Beyond the Pampas

by Imogen Herrad

  He had lost everything, his land, his standing, his freedom. It must have taken a lot to sit down with Roca, the man who had destroyed the life of not only Sayhueke, but of all the Indians of Patagonia.

  I wouldn’t blame Sayhueke if he’d pulled a gun on Roca or if he’d gone for him with his bare hands. But he didn’t. He was still responsible for the lives of his tribe: the 700 men and 2500 women who had surrendered alongside him on New Year’s Day, 1885.54 At least they hadn’t been dragged off to prison camps, the way the tribes of Inakayal and Chikichan and Foyel had. But Sayhueke was the only one who could prevent a similar fate for them. He could not afford a grand gesture of revenge. So he talked to Roca. He asked for land where he and his people might live in peace, outside the city, back home in the south, in Patagonia.

  It took ten long years for his wish to be granted. For ten years he and his tribe lived in limbo, waiting to hear where they would be allowed to live permanently. Finally, the Argentine government set aside 150 square miles of land for Sayhueke and his people near what is today the village of Tecka, in the province of Chubut, in the dusty emptiness of the desert.55 There he lived out his remaining years on dry and stony ground; four hundred miles south of the Apple Country. Sayhueke died in 1903.

  He, at least, died in freedom.

  Inakayal was a Tehuelche chief whose tribe had once inhabited the area in the foothills of the Andes where at the turn of the century the Welsh would establish an offshoot colony of Y Wladfa. He had attended that last great gathering of the chiefs, and had surrendered with his warriors in 1884, a few months before Sayhueke. He, too, had been visited and written about by Francisco Moreno. And when Inakayal was in captivity, Moreno intervened and talked the authorities into releasing him and his immediate family. (Only him, not the rest of the tribe, the commoners.) They were released, but not into freedom. Inakayal, his wives and their children became inmates, living exhibits of sorts, at the great Natural History Museum which Moreno had established in the city of La Plata near Buenos Aires. The museum had already collected, and was exhibiting, plenty of bones of the Patagonian ‘natives’. Inakayal and his family were made to undergo anthropometric measurements and photographic sessions.56 There are frontal and profile photos of the chief’s expressionless face. They look like prison shots. Which is what they are. Inakayal’s crime was to be a Native American in a country of immigrants. He never regained his freedom.

  ‘One day in 1888,’ wrote Moreno’s secretary, Clemente Onelli (later to head the Buenos Aires zoo) in his memoir, ‘as the rays of the setting sun painted the front of the building purple, Inacayal appeared at the top of the monumental staircase, supported by two Indians. He took off his clothes: the clothes of those who had invaded his country, and bared his golden torso. He made an obeisance to the sun; another, much longer one, towards the south. That same night, Inacayal died...’57 After his death, Inakayal’s skeleton, brain, scalp and death mask were kept by the museum as exhibit number 5438.58 They were put on display alongside other specimens of ‘indigenous anatomy’.59 His remains were not buried until over a century after his death, in 1994.

  To this day, the collections of the La Plata museum include the skull of Mapuche cacique Calfucurá, along with those of a number of other Indians whose names are unknown.

  It is hard to believe that this campaign of ethnic cleansing, this – surely – state genocide against the indigenous population of the Patagonian steppe, is still largely spoken of in Argentina today simply as the ‘Desert Campaign’. Very few people get angry over it, except for the Mapuche and the allegedly extinct Tehuelche. There are no Pampas Indians left at all who can get angry.

  It is equally hard to believe that to this day statues of General Roca, the architect of the ‘Campaign,’ stand on the plazas of virtually all towns and villages in Patagonia. (Scrawled over, often, with graffiti by Mapuche or Tehuelche activists.) He is still seen largely as a hero who brought civilisation to the wild wastes of Patagonia.

  30

  I MEET RODRIGO GÓMEZ in the Amgueddfa Gaiman, Gaiman’s small local museum, on a Tuesday afternoon. He is there most Tuesday afternoons, because that is the day he visits the smallholdings of people who live in the countryside around Gaiman, in the chacras. After he has finished his business with them, he often has an hour to kill before the next bus leaves for the city of Trelew, where he lives. So he is in the habit to going to the museum for a round of maté and a chat with Miguel – the affable young man who spends his life mysteriously doing nothing but to learn. And, it appears, to mind the Amgueddfa. I have called into the museum with much the same end in mind as Rodrigo; barring the maté, of which, despite trying, I am not fond. Miguel, who knows that my interests in Patagonia now include indigenous as well as Welsh culture, introduces us. He thinks Rodrigo’s job might interest me.

  Rodrigo is the joint manager and founder of a not-for-profit organisation called Banco de Lanas, The Wool Bank. ‘We supply spinners and weavers of Mapuche-Tehuelche origin in the region around Gaiman with micro-credits,’ he explains. ‘People for whom this kind of work is part of their culture. We pay them for doing something they do well, and that helps preserve the cultural heritage. Most of our producers live in small, isolated communities here in the region or on the tablelands near the Andes. The money that the Wool Bank provides means that they can stay on their land, within their culture, if you like, and won’t have to up and leave for the city, where they’ll be cut off from everything they know.’

  Miguel, who had wandered across to the window to observe the street outside, returns.

  ‘The Trelew bus is coming round the corner.’

  ‘Why don’t you come with me to Trelew?’ asks Rodrigo. ‘I could show you our premises, and you could meet Lía, my partner.’

  No! I think. It’s six in the evening and I’m tired, I went for a run at 7.30 this morning and I’ve been on the go pretty much ever since before dropping in to the museum for a breather. What I want to do now is to go home and put my feet up, read a book, see nobody, do nothing. Instead, I say, ‘Yes – why not?’

  The bus wheezes up the hill, past the large hoardings advertising Gaiman’s tea shops, past the small chapel that overlooks the roundabout and the rusting Coca-Cola hoarding that has quite probably stood there since the 1950s. Gaiman ends abruptly: one moment we’re in the town, the next we are out on the open road with nothing but grey scrubland left and right. The white hill of Bryngwyn rises up to the right, bordered by a green line: poplars and willows growing by the edge of the river.

  Trelew with its population of 120,000 is the largest city in the province of Chubut. It’s laid out in the grid pattern typical of cities in the Americas: wide, perfectly straight roads intersecting at regular intervals. Every cuadra, or block, is one hundred metres long. It’s all very beautiful and logical; a system that makes it almost impossible for anyone (even for me) to get lost. There are no crescents in Patagonia.

  The lake behind the bus and coach station is named in honour of a chief of Pampas Indians with whom the Welsh were on friendly terms: Laguna Chiquichano. The large green square in front of the station contains a giant statue of Lewis Jones, in whose honour the city itself is named. There are hotels and souvenir shops, cinemas and cafés and restaurants.

  Rodrigo and I get off the bus at a street corner and walk a few cuadras to the shop and office of Banco de Lanas. The window boasts a couple of mannequins wearing cardigans, shawls and ponchos. The word poncho, he tells me, is in fact derived from a Mapuche word; pontró in the Mapuche language Mapudungun describes a wrap or mantle.

  Inside the shop it’s warm and a little stuffy. The air smells of dust and wool. At the back, in a tiny office, hopelessly crowded with furniture and office equipment, sits Lía, Rodrigo’s partner in the Wool Bank and in life, typing at a computer. Rodrigo takes a small, dented kettle from a wall cupboard and proceeds to boil water for maté (for him and Lía) and tea (for me).

  ‘These days, I use my full name, Ñancuf�
�l Musa,’ Lía explains while the kettle begins to sing. ‘My father was Arab and my mother Mapuche. I use both their surnames. When I grew up, nobody said, “I am Mapuche” or “I have Mapuche ancestors”. It wasn’t something you’d want anybody to know about. Our grandparents learned to keep quiet. There has been so much pain, so much loss. They learned to turn inwards, not to hold their heads high, to disappear within themselves. And that hurts. One can feel it still today, in our people. I myself can feel it.’ She looks at me for a moment, her face serious, her eyes remembering. ‘A lot has changed. Take me, for example: I was lucky, because I had the grandmothers of our people who guarded the traditions. They taught me a lot. I began to read about us. I used to be ashamed to say: “I am Mapuche”. Then I started to learn about the past, to find out who I actually am. And I found such a rich heritage in our culture. So much that is worth preserving and passing on. So much that we must defend and protect, so that it won’t get lost.’

  Doors open in me while Lía is talking. I can feel echoes in myself of her sadness over the lost years, the needless shame of the little girl she once was.

  ‘It makes our work quite hard sometimes,’ says Rodrigo, who is bearing maté and a cup of tea. ‘Most of our members find it difficult to stand up for themselves. They have become so used to having a boss, to following orders, as it has been for so long. We try to give them the freedom to act for themselves, but it’s not easy.’

  ‘It is getting easier now,’ Lía says. ‘The young Mapuche are beginning to look at themselves...’ She stops for a moment, reconsiders. ‘We are beginning to look at ourselves in a different way, to re-evaluate what is ours, our culture. We’re beginning to throw off the shame. We’re learning the language again. And we’re beginning to realise that our culture really was a great and valuable culture. That we had our own gods, our own way to connect with nature. There was a connection with nature that gave us protection. And through the imposition of another culture, all of that was lost. Our identity. But now, we’re beginning to stand up again. To try and understand what we are about. To work on healing the wounds of the past that way and also, on the other hand, to learn how to coexist with the other culture, the white culture.’

  It is as though the walls of the stuffy little room at the back of the shop have fallen away. The landscape of the past is all around us, reclaimed by the Mapuche of today who are learning to hold their heads high, to be proud of their people, their culture, their past. And the landscape of a present in which the young are beginning to leave bitterness behind, and open themselves up to approaching and claiming for themselves their own culture, with pride and without shame.

  ‘As a small girl, I kept trying to understand who I was, I even picked up a few words of our language from the grandmothers. And today, when I need to be able to speak Mapudungun, I find that the words are still in me.’ Lía gives me a brilliant smile. ‘When I was little, I couldn’t understand why I had a Mapuche surname. Sometimes it made me furious, I didn’t understand why the other children at school made fun of me for it. Until a teacher told me what my name meant. Ñancufíl is composed of the words ñancu, which means hawk, and fil, snake in Mapudungun. “You are named,” that teacher told me; “for the wisdom of the snake and the wisdom of the hawk. And when you need help, you can call on them and they will come and help you and guide you.” That changed my whole life. I often dream of hawks. When I am low and I need help, I call them and they come to me.’

  Lía turns in her swivel chair and taps out some commands on her keyboard that open a number of images on the computer.

  ‘We took those the last time we were in Epuyen, in the Andes,’ she explains.

  Photos appear of a glorious mountain landscape, white peaks and green wooded valleys. And in the foreground stands Lía, her head tilted back, looking up at the sky from which descends a large bird. A hawk. Over the course of several pictures, it comes closer and closer, until it finally alights on her head.

  She laughs at my astounded face, a laugh of utter joy.

  I have never seen a large bird of prey sit on anybody’s head. Not ever, not even on T.V.. (Maybe Oscar Payaguala was right about being able to make rain, too?) Rodrigo hovers in the background, smiling.

  Working with Rodrigo in the Wool Bank is not Lia’s only job. She is also a teacher. She teaches traditional crafts in the schools in the poorer neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Trelew.

  ‘There are lots of children there of Mapuche origin. Spinning and weaving is part of their heritage. The thread that we spin is a connection to the grandmothers and grandfathers. I learnt spinning from my grandmother, and now I am passing it on to the children of today. That’s how it always was. Today, the grandmothers and grandfathers are not held in high regard, because they’re old. With the work I do, I hope that the children will learn again to respect their grandmothers, and their culture. They have a right to know who they are.’

  31

  A FEW DAYS LATER I visit the Gaiman museum again where Miguel is on duty once more. I sit at the table in the back room with a stack of newspapers. When there are visitors, he disappears to the museum’s front room to welcome and guide them round. When there are none, he sits in a tiny little room, hardly more than a cupboard, off the back room, reads and listens to the radio.

  Today, nobody comes into the museum all afternoon.

  Halfway through my stack of early twentieth century Welsh newspapers, I remember that I want to buy a book. The museum has a little shop – that is to say, a book rack in Miguel’s cupboard which must be larger than it looks, because it somehow manages to contain most books published in Spanish about Y Wladfa. I want the Spanish translation of Eluned Morgan’s account of her trip west across the desert at the turn of the last century, Dringo’r Andes. I’m struggling with the Welsh original.

  I announce my intention to buy the book.

  ‘Ah,’ says Miguel and emerges, two books in hand. ‘You want to buy this one as well.’ This is a history of some of the women of the colony. ‘Vos escribís sobre estas cosas del feminismo, ¿no? You write about this feminism stuff, don’t you?’ He says it with a sidelong glance.

  ‘I’ve already got that one,’ I tell him. ‘And yes – I am a feminist.’

  We drift into a conversation. He asks me how I got on with Rodrigo, and I tell him about Lía and the hawk, and thank him for introducing me to Rodrigo. We talk about Patagonian Indian cultures, and Miguel says – I get this only slowly – that he really shouldn’t talk about this topic. He speaks faster than usual, and because of this I find it harder than usual to follow his Spanish. At first, I naturally assume that he – like Rodrigo, like Lía, like me – feels that more justice for the Mapuche and other indigenous peoples is necessary. But it turns out that he doesn’t.

  Quite the contrary, in fact.

  ‘What kind of culture did they have anyway before the Europeans came?’ demands Miguel – rhetorically, because before I can answer, he sweeps on. ‘They have exactly the same civil rights as all other Argentinians, but they don’t want to be Argentinians, they say they’re Mapuche not Argentinian....’

  What the hell is this about? What has ruffled his feathers? I’ve never seen Miguel other than chilled.

  I say that I can understand that some Indígenas don’t necessarily identify with a state which ordered their destruction, even if it was over a hundred years ago.

  ‘The Desert Conquest, don’t talk to me about that,’ Miguel says when I call it a genocide.

  It wasn’t a genocide, he argues, because a genocide is the illegal killing of a group of people, whereas the ‘Desert Conquest’ was decided by the Argentinian Congress, which passed a law about it. So it was legal. And anyway, it was decided upon because the Indians had attacked European settlers and settlements. So it was justified as well.

  ‘Yes, but excuse me,’ I say, finally getting a word in, ‘those settlements were on the land that belonged to the Indians!’

  ‘But they didn’t even work the
land,’ says Miguel, as though there was any logic in that. ‘They just moved about on it, they weren’t settled or anything.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And now they demand all that land back from the state; and they still don’t do anything with it. There are some who have a chacra in the Andes, and what do they do? Nothing. What is a farm for, working the land and making money, isn’t it? Not for just sitting on the land staring at the sky and doing nothing.’

  I remember that a couple of days ago Miguel himself said that Rodrigo was always trying to get him to work and it was no good, he and work are incompatible. And now he accuses others of laziness!

  ‘They want their land back,’ Miguel continues, ‘but how, of whom? They don’t have any written deeds, nothing to show it is theirs. It now belongs to other people, and do they want to disown those people to get their land back?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I say, ‘that wouldn’t work, they did that in East Germany, returning the lands of people who had been disowned or who had fled in the 1940s and 1950s, after the War; and the East German state gave that land to other people. After reunification, it was taken off those people and returned to the heirs of the original owners.’ I want to say, “That would be committing a new wrong to right an old one”, but I haven’t got the words for that in Spanish and, anyway, Miguel is in no state to listen.

  ‘I know what you think, you think it’s a simple thing and it isn’t.’

  ‘I don’t think that, actually...’ But it’s no good.

  ‘I am a descendent of the Welsh, of Lewis Jones, Llwyd ap Iwan; the Welsh were given land by the state back then, my family owns a farm and lands in the Andes – they would want those back off us too, I suppose.’