Indigenous Politics in Northern Patagonia: Reciprocity, Kinship, and Territorial Networks of Power, 1850–80

This paper describes how indigenous groups such as Pehuenches and Huilliche-Tehuelches in Northern Patagonia defined and controlled territorialities and polities during the period 1850-1880. In this region, indigenous groups’ practices and ideologies of domination were based on kinship ties and reciprocity –which also implied hierarchical relationships-, and aimed at controlling trans-Andean trading routes, grazing lands to herd cattle and horses, and secure areas for settling, trading and organizing polities. Indigenous leaders were crucial political actors in the region, especially in a context of unstable creole governments and limited state presence in frontiers. Frontier policies were usually the outcome of local leaders’ negotiations with the indigenous groups. Furthermore, powerful leaderships among confederate indigenous allies also implied alliances with creoles in specific frontier posts such as Carmen de Patagones and Malargue. This interdependence consequently generated ambiguous levels of subordination. Analyzing written treaties under the light of these inter-ethnic alliances and negotiations will show that state’s policies were not necessarily effective strategies of control and assimilation of indigenous people, their territories and resources. Alliances and negotiations in these treaties actually show how many times they resulted from creoles’ response to indigenous power and implied creoles’ temporary subordination as tributaries and tenants of specific indigenous groups. In this paper, I present cases where indigenous leaders rented land, limited creoles access to certain areas and resources or demanded payments in exchange. Thus, this paper places independent indigenous groups as political actors, policy makers and key players in the shaping of economic, political and cultural developments in Northern Patagonia. It also suggests that it was this condition of domination, and not the effectiveness of states’ policies of submission and domination, that explains the decision of the Argentine and Chilean states to end indigenous independence by military means at the end of the nineteenth century.