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William E. Skuban, Joanna Crow. The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1575–1576, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1575
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In this ambitious study, Joanna Crow explains how the cultural and political initiatives of a wide array of Mapuche protagonists have articulated historically with the cultural policies and indigenous rights legislation of the Chilean state. Her book is one of the few long-term studies in English of Mapuche-state relations in Chile that underscores both the diversity of indigenous responses to internal colonialism and the various ways the Mapuche have experienced the Chilean state at the local level. The Mapuche who populate Crow's history are actively engaged in negotiating the parameters of an evolving relationship with the Chilean state. For Crow, what lies at the heart of this relationship for most Mapuche is a strongly felt sense of difference that ultimately defines “what it has meant and means ‘to be Mapuche’ in modern Chile” (p. 9).
Crow's evidentiary base primarily consists of a wide range of cultural forms, including poetry, popular song, collections of oral testimony, theater, ethnographic studies, photographs, public monuments of legendary Mapuche heroes, and museum exhibits. She analyzes these forms of cultural discourse to penetrate the web of meanings that constitute Mapuche identity, understanding that cultural production cannot be divorced from political activism in the face of a highly centralized Chilean state. Consequently, Mapuche and non-Mapuche Chilean political leaders and intellectuals, as well as the shifting state agenda on the “indigenous question,” loom large in her analysis and propel her chronological narrative.
