Melipeuco, ChileMelipeuco, Chile – the fog suddenly arose from the Truful Truful River while flowing under the snow -covered llaima volcano. Victor Curin smiled when he saw the sun’s drops illuminated by the sun.
Leader of one of the indigenous communities of the river banks in the Chilean Andes, Curin took it as a sign that the “ngen” of the waterfall – his own and protective spirit – approved his visit and prayer on that mid -morning July.
“Nature will always tell you something, he always responds,” said Curin, who works as a ranger in the Conguillío National Park, in the head of the river. “The human being feels superior to the space where he goes, but for the Mapuches, I belong to the earth, the earth does not belong to me.”
In the worldview of the Mapuches, the largest indigenous group in Chile that constitutes more than 10% of its population, a pristine river is home to a spiritual force to revere, not a natural resource to exploit.
That has leaned many Mapuches throughout southern Chile, rich in water, to fight against hydroelectric plants and other projects that consider them to desecrate nature and deprive the indigenous communities of the essential energies that prevent them from preventing them.
“Being part of nature, we cannot destroy part of us,” said Lientur Ayenao, a machi or healer and spiritual guide that extracts water from the truffulous trufful for his ceremonies. “The balance has to be maintained, and this is broken when it is intervened in natural spaces for a selfish end.”
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About 320 kilometers south, another Machi, Millaray Huicalaf, has led a battle sometimes violent against hydroelectric plants in the Pilmaiquén River, which flows through grassland undulating from a lake at the foot of the Andes.
After their resistance and cultural consultations with indigenous communities, an energy company froze the plans to make a plant next to a sacred site next to the river and said it would return the property of the land to the Mapuches.
However, the construction continues in another plant, so the fight is not over, as in the truffulous Truful, where a proposed plant is under review.
“I am the river too, we are sacred like the river,” Huicalaf said while a storm hit his wooden cabin. “As for fighting for the river, we are in territorial recovery processes and spiritual reconstruction.”
It is in the question of rights over indigenous lands, a volatile issue in Chile’s policy, that spirituality is entangled with ideology. Several Mapuche leaders say that the spirits that appear in dreams encourage the fight against capitalism in their ancestral territory.
Next month, Chileans will vote a new and controversial Constitution that highlights indigenous rights and land restitution. But they also deal with violent attacks against agricultural, timber and energy industries, particularly in the Araucanía region, even by some groups that demand Mapuche ancestral lands that were never completely conquered by the Spanish empire and fell into the hands of the Chilean State at the end of the 19th century.
For most Mapuches, such violence further destabilizes the desired balance between people, the natural space to which they belong and the spirits that inhabit it. A first step against him is to make sure that non -native understands the way nature matters to the Mapuches, said Andrés Antivil Álvarez, indigenous and mediator leader.
“The world is not a booty. Everything outside is inside us, ”he said, sitting by the fire in his Ruka, a traditional construction outside his home near the capital of La Araucanía, two hours by car of Truful Truful. “That it is understood that the spirit of fire present is as sacred as Christ in a church.”
And trampling a crucifix – as some protesters made in the massive uprisings of 2019 – is as painful and satanic as a river, said Antivil. He cited as an example the construction in the early 2000s of the Ralco dam, which flooded sacred enclosures and generated an uprising that prevented similar massive projects and promoted cultural resistance to more small ones.
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The worship of the members of the Mapuche community is evident when they walk next to rivers such as the Truful Truful, whose name means “jumping in jump” in the Mapudungún language.
On a cold afternoon, Ayenao approached the largest waterfall of the river, the proposed site for a new hydroelectric plant, with a bag of seeds in the pocket. That would be an offering of reciprocity for the “ngen” of the river if Ayenao decided to take water to treat the physical and spiritual ailments of their patients.
“’Ngen’ are before us and they are they allow us to live in space. And there are certain predominant ‘ngen’ to which we have to do prayers ”, such as that of Truful Truful, he said.
Do not ask permission to “ngen” to approach the water, or not explain the need to do so, it means transgressing space, separating the spirits that protect it and make you, your family and even your animals ill.
But if the “ngen” allows it, then Ayenao can use the “energy power” of the water that falls for healing purposes, either in ceremonies next to the river or for the large bottles of soda full of their water to your house.
Relocated in Temuco when he was six years old, Ayenao finally moved to Santiago, the capital of Chile, to study, and there he got so sick that he could not walk or speak. His family realized that the only remedy was to accept that the spirit of his great -grandmother, who was also Machi, asked to return to him.
He was apprentice for three years and returned to practice traditional medicine in a small plot of land in the broad Río Valley below in the town of Melipueco, named for the union of the truful Truful and three other rivers.
Now the spirit of a nearby river where fish farming is planned has asked Ayenao’s help in dreams.
“They ask me and demand that you have to protect, and thus contribute to health,” said Ayenao, 28. “We human beings … we are the messengers of the” Ngen Mapu “… to stop extractivism” and the sale of natural resources.
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More spiritual guides such as Ayenao are needed to remedy the loss of environmental, medicinal and linguistic knowledge caused by the assimilation policies imposed in the past, when many indigenous people grew away from their roots in marginal settlements of the big cities, said Artemio Huenupi, An old Mapuche.
“Our wisdom is based throughout the territory of nature. We live in this space to take care of it, other cultures say they are owners of the Earth, ”he added when he spoke in the small Mapuche Museum of which he is a curator in Melipeuco.
In a village, during a July night recital to raise funds for the meeting space with Ayenao’s straw roof, community members reported how they joined to oppose a hydroelectric plant in Truful Truful.
After almost a decade of multiple environmental and cultural evaluations, as well as legal appeals, the plant has been temporarily blocked in the courts, said Claudio Melillan, a councilor in Melipeuco who recently returned to his ancestral lands for what he called the “stage of reconstruction ”of his Mapuche identity.
The community has the hope that a final ruling will end the project definitely, which threatens to damage the waterfall that is considered a crucial source of spiritual energy, said Sergio Millaman, the lawyer who won the last appeal.
But a certain human impact is already evident, from an increase in tourism to the decrease in the current compared to the caudalous river that many remember from their childhood.
Despite the abundant rains and snowfall of this winter, Chile faces a worrying drought caused by climate change, which has aggravated tensions for the use of water, said Juan Pablo Herane, an expert in hydrology of the University Center for the Global Change Center of the University Catholic of Santiago.
In April, after more than a decade of legal disputes, the country’s water code was updated to better protect several rights, including the use of water in its source for ancestral conservation or uses, said Juan José Crocco, a lawyer who It specializes in water regulation and management.
However, it is not clear if a new constitution could alter that and how the code will be implemented in the case of hydroelectric plants that technically do not extract water, but redirect it to generate energy, said Benjamín Bulnes, a water rights lawyer who He worked in the new code and has fish on the Pilmaiquén River.
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The first hydroelectric plant in Pilmaiquén, built in the mid -twentieth century, is in front of a botanical garden administered by Mapuches that focuses attention on native trees.
A bitter battle under the leadership of Huicalaf began a decade ago to stop three floors several kilometers downstream. Like Ayenao, she became seriously ill when she was a child in the nearby city of Osorno until her family realized that it was the spirit of an ancestor who wanted to return to her as Machi.
During years of training to assume that role, he began to dream about Kintuantü, a “ngen” who lives in a broad pilmaiquén bend.
“I am a means of energy. Through dreams and visions in Trance he told me that I had to talk for him, because he was dying, ”said Huicalaf.
A plant would have raised the river to the caves in the ravine where the “ngen” lives. At the top of the cliff there is a Mapuche ceremonial complex that includes a cemetery, from where it is believed that souls travel through groundwater currents through the caves to the Pilmaiquén and the eventual reincarnation.
Huicalaf directed an occupation there. A private house caught fire and the protesters faced the police. They followed more protests and judgments, and divided the indigenous communities near the river.
Huicalaf was imprisoned for several months. But he said he is not afraid of prison because he managed to save the site, where he collects medicinal herbs and performs sacred ceremonies: “And the ‘ngen’ continues there.”
Statkraft, the Norwegian state energy company that bought the Pilmaiquén projects, works with the Chilean government to return the property of the ceremonial complex. The construction was frozen after the company realized that the cultural impact of the proposed plant was “unacceptable,” said statkraft manager in Chile, María Teresa González.
González said the company learned the importance of understanding indigenous worldview and involving different communities from the beginning, and is doing precisely that with another plant that builds in the Pilmaiquén.
But he condemned the violence in progress, such as the recent fire of a truck that transported half a dozen workers. No one has been accused of the attack of the end of June.
For Huicalaf, the fight continues: “Our great goal is for the river companies to leave.”
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Back in the black volcanic field that crosses the Truful Truful, while a snowstorm approached a nearby peak with ancient Araucarias, Curin defined the goal of his people in more essential terms.
“What fights the Mapuche world? What protects the Mapuche world? Not a silver world. Mapuche culture is very spiritual, very heart, ”he said. “It’s no accident that we are still here.”
Then he knelt to take a sip of the river water and returned to his ranger post.
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