Indigenous People, Economic Development, and Conservation in Nahuel Huapi National Park, Argentina (1900-1946)

• In Event: Environmentalism Without Justice: Popular Discontent with State Environmental Regulation in Argentina and the US

Abstract

Situated in a dazzling alpine location in northern Argentine Patagonia, Nahuel Huapi National Park is one of the crown jewels of the country’s conservation efforts. As in countless other locations around the world, the costs of conservation largely fell on the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. This paper will consider the relationship of Indigenous Mapuche communities to conservation efforts in the Nahuel Huapi region and the thoroughly ambivalent results the park has had for them as a case study for understanding cultural survival and the preservation of Indigenous knowledge. As I will show, efforts to found an Indigenous agricultural colony during the 1910s were hamstrung by international ranching interests which were in turn displaced by the establishment of the national park in 1934. On terms contested vociferously by these communities, conservation simultaneously precluded many traditional aspects of Mapuche environmental activity and provided the economic means for rural communities to remain stable during the agricultural crisis of the 1930s.

Author

• Rob Christensen, New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs