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Moira Millán, a Mapuche indigenous person, is one of the voices that opposes the narrative of
national
whiteness
that Argentine President Alberto Fernández reaffirmed on June 9.
She fights her fight on several fronts: she fights by walking and denouncing to the world the constant violation of the bodies and territories of indigenous women.
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On March 14, indigenous women from Argentine Patagonia began a march against what they have called a
terricide
. From the Lof Mapuche Pillán Mahuiza recovered territory (100 kilometers south of the city of Esquel, Province of Chubut) a column of protesters began to walk "to heal," according to their proclamations. The destination was Buenos Aires, where they arrived on May 22. One of the inspirers of the activity was Millán, founder of the Indigenous Women's Movement for Good Living. She is
weichafe
, a word that in the Mapundungun language means warrior.
This concept, however, does not have the warmongering character for the Mapuches that it has for Western culture. In Mapuche culture, the
weichan
is an act of self-defense. Rather, he is a defender of his people and his territory. Moira speaks from the heart of the Puelwillimpapu –now called Patagonia–, and tells why the march took place and what her struggle and that of her companions are.
"Women have become a structural force in this process of struggle precisely because all the violence of society falls on them and the full weight of death, both human and natural, reverberates," she explains.
“This is the basic concept of the March Against Terricide, a 1,900-kilometer walk from Patagonia to Buenos Aires to denounce the violence of this colonial state.
Within the
body-territories
(sic) there is an ancestral memory of struggle, resistance and resilience that drives, guides and sustains us.
We are the heirs of brave women who came before us and we are continuing the battle ”.
We are the heiresses of brave women who came before us and we are continuing the battle
One of the practices that fight as their predecessors did before, says the
Mapuche
weichafe
, is the
chineo
, which
It consists of the rape of indigenous girls who have just begun to menstruate (10-12) years by white men who want to mark in this way a ritual passage in the sexuality of the minor and at the same time reaffirm their own virility.
This atrocity, he assures, has not disappeared with the colony and continues to be carried out in many cases under the protection or complicity of the chiefs of the communities.
The non-Spanish-speaking mothers of these raped girls find it very difficult to report the facts, since many times the application of linguistic rights is violated, an element that prevents them from being able to inform the authorities in detail about what happened.
When the rapes are reported to the justice of the
Winkas
(whites in Mapundungun) they go to the chief who reduces everything to a cultural practice, thus covering up the rapist and guaranteeing his impunity. “For this reason, we launched the #bastadechineo campaign in 2019, to ask the world to recognize that chineo has to be declared an atrocious crime and eliminated once and for all,” says Millán.
Moira Millán herself, in an international event on May 15, in which she spoke with the Indian activist Vandana Shiva, recalled that "the earth calls indigenous women to fight." And she explained: “We indigenous women are bodies-territory (sic) and the earth inhabits us ... This is what indigenous women do with this march: we manifest the inaudible voices of nature against the terricide promoted by the new greedy colonialism . The Earth's spiritual telluric force is awakening women and women will fight to defend Earth, the true source of their deepest identity. I call this cosmogonic feminization. In addition, for us it is important to affirm that we are not challenging the power of this colonial, patriarchal and capitalist system. We fight to restore harmony ”.
The phrase pronounced by the President of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, on June 9 at a press conference held in Buenos Aires together with the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez - “Octavio Paz once wrote that the Mexicans left the Indians The Brazilians came out of the jungle, but we Argentines came from the boats.
They were ships that came from Europe ”- they confirmed, he says, the myth of the
whiteness
of the nation, in the opinion of the indigenous people.
Moira Millán, author of
The Train of Oblivion
(Editorial Planeta), a work that tells what happened in Argentina through the eyes of the Mapuche nation in a counter-story that opposes the official narrative of the State, replied the president's words with a letter, released the next day.
“Yesterday when listening to the unfortunate presidential phrase, reaffirming once again the European spirit of this country, which despises the indigenous, because it poses incomprehensible epistemological thresholds for a logic trapped in existentialist reductionism. How can they understand our world linked to deep roots in ancient territories, who have their feet sailing in the distant waters of another continent? How can they love with the same dedication that we indigenous women do, the land they walk on? If the Argentines come from the ships, then they will have rights over the seas; and we, the indigenous nations, over the territories. Denialism as a state policy has been and is genocidal. The omission or denial of a conflict does not cause its disappearance or resolution, it only causes the conflict to deepen.Argentina will have to rethink its relationship with the indigenous nations that it has invaded, because memory, truth and justice are necessary to heal, ”he stated in the letter.
After the end of the march and return to their daily lives, one of the requests recently made by activists to the Fernández government is the creation of territorial defense centers for indigenous women.
"We simply understood that we cannot delegate the representation, administration and agency of our rights to those who are part of the machinery of oppression," says Millán.
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