Mapuche medicine

The Mapuche, 'people of the land', are the largest Indigenous people of Chile and also live in Argentina. Their land lies between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, with temperate rainforests, lakes and volcanoes.

For a long time the Mapuche lived from a mix of small gardens, livestock, fishing and gathering. They cleared and burned a patch of forest for a garden and moved on when the soil was exhausted. What the forest, the coast and the mountains provided was at least as important as the harvest: fruits, nuts, roots, mushrooms, seaweed and wild grains. Spanish chroniclers often overlooked this gathering, because they paid attention mainly to farming.

The Mapuche resisted the Spanish for centuries. After the great uprising of 1598, the land south of the Biobío River remained independent, and the Spanish crown made treaties with them. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did Chile and Argentina conquer their land. The Mapuche were confined to small plots, the reducciones. Moving around was no longer possible, and much of the forest they gathered from disappeared. Their language and medicine were suppressed for a long time.

Yet the medicine survived. The machi, the lawentuchefe and the midwives kept working, often in secret and alongside Chilean health care.

Among the Mapuche, health is called küme mongen: living well, in balance with the community, the land and the spirit world. Illness arises when that balance is disturbed, for example by conflict, by breaking rules about the land, or by evil forces.

The word for medicine is lawen. Many plant names are built with that word and say what the plant is for. Cachanlagua comes from kachanlawen, 'remedy for a stitch in the side'. A small fern is called llushu-lawen, 'remedy for the baby', because mothers covered a newborn's navel with it. Other names describe how a plant looks or grows. Plants that were of no use often got no name of their own: they fell under re-kachu, 'just grass'.

The machi is both healer and spiritual leader. Usually she is a woman. She is seen as someone who has been called, often after an illness or a dream, and she mediates between people and the spirit world. Beside her house stands the rewe, a carved trunk with steps, often with branches of canelo.

The canelo, foye in Mapudungun, is the sacred tree of the Mapuche. It stands for goodness, peace and justice and was planted where people gathered. Maqui and the Chilean laurel are also plants of peace and good intentions. Their branches are taken to gatherings and decorate the rewe.

Plants are not only for illness. There are also remedies for love, for a healthy pregnancy, or for finding out what ails a sick person. These belong to the personal and spiritual side of the tradition.

There are different kinds of healers. The lawentuchefe is a herbalist without the spiritual role of the machi. There are also midwives and bonesetters.

Knowledge of lawen is passed on within families and from teacher to apprentice. A machi learns for years with an experienced machi. She must know which plant, and which part of it, belongs to which complaint, and where and when to pick it.

That knowledge is tied to the landscape. The Mapuche distinguish three zones. Lafkenmapu, the land by the sea, provides fish, shellfish and seaweed such as cochayuyo. Lelfünmapu, the plain, has forests full of fruit and medicinal shrubs. Inapiremapu, the land near the snow in the Andes, is the realm of the monkey puzzle tree, the pewen. The Pewenche, 'people of the pewen', are named after it.

Time, too, was divided by plants. The months were named after what was ripening or sprouting. Pascual Coña, a Mapuche leader who told his life story around 1925, said that in earlier times people really knew only two seasons: the time when there were wild fruits, and the time when they were gone.

The machi also has a ceremony for serious illness, the machitun. In it she tries to find the cause of the illness with drum, song and plants. This belongs to the spiritual side of the tradition and is not described further here.

Mapuche medicine is oral and is passed on in Mapudungun. Spanish chroniclers and later Chilean researchers described plants and practices, mostly from the outside.

An important source is the work of the German Capuchin Ernesto Wilhelm de Moesbach (1882–1963). He came to Chile as a missionary in 1920 and learned Mapudungun. With Pascual Coña he wrote Vida y costumbres de los indígenas araucanos (1930), a life story that Coña told in his own language. In the 1950s Moesbach gathered all the Mapuche plant names he knew in Botánica indígena de Chile: about 750 plants with some 900 Indigenous names. The book only appeared in 1992, edited by the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino. According to the editors, about 70 of these plants are eaten and some 146 are used as medicine.

Moesbach wrote with the outlook of a missionary of his time, and some plant names are now outdated. But his work shows how large and precise the plant knowledge of the Mapuche is.

A remarkable number of scientific plant names come from Mapudungun. In the eighteenth century the Chilean naturalist Juan Ignacio Molina turned them into Latin genus names: Quillaja (soapbark), Peumus (Boldo), Gevuina (the Chilean hazelnut) and Maytenus (Maitén). Later came, among others, Ugni, after uñi (Murta), and Latua, after the poisonous latué.

Since the 1990s the Chilean government has given Indigenous medicine more recognition. The Ministry of Health has a programme for health and Indigenous peoples, and a 2012 law on patients' rights recognises the right of Indigenous peoples to culturally appropriate care.

In the Araucanía region and in cities such as Santiago, machi and herbalists are still at work. There are intercultural health centres and a hospital in Nueva Imperial where Mapuche healers and doctors work side by side, and patients choose for themselves.

Gathering continues too. Every autumn, around April, Pewenche families go to the monkey puzzle forests to collect the seeds, the ngülliw. Beforehand they pray to the old man and the old woman of the pewen, who protect the male and female trees. Cutting down a pewen is forbidden. The seeds are dried, smoked or kept in cold water, so that they stay good for up to a few years. On the coast families still gather seaweed, and markets in the south sell nalca, murta and maqui.

The tradition is under pressure from the loss of land and forest. Large pine and eucalyptus plantations have replaced much of the native forest. With it the lawen that herbalists need are disappearing. Mapuche organisations work to restore land and forest.

The Mapuche use plants from the forest, the fields and the garden. Many are drunk as a tea or decoction, or used as a wash and compress.

Canelo is the most important and sacred tree. Its bark is one of the machi's most used remedies, for fever, wounds and skin complaints. The leaf of Matico, pañil in Mapudungun, is a well-known remedy for wounds and stomach complaints. Culén is a remedy for digestive complaints and Cachanlagua a bitter tea for fever. Maillico is a mountain plant of the machi. The leaf of the Chilean laurel is used for headache, and Chilco as a diuretic and for fever.

For liver and stomach people use Boldo, folo in Mapudungun, and also Peumo, Bailahuén and Natre, a bitter shrub for fever. Pichi serves for the bladder and urinary tract, Radal for coughs and Quinchamalí for wounds and colds. The leaf of Maitén was a remedy for fever and for the rash the litre shrub can cause. Arrayán is used as an astringent. People also use the bark of quillay (soapbark) as soap and for coughs, paico (Epazote) for stomach ache and cedrón (lemon verbena) as a calming tea. Even plantain, which came with the Europeans, got a name of its own: 'the foreigners' plantain'.

The forest was also a larder. The seeds of the monkey puzzle tree were a staple food. The berries of Maqui, Murta and the Chilean strawberry were eaten fresh, dried for winter or made into a fermented drink, muday. The stalks of Nalca are peeled and eaten raw, and the root gives a black dye. In the past people also grew a grain of their own, mangu, a kind of brome. When wheat arrived it fell out of use, and now it has all but disappeared.

Some plants are dangerous and belong only in the hands of experienced healers, such as Palqui, Tupa and above all latué, the 'tree of the sorcerers', which is deadly poisonous.

Much of the machi's knowledge is spiritual and not meant to be used apart from the community. Ceremonies are not a tourist attraction. For that reason nothing is said here about the use of latué and other poisonous plants.

What has been written about Mapuche plants comes largely from outsiders, such as missionaries and researchers. Their descriptions are valuable, but they render the knowledge through their own lens. The knowledge itself belongs to the Mapuche.

The Mapuche are still in conflict with the state and companies over their land. Anyone who reads about their medicine also reads about that struggle: without land and forest the plants disappear, and with them the knowledge. The monkey puzzle tree is protected by law in Chile and is an endangered species; do not pick or buy plants from wild forests without knowing where they come from.