Deciphering the Butalmapu: Mapuche Confederations in Late Colonial Chile

The Mapuche term butalmapu (or fütramapu), which roughly translates to “great territory,” frequently appeared in Spanish colonial sources in the centuries following the failed conquest in the mid-sixteenth century. After a 1599 Mapuche uprising defeated the conquest, frontier officials employed it to subdivide the Mapuche-controlled Araucanía into four discrete regions. Colonial authors used (and mapped, literally) butalmapu to refer to an unchanging and legible canton or political unit. This meaning served multiple purposes: surveillance, categorization, missionary work, and negotiation. Many scholars have also accepted this meaning to characterize late colonial Mapuche social organization. Drawing on ethnohistorical inquiries, Spanish military and ecclesiastical correspondence, and Mapuche-dictated letters, this paper attempts to outline how cultural meanings of authority, violence, and diplomacy gave the term multivalent and contested meanings when Mapuche leaders deployed it internally and along the transandean Mapuche-Spanish frontier. Butalmapus were thus never a static region easily affixed upon a colonial map, but more a confederation responsive to consensus, rivalry, and changing frontier dynamics.