Chilean visitor compares Aboriginal living realities

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Chilean Mapuche social activist and educator Nilsa Rain recently spent a month touring Canada, exchanging ideas and comparing living realities with Canadian Aboriginal peoples.

And like to many Indigenous Canadians, Chilean Mapuche Indians are fighting for a land base to sustain them.

Rain, who represents an organization called the Council of Whole Lands, is one of approximately two million Mapuche in Chile's population of 12 million. They are not recognized as Indigenous peoples by the government, who want all Chilean residents to consider themselves Chileans only.

The Mapuche live in some 3,000 communities in Chile, but their land base has been steadily eroded until subsistence is almost impossible. Some land has been usurped, and some Mapuche families sold their land, an act foreign to their traditional beliefs.

"We don't believe in private ownership of the land. We always believe in the community taking care of the land. Mapuche people face the same reality as Native people around here - the land issue is the biggest problem."

"Because land is essential to the continuation of their traditional lifestyle, some of the Mapuche are starting to take back what was once theirs. About 65 communities are starting to act, in direct defiance of the government.

"We believe this is a historical right of ours. Nobody can deny that the Mapuche are the natural caretakers of the land, like the Aboriginal people here in Canada."

"One of the harshest realities is if we continue waiting as people - waiting for the judicial system, the legal system - to solve our situation ...we will just die out."

Because Chile is coming out of a dictatorship which ended in 1990, the government has to give the impression they are taking part in a democratic process. That means they have been very careful in dealing with the Mapuche "recuperation" of the land.

During her stay in Canada, Rain also hoped to learn how the education process is taking place in Native communities.

"We're trying to develop our own formal system in the area of education," said Rain.

She visited Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Regina, Akwasasne and Kahnawake during her stay. She found Mapuche families who moved to cities faced the same social problems as Natives in Canada: alcoholism, poverty, suicide, unemployment, abuse."

"It is a factor because they are displaced from their communities and their traditional values."

But what the Mapuche and Canadian Aboriginal don't share is the disintegration of the extended family group, which Rain found "appalling." Mapuche family groups live in harmony and that's essential," she said.

"By keeping our family unity, we intend to pass it onto the future generations for them to continue the struggle and change the reality someday."