Last week, indigenous Mapuch fighters set fire to a police station in Chile. In solidarity with the indigenous prisoners of the Angol Prison, in Araucania.
July 17, 2022 - Sabotage of a company that supplies logging companies on occupied Mapuche territory. The militant Mapuche organisation CAM dedicated the action to Pablo Marchant, a CAM member who was murdered by Chilean police a year before. [video]/[link]
Breast jewellery / Trapelakucha. Mapuche; Araucanía (Chile), 1897. Silver.
Breast ornament for women with six plates. Very simply worked, without engravings or other decoration. The Mapuche distinguish ornaments according to their use. There are pieces of jewellery that are worn for political events such as meetings of the communities of different territories. The village chiefs (lonkos), the spokesmen (werkén) or their wives, for example, wear this jewellery. Even their horses are adorned with it. Philosophical ornaments, on the other hand, are worn by shamans or shamanesses or by participants who accompany the shamans and shamanesses during rituals. The lowest plate, represents the meli witran mapu (the four forces of the earth).
A Mapuche resistance group fighting against the historic discrimination and extreme poverty their people have suffered for centuries. They are heavily focused on combating the exploitation and expropiation of their ancestral lands.
The Pillan (plural pillanes) are powerful and respected male spirits in Mapuche mythology.
According to legend, the Pillan are good spirits, but they can also cause disasters, since they also punish (or they allow the wekufe to punish) with drought or flood, earthquakes, or diseases. The Antü is the most powerful Pillan, who governs the others. In the Mapuche tradition, a man that follows the laws of the admapu can also become a Pillan after death. The Mapuche perform a ngillatun ceremony for the Pillan, for the latter to grant benefits to the people, and to thank them for their gifts.
The Pillan have been described as spirits that live in the Wenumapu (a spiritual world of good), and those that inhabit the Earth generally live inside the volcanoes. (Example: Osorno and Quetrupillán Volcano). The accompanying female spirits of the Pillan are the Wangulen spirits.
"The big spirit lived with a number of little spirits [children], who wanted power and rebelled, so the big spirit spat on them and their bodies turned to stone. They fell to the earth and became mountains. Some spirits stayed trapped inside the earth..."
"... and turned the mountains into smoking, erupting volcanoes. They were the big spirit's sons, who became the first male warrior spirits in the form of thunder, lightning, volcanoes, and stones. Our ancestors came from these spirits, called püllüam. Other spirits were loyal to the big spirit and cried copiously over the mountains and ashes. These were the big spirit's daughters, who were transformed into stars that mourned their brothers. Their tears formed lakes and rivers. The earth was created from the mixture of water [daughter's tears] and ash from the volcanoes [brother's anger] and was therefore both male and female. The big spirit then became Elchen or Chaw Elchefe, the creator of humanmankind, and divided itself into male sun and husband/father [antü] and female moon and wife/mother [küyen]...
"The moon and the sun took turns looking over their children, thereby creating the balanced relationship between day and night." - Edited excerpt from Armando Marileo's narration of the Mapuche Creation Myth, January 5, 1995 (Shamans of the Foye Tree, Bacigalupo, 2007)
Cotton ribbon on which llef llef (semiglobular beads of silver) are sewn. Mapuche women wear such ribbons as headbands. It is wrapped around the head tying the lower ends around the braids.