The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina's Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History

This collection of essays explores a seminal event in Argentina's national imaginary—the Conquest of the Desert—whose meanings have been increasingly challenged in recent years by Mapuche activists and their allies. Consisting of an introduction and nine chapters written by scholars based in Argentina, Canada, and the United States, the volume disentangles “issues of nation, violence, memory, colonialism, and indigeneity” linked to a violent military campaign—and its aftermaths—waged by Argentine president Julio Roca against Indigenous inhabitants in northern Patagonia between 1878 and 1885 (p. 2). The authors succeed in presenting novel forms of evidence and sharing conceptual insights that challenge nation-building narratives told and retold by military officials, political elites, nationalist historians, and opportunistic entrepreneurs for nearly 150 years (and counting).In addition to writing a clear and concise introduction, volume editor Carolyne R. Larson contributes a chapter that recounts the “official story” of Argentina's military campaign. Acknowledging the ethical ambiguity of retelling the Conquest of the Desert via the copious documentation created by military and state agents, Larson provides both a foil for the chapters that follow and a critical analysis of the narratives produced about the organized violence. She concludes that no sooner had the soldiers' repeating rifles cooled than the military, the state, and the Spanish-language press declared the “Indian Problem” resolved (p. 39).A major strength of this volume is the authors' collective engagement with the organizing concepts, chronologies, and geographies used to understand the Conquest of the Desert. For example, Julio Vezub and Mark Healey, whose chapter draws on the correspondence of Mapuche and Tehuelche longkos to argue that Indigenous leaders were more effective in coordinating among themselves and “negotiating terms of subordination” than most scholars acknowledge, view the violence as an asymmetrical war that Mapuche actors described using words like kona (soldiers) and weichafe (warriors) (p. 44). In contrast, Walter Delrio and Pilar Pérez develop a layered argument in favor of a conceptual framework of genocide over competing frameworks of war or assimilation. They contend that genocide is vital for avoiding reductionism because the concept enables readers to ponder a “multiple, complex process” involving state, nation, and territory that generates a series of questions about Mapuche/Indigenous futures as well as debates over discrete, past events (p. 141). The tension between these two chapters is productive, demonstrating the need for historians to move beyond demonstrations of Indigenous agency to nuanced considerations of the conceptual language used to frame people's actions and discourses.This creative tension around framing runs throughout the remaining chapters, which both expand the meanings and temporal boundaries of conquest beyond the military campaigns and present Mapuche perspectives on the violence (conquest) and sense of places (the desert). Ricardo D. Salvatore's chapter reveals not only the tragically familiar process of stealing artifacts and mortal remains of Indigenous people for museum display but also Francisco P. Moreno's decision to force captive Indigenous leaders to live and work in the Museum of La Plata. Salvatore interprets Moreno's action as part of a “Scientific Conquest” that entombed people only recently defeated in an antiquity from which there was no return. Jennie I. Daniels's examination of well-known Hispanophone Argentine literature traces shifting representations of the desert and concludes that it symbolized a liminal space between “national and foreign, citizen and Other” (p. 168). David M. K. Sheinin's chapter offers a chilling account of the Argentine military government's 1979 centennial celebration of the Conquest of the Desert and its symbolic connections to the military's brutal campaign against purported leftists. Sheinin also describes the military's simultaneous efforts to provide social services to “First Peoples,” an initiative that is perhaps less surprising than the author suggests given the Brazilian military government's establishment of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) in 1967.The final two chapters provide early twenty-first-century Mapuche views on history and territory. Ana Ramos draws on ethnographic data to share Mapuche memories transmitted via nütram, performative stories of often-violent pasts that link Mapuche people across generations and geographies. Sarah D. Warren analyzes three different maps of Mapuche territory—called Wallmapu—that link Mapuche communities on both sides of the Andes, challenging spatial orderings that privilege the nation-state boundaries of Argentina and Chile. The contributions of these two chapters (not adequately conveyed here) would be even greater with additional chapters contextualizing the Mapuche political resurgence in this century.The insights in this excellent volume might be extended in two ways: by taking inspiration from the suggestive chapter by Rob Christensen on the role of environmental processes, including climate and disease, in determining the outcome of the military campaigns; and by breaking free of the long shadow of the nation-state to integrate Mapuche stories from what is today Chile. Materialist histories of both Mapuche and colonizers, cast in a transnational/imperial framework, would serve to reconceptualize not only the conquest but also the desert: the battle for history is unlikely to be won by Indigenous people whose pasts (and futures?) remain confined to nation-states.

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