ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between two phenomena in the history of the Mapuche, the people indigenous to much of what is now southern Chile and Argentina. The first is the conflict between the Mapuche people and Chilean settler society. (This conflict is often called “the Mapuche conflict” in the Chilean media; in order to avoid attributing the conflict to the Mapuche, here I simply write “the Conflict”, capitalised.) The second is the more recent phenomenon of Mapuche language revitalisation. To bring these two phenomena together probably constitutes a rather different contribution to the theme of language and conflict to many others in this volume. This is for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, the chapter specifically addresses language revitalisation. To this author’s knowledge, the only work on language revitalisation in a similar context of violent conflict is that of Mac Giolla Chríost (2012) on Northern Ireland. 1 Secondly, it concerns a language indigenous to the Americas: Mapuzugun (the Mapuche language). The Americas are a region generally overlooked in the study of ethnic or political conflict in relation to language (with the exception of French in Canada), because there are few cases where one particular language is “contiguous” with a party to a large-scale conflict. There are conflicts where a more general concept of indigeneity plays a role (e.g. in the Zapatista region in Mexico), but it is an indigeneity encompassing multiple ethnolinguistic groups, with the result that no single indigenous language is considered emblematic.
