Walking and telling the territory: reclaiming Mapuche planning through storytelling and land-based methodologies

Abstract

ABSTRACT The spatial disciplines have slowly started to acknowledge their complicity with Indigenous dispossession in settler colonial contexts. Since early contact, instruments of land appropriation like surveying, mapping, town building, zoning, and place-naming have helped legitimise settler presence and imposed Western spatial relations over Indigenous territories. Indigenous planning – understood as planning by, for, and with Indigenous peoples grounded in their worldviews, values, and priorities – pre-dates and stands in stark contrast to dominant planning discourses. This paper offers methodological reflections on a participatory action research project that seeks to rebuild a Mapuche spatial planning knowledge base that still exists despite state-led attempts to disarticulate Mapuche socio-spatial relations. Within the logic of Indigenous resurgence, we consider the power of land-based walking and storytelling methodologies as tools to rebuild Mapuche spatial planning. By deepening embodied community knowledge of the land, renaming places, and (re)producing community-owned knowledge that refuses to be shared outwardly such methodologies not only contest the legitimacy of Western planning systems, but reassert the principles that have long guided Mapuche spatial planning and support the reconstruction of Mapuche territory. We also explore the limits of such approaches and whether they can reorient the ethics of Western planning towards Indigenous priorities.