The Mapuche are an indigenous group who historically inhabited the Wallmapu (a vast piece of territory currently within the boundaries of Argentina and Chile). After the independence of Chile, a civic-military incursion into its ancestral territory led to the dispossession of their land and cycles of impoverishment that still have consequences to this day. In this talk, I will present evidence from one qualitative study conducted with self-identified Mapuche participants in Chile (N = 28) regarding the characteristics of different postcolonial ideologies, namely historical negation, symbolic exclusion and miscegenation and the significance they have for demands of reparation and recognition on behalf of the Mapuche. Finally, I will also introduce results from a survey study with both Mapuche and non-indigenous participants analyzing the relations between postcolonial ideologies and reparation and recognition policies. The results are discussed in terms of their consequences for present-day intergroup relations and the development of public policies aimed at improving the current situation of the Mapuche in Chile.

Ana Figueiredo (PhD) is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Universidad de O’Higgins (Chile) and Associate Researcher at the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES). As a political and social psychologist, her main research interests focus on coloniality, collective memory, historical conflicts, ideology, political and state violence, citizen-police interactions, collective action, and social justice. She works with different theoretical and methodological approaches to understand these phenomena mainly from the perspective of minoritized groups, such as indigenous and migrant communities. She is also co-editor of the Journal of Social and Political Psychology (JSPP).