Lauren: Nguillatun.

Recently, I attended Nguillatun with Daniela and Stephen, a Mapuche festival where the indigenous group thanks deities and ancestors for a good harvest, and predicts the upcoming year's events.

We walked up to the ceremony where many families had set up tents and had been camping all weekend, and immediately sensed hostility -- at the very least we felt very unwelcome. I had thought this was a celebration that was open to people, but we had kind of walked into a very sacred ceremony wearing bright colors and walking in the holy circle where the ritual was being performed.

Mapuches are very somber, wearing all black with the only colors being ribbons of various colors tied to a headdress, each one symbolizing a different, very specific thing. Their jewelry is square and heavy with little coins attached to different pieces. Their music is sad because of the cold, harsh climate where they had lived for centuries, and the constant wars first with Spain then with Chile.

The Nguillatun is one of their most sacred holidays and we rolled up in lime green and coral jackets, ready to dance -- a tad inappropriate for the sacred occassion. Few Spanish-looking Santiaguinos were even there, and we were there speaking English wondering what all the fuss was about as we were asked to step out of the holy circle vaguely marked off with canelo branches, sacred branches that are made into medicines by the Mapuches.

There was a lot of jumping in the ceramony, and the local Machi, the shaman, was drumming her kultrun, and eventually went into an hours-long trance where she spoke in tongues about this year's upcoming events.

Once Tio Jorge (the same wonderful tio who lent me his ID to go to the hospital three months ago), showed up it was a different story. He is a popular man wherever he goes, and people were offering us homemade sopaipilla bread from their tents, and we got to sit in on the Machi softly drumming in her trance. Quite a sight. Especially since everyone was crowded around her, speaking in tongues, and "Hurrah!"-ing every time she said something in this language.

Throughout this ceremony the Mapuches would shake branches from the canelo tree, some splashed with water.

A jug of homemade liquor was passed around in an earthenware jug while the Machi was in her trance. First you had to pour some of the liquor on the earth and say a few words, not for relatives or friends who had died (my first thoughts) but to thank the earth for this beverage. Afraid I might go blind or lose feeling on one side of my face or offend someone by not doing it right, I passed.

-- Lauren

Lauren: Los Mapuches.

Chile is a really homogenous country. While we've been here, Aneya and I have seen one gay couple, one questionable lesbian couple (it was questionable whether they were a couple), less than ten black people, and three Asians. You could go days without seeing someone who wasn't Latino, and that was over a month's time.

87 percent of the population here is Catholic, 11 percent is Protestant. So almost 100 percent of people are Christian.

But there is one major ethnic minority, the indigenous Mapuches, the largest indigenous group here. And there is a pretty real resistance from the Mapuche, especially in the south. Graffiti for Mapuche power isn't as common as it is on the coast or in the south, but there are still examples within the city of resistance, which can be seen in the above graffiti, which reads "Liberty to the Mapuche now!!".

In the south, especially in Temuco, the symbol of the Mapuche drum, the kultrun, is used as a symbol of the resistance, and can be seen all over town, quite often accompanied by something written in Mapudungun. There are also a number of lawyers in Temuco because of the litigation over things like land rights.

The Mapuche have a really sad history. They've been at war with Chileans since Chile started being settled, it's considered a 400 year war, and have sad songs. When we were in the pastoral area of the Araucania region near Temuco, a farmer who isn't Mapuche said the local Mapuche were pestering him, trying to get him to abandon his land by throwing stones into his field. If large companies go to the Araucania area to have factory farms, sometimes they will be driven out by the Mapuche. They're not kidding around about resistance.

Photo taken at San Antonio and Alameda.

-- Lauren