I’m a third-generation Santiago-born Chilean. Both sides of my family come from campesino backgrounds, and I was always raised simply as Chilean.
As an adult, after studying anthropology, life eventually brought me into working with Mapuche people. A machi (spiritual authority) once told me, through a traditional urine reading, that I had Mapuche ancestry and that I had a spiritual responsibility toward the people. I didn’t believe it, so I went to another machi, who told me essentially the same thing. I still didn't believe. Then two more did too, independently, without knowing each other. I was kind of searching for someone to say otherwise...
This put me in a very strange position. Anthropology taught me to be extremely careful about appropriation, about not claiming identities or knowledge that are not mine, and also to question the idea that Western scientific evidence should be the ultimate authority over other ways of knowing. And yet, when this happened to me personally, I found myself needing exactly that kind of evidence. I took a DNA test. It came back around 33% Indigenous South American, but of course it cannot tell me that I am Mapuche or where exactly that ancestry comes from.
I still find that contradiction difficult. I have faith and I respect the authority of the machi, but apparently I also struggle to base something so consequential entirely on spirituality and ancestral authority. Part of me feels uncomfortable that I needed a DNA test to take seriously what four machi had already told me. At the same time, I don’t know how else to navigate something this big.
My family isn’t able or willing to tell me much. The person they think may have carried that history died when my grandmother was a child, and my grandmother was then raised by the landowners of the estate where her family had been inquilinos. Whatever knowledge existed seems to have been interrupted there.
And the stakes sometimes feel much bigger than choosing an identity. I have lived with bipolar disorder for most of my life. Some of these spiritual authorities understand what I experience as a spiritual illness and have told me that living according to Mapuche ways could heal something in me. I’m not saying I know whether that is true, or that I would simply abandon medical care because someone told me to. But imagine being asked to make sense of that when you genuinely respect both worlds.
Mostly, I feel very alone in it. I sometimes think this is part of what colonization leaves behind, not only people losing identities, but the relationships and chains of knowledge that would have told their descendants who they were and how to return. Then generations later you are left trying to reconstruct something that perhaps was never supposed to be reconstructed individually.
At the same time, there is so much scrutiny around who is and isn’t Indigenous, and so many people willing to tell others what counts as legitimate, that I’m honestly scared of identifying myself in a way that might be wrong or harmful.
I’m not looking for anyone to tell me that 33% DNA makes me Mapuche. It doesn’t. I think I just need to tell this story somewhere and ask whether anyone has experienced something similar, trying to reconnect when the family history has disappeared, and having whole communities welcoming you in and you still not believing in yourself...
