The Mapuche are the largest indigenous people of present-day Chile and adjacent Argentina, with a well-documented history of sustained and largely successful military resistance to Spanish colonial expansion south of the Bio-Bio River for roughly three centuries, formalized in a series of parlamento treaty agreements recognizing Mapuche territorial autonomy until the Chilean and Argentine states' later nineteenth-century military campaigns ('Pacification of Araucania' and the Argentine 'Conquest of the Desert') incorporated Mapuche territory by force. Mapuche social organization is traditionally based on extended kin groups (lof) without a historical centralized state structure, and contemporary Mapuche political movements, including ongoing and well-documented land-restitution conflicts in southern Chile, remain an active subject of national policy and periodic civil conflict in both countries today.
Facts
Group TypeSourced to the subject's own accountIndigenous ethnic group 1 Typical RegionSourced to the subject's own accountSouthern South America (south-central Chile and adjacent parts of Argentina) 1 Primary LanguageSourced to the subject's own account Subsistence ModeSourced to the subject's own accountHistorically agriculture and, after the introduction of the horse, an increasingly significant pastoral and equestrian economy; documented as the only indigenous people of the Americas to successfully halt Spanish colonial territorial expansion for an extended period, along the Bio-Bio frontier. 1 Disputed
Population Estimateapproximately 1.7 to 2 million 1 Sourced to the subject's own accountChilean and Argentine census figures on Mapuche self-identification have varied significantly between survey years and methodologies. Sources
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