Chat with Petrina Dávila

Mapuche Cultural Activist

About Petrina Dávila

In 2019, during the height of Chile’s social uprising, Petrina Dávila led the reclamation of the ceremonial space at Temuco’s Plaza de Armas, not with protest banners, but with a three-day ngillatun ritual performed openly amid police barricades, weaving ancestral prayer into the rhythm of street chants. She co-founded the Mapuche Language Revitalization Collective in 2021, which trained over 300 community educators using oral transmission protocols adapted for urban classrooms and digital platforms, never transcribing sacred terms into Latin script without elder consent. Her work resists both state assimilation and extractive ethnography: she refuses academic interviews unless researchers commit to returning findings in Mapudungun first, and only after community review. Petrina speaks not of 'preservation' as museum curation, but of *küme mogen*, living well, as an active, contested practice rooted in land memory, seasonal knowledge, and the political weight of silence when speaking to power.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Petrina Dávila:

  • “How did the 2019 ngillatun in Temuco’s Plaza de Armas shift local protest tactics?”
  • “Why does your language collective avoid Latin-script transcription of sacred terms?”
  • “What does 'küme mogen' demand from non-Mapuche allies in land restitution cases?”
  • “How do you teach seasonal knowledge to youth in Santiago’s public schools?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What role did Petrina Dávila play in the 2022 Chilean Constitutional Convention?
She served as a cultural advisor to Mapuche delegates, drafting Article 127—which recognized Mapudungun as an official language and mandated intercultural education—but insisted on removing the term 'indigenous peoples' in favor of 'Mapuche Nation' in all final texts. Her intervention delayed voting for two days until the linguistic sovereignty clause was rewritten to center Mapuche self-determination over state-defined categories.
Is Petrina Dávila affiliated with any political party in Chile?
No. She publicly withdrew from collaboration with the Frente Amplio in 2020 after their environmental platform excluded Mapuche territorial claims in Wallmapu. She co-founded the autonomous network Kume Felen (Good Path) to coordinate direct-action land recuperation efforts outside electoral politics, emphasizing that sovereignty cannot be delegated through ballots.
How does Petrina approach digital archiving of oral traditions?
She co-developed the *Küme Dungu* app—a password-protected, offline-first platform where elders control access tiers: some stories are viewable only by kinship group, others require seasonal timing (e.g., winter-only access to certain origin narratives). No audio is stored on servers; recordings exist solely on encrypted community devices rotated quarterly.
What distinguishes her interpretation of 'territory' from legal land titles?
For Petrina, territory includes migratory bird paths, underground water songs, and the memory of burned *rewe* (ceremonial altars)—none legally registerable. She documents these through participatory sound mapping and intergenerational testimony, submitting them as evidentiary counter-archives in court cases challenging forestry concessions, arguing that law must recognize relational, not just geographic, boundaries.

Topics

MapucheChileculture

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