapable of living in real communities) to see those who still are, like something that must be conserved. But why? Is a strange problem, because the argument to defend the rights of the Mapuche is not only that they have the normal people right to live as they want, it`s also the idea that there is something in their way of life that must be preserved because it says something about our past. I can understand that if you talk about buildings, nature, books, etc. but people?... where does the right to ask for exceptional rights resides?
The conflict starts when the modern structure crashes with the conservation of a different structure, in this case, the Mapuche structure. We have to live in a capitalist constructed system, but inside of it, must be reserved some space for those who have inherited the right to live as the culture of their fathers have been. If the ancestral tradition says that from the river to the mountain is the domain of some Mapuche family, but the modern system tell us that those lands are part of a private field, then an exception must be made to preserve the “normal” functioning of the culture that we are protecting. There`s a problem there, of course, because how can we pretend to conserve a culture as it is, knowing that the space for it to stay, is an exceptional and modern space? Can we think that the Mapuche can keep being as they were inside their anthropologic museum? How can we really solve the problem if, not to preserve is fascist, and preserve is an illusion of modern anthropologic museum-ism?
