If “Everything Is Mapu”

Abstract

Abstract Chile has created its national cohesion and territorial assertion of sovereignty through a colonial metonymic operation whereby the removal of the Indigenous body, or part of this body, is possession of the land; whereby the Black body is instrumentalized as an extension of settler occupation, inhabitation, and Indigenous elimination. This operation is based on the “associative matter” or qualifying characteristics of a metonymic relation within settler logics that performatively call into being both “territory” and “nation.” This essay argues that this is an ontoepistemological substitution and the foundation on which the current 1980 Chilean constitution is based, and on which the majority rejected the proposed 2022 constitution. The essay critiques both the 1980 and the recently rejected constitutions through consideration of what a Mapuche cosmological conception of land-as-mapu, of mapu as everything rather than as propertied resource, might mean for demolishing the land and body logics of the settler-colonial state that continue to devastate ecological relations through the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous and Black peoples.