Mapping living geographies and hope in Wallmapu

Mapping living geographies and hope in Wallmapu

Written on 09 January 2026. Posted in Chile

BY SARAH KELLY AND MONÉ VÁSQUEZ FOR INDIGENOUS DEBATES

Participatory mapping of local realities, which differs from official state maps, constitutes a method and a tool for collective resistance on Indigenous lands. These maps were made with Mapuche-Williche communities who exercised decisions about what data to include and how to communicate it. Maps were not the end product but a longer process of mapping territories. Mapuche communities collaborated with us to interpret these methods from within their forms of resistance, which involve legal, administrative, and territorial defense.

Wallmapu, the ancestral land of the Mapuche people, was divided and exploited by colonialism. Today, projects such as monoculture tree plantations (forestales), hydroelectric dams, and so-called "green energy" have taken over land and water without Indigenous consent, harming nature and Mapuche culture. These actions and projects affect traditional knowledge, food systems, and relationships with water. What was once shared and collectively experienced -water (Ko), the native forest (mawizantu), the land (Mapu)- is today extracted, displaced, and privatized.

What remains is not just degrading the ecology but also damaging Mapuche culture. The disruption affects other species as well as the life and care of the Mapuche people for all living beings and all life in küme mongen. This paper is part of an ongoing conversation about how participatory mapping is used in Wallmapu. The authors have worked with Williche communities for more than 10 years and have recently carried out a similar mapping process in the Araucanía region.

Systematizing territorial invasions and mapping hope

The loss of water, forests, and community is not accidental. It is part of the state's extractive policies that benefit corporations and the elite. By mapping these territorial invasions, communities can document damage, share their history, and strengthen strategies for defending their territories. Maps allow people to communicate more rapidly in order to respond to Western colonial processes. It also supports Mapuche efforts to protect the rivers and halt development projects in their territories.

This process of countermapping official maps is a helpful tool to recover histories and memories. Mapuche communities have used these maps as part of their resistance. Maps help support legal actions and protect cultural uses of territory and their geographies. Maps help tell people about their territory when this is not easy to understand. These defense strategies are technical and also communicational.

The very process of creating the maps has been a fundamental part of these efforts, as can be seen in the map submitted to the Environmental Court of Chile.

Mapping Dispossession: History of Displacement

Mapping can also help communities remember and understand past violence. In 2016, a meeting was held with community members and ancestral authorities in Caunahue during a trawün ("Mapuche assembly"). Previous maps showing local threats highlighted the need to explore the deeper history of land and water appropriation.

We brought three key materials to the trawün: enlarged maps from a 1990 book by Molina et al.; a timeline of historical laws related to land loss; and excerpts from a 1996 historical study by Vergara et al., based on archival documents and oral testimonies about dispossession in the region. At that same trawun, elders looked at arrows drawn on the maps and remembered how families were forcibly relocated. These maps helped them recall how certain places become cultural and spiritual resguardos.

Later that day, while sharing mate, one elder said, "Religion came with the forts." This comment showed that mapping was more than just a technical task, as the elder understood the arrival of the Catholic Church as part of a colonial history. They also used books to date the stories of dispossession and violence passed down through families. This helped to confirm oral histories for future education and legal processes.

Mapping Threats: Ongoing Colonization

In Wallmapu territory, there are ongoing threats that can be located using GPS, drones, and satellite imagery. Investment or extractive projects strategically use these technologies and maps to appropriate land and water, dispossessing communities, often without their agents having lived in or visited the territories. By creating their own maps, communities can take ownership and identify what might be taken from afar. This is an important tool to understand how the outsider looking to profit from their territory makes decisions.

Mapping work with Mapuche communities helped resist major projects, such as hydroelectric plants and high-voltage power lines. These efforts brought together the Mapuche alliance, Alianza Territorial Puelwillimapu, and the Chilean civil society movement, Futrono Sin Torres.

Another emblematic case was the resistance to the Norwegian company SN Power's hydroelectric mega-project, which the Mapuche communities managed to halt thanks to the maps produced collectively. The use of maps enabled communities to organize support, gather signatures, and coordinate actions between groups. After meeting nearly monthly for a year, they had produced nine versions of the same map with all the forms of invasion.

One of the printed maps, produced collectively, depicts two "horseshoe"-shaped zones related to land and water use. The outer horseshoe comprises conservation areas that still permit hydroelectric and aquaculture projects (the farming of aquatic species, plants, and animals). The inner horseshoe contains the actual hydroelectric and aquaculture projects, located downstream within the outer zone. While the outer area protects water through native forests, it also supports the internal economic development of aquaculture and hydroelectric power. These maps helped leaders explain and analyze how these projects were affecting their land and to depict the cumulative impacts of this model.

The Mapuche people also developed a map showing títulos de merced (granted land), formally registered Indigenous communities, bodies of water, and non-consumptive water rights (hot spots), alongside the layers mentioned previously. This initial "threats" map was used to visualize all the projects (see the map on the defense of the transmission line and Florín). All the mapped economic development projects were situated on fundo land -lands granted to Chilean and German settlers from the 1850s to the early 20th century.

Geographies of Protection: Maps of Hope and Defense

Mapuche geography and territorial resistance can be mapped, and these maps can support Indigenous rights. Maps bridge epistemic divisions: judges, policy makers and international audiences need to better understand how Indigenous rights are being violated to support justice. Mapping hope also involves mapping rivers. They worked with artists and ancestral communities to interpret Mapuche geography and revise these maps with communities. Rivers, which both divide and unite territories, must remain free in order to live.

The map produced by Sergio Iacobelli was developed during the 2019 mapping of the Pilmaiquén territory. For 15 years, these communities have been in conflict with a hydroelectric project being carried out by Statkraft, a company owned by the Norwegian state. The consent process was opaque and misleading, and some families were bribed, fostering a distrust that persists to this day. Consequently, three maps were created to support their case before the Environmental Court of Chile. In addition, three extensive unstructured interviews were conducted with ancestral leaders of the territory to draft a report for the Second Environmental Court of Chile.

For this case, two maps were created, one of them produced together with the ancestral authorities of Pilmaiken, showing the healing relationships with the Ngen Kintuantee (the spiritual guardian). The map was produced in order to argue that the 'area of influence' determined by the consultancy company for the hydropower project was incorrect. The case of Pilmaiken territory reached the Chilean Supreme Court and sought international mediation via the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Today, the Los Lagos hydropower project is near completion, although water has still not been allowed to enter the project due to ongoing administrative processes connected to the Indigenous consultation.

How methodological perspectives travel

In 2025, together with members of Mapuche communities, work began on counter-mapping and conducting interviews focused on the connection between body and territory (what they refer to as "from body and territory") in the Araucanía. Jointly, they used countermapping to document not only the environmental damage but also the lived histories of how territories have changed, stories of resistance, and the politics of what is made visible or invisible.

Each territory teaches us something. Each one is different, with its own history, politics, and geography. In every place, communities shared their knowledge by drawing their symbols and stories onto the maps. They mapped grief and displacement but also care and resilience.

Through this work, they came to see mapping not as a tool for controlling land but as a relational method rooted in memory and guided by the living territory, the Mapuche people themselves.

It was through this approach and practice that the work became a source of guidance and support. Their collaborative and horizontal research in Puelwillimapu, conducted alongside Mapuche-Williche communities, has inspired a rethinking of research practices and intellectual work at a time when approaches that genuinely respect Indigenous knowledge and ethics are increasingly sought. Moreover, the geographies explored and the analyses proposed provide a framework for better understanding both systems of violence and the ways in which communities resist.

Participatory mapping as living testimony

Mapping is more than a representation; it is a political, cultural and spiritual practice. In Wallmapu, mapping shows dispossession but also what lives and what resists. Mapping remains a double-edged sword depending on who wields it: a tool for territorial dispossession or a tool for exercising Indigenous rights. It must be done carefully, in trust with collaborators.

Through participatory mapping, maps can become spaces of memory, collective analysis and strategic planning. We learned together that mapping is remembering, imagining and defending past, present and future. Maps can facilitate knowledge passing between generations. Youth are drawn to maps, and elders can share knowledge via maps.

Working with artists and researchers together can be beneficial for the defense and communication of Indigenous rights. This tool can easily be shared with communities as a training method to build capacity with which to confront state institutions and transnationals. People working with this mapping tool must be respectful of territorial and local knowledge.

People working with this tool must also follow territorial protocols about what needs to be seen and what cannot be disclosed. Indigenous communities must revise and decide what is mapped, and how. Lastly, participatory mapping must be reciprocal. In the face of extractivism, this tool works as a living testimony and a gesture of hope to build better presents and futures.

Sarah Kelly is a lecturer and associate researcher at the Energy Justice Clinic, as well as a researcher at Andes Lab Sur at the Universidad Austral de Chile. She also maintains collaborative research relationships with Mapuche-Williche communities in Chile on hydroelectricity, cultural mapping, and Indigenous rights.

Moné Vásquez is a musician, activist, and researcher from Pikun Mapu (Valparaíso). He is currently undertaking a PhD in Political Ecology and Governance at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, where he examines the enduring impacts of colonialism, with a focus on the continuity of the coloniality of nature and power in Mapuche territory.

Cover map: Hand-drawn map based on the territorial knowledge shared by ancestral leaders. Map: Sergio Iacobelli

Tags: Indigenous Debates