Mapuche Nation
The name “Mapuche” means “People of the Earth” (“Mapu” is Earth and “Che” is people), and the Mapuche community of Lof Cushamen finds incomprehensible the ongoing pillaging of the Earth’s resources for private profit and the culture of neoliberal capitalism that asks, “What will I get out of it?” rather than “What is right?”
Mapu Law
A Mapuche woman named Rosa Currinanko told me: “The Mapu has her own law and every now and again, she makes it known. Her law is more powerful than the law of the white people, but they don’t want to understand that. When the Mapu decides to overturn a mountain she will do just that and nobody — not anybody — can stop her.”
Wefkufe
Like the Algonquin Indigenous peoples, who saw those consumed by greed, excess and selfish consumption as suffering from Wetiko, the Mapuche believe in spirits known as Wefkufe, whose energies disturb the Earth’s harmony and cause illness, divisions and death. Disembodied spirits, the Wefkufe take on solid form when they are introduced into the body of a victim, who then becomes possessed with the disruptive energy. Those who do not respect the laws of nature are often punished with Wefkufe.
Filling us with this same disruptive energy, neoliberal capitalism has stolen our souls and possessed us so that we have become complicit in the tyranny and increasing authoritarianism of the neoliberal system. People living under neoliberal capitalism are thus exhorted to focus on material priorities and prevented from even imagining alternatives. When the neoliberal onslaught began in the 1980s, one of its key instigators, Margaret Thatcher, was clear that, “Economics is the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”[1]