Collective Healings from Wallmapu in Creative Mapuche Spirits

Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology, UConn)

with a response by Harry van der Hulst (Linguistics, UConn)

Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 3:30pm, Virtual

This virtual event will include automated captioning.

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This talk explores the role of contemporary Mapuche art in healing colonial trauma. Understanding colonial trauma as a historical and transgenerational process that continues to produce violence through modern state structures, the research proposes indigenous art as a decolonial methodology capable of transforming narratives of defeat into stories of dignity and resistance.

Based on the work of four renowned Mapuche creators—a jeweler, two visual artists, and a weaver—the talk analyzes creative experiences that not only rescue memory and traditional knowledge but also generate new forms of political and cultural representation. Art is conceived here as a means of collective healing, in which healing goes beyond the individual dimension to include territories, spiritualities, and intergenerational bonds.

From this perspective, indigenous art becomes a practice of re-existence and affirmation of autonomy, allowing for the restoration of Küme Mongen (Good Living) and opening spaces for historical, cultural, and spiritual reparation for the Mapuche people.

Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta is a Fulbright scholar of Mapuche origin who is currently a PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She has a master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Oaxaca, Mexico. Catalina has worked in public service as a manager of health programs for the indigenous population in Chile, and she has worked as an academic at universities in Chile. Alvarado-Cañuta’s main focus is on colonial trauma and the processes of collective healings of indigenous peoples, and indigenous art as a decolonial methodology. Her latest co-authored work is the chapter “Trig Metawe: Restoring the cracks of dispossession for Küme Mongen,” in which she and Mapuche artist Francisco Huichaqueo analyze the plundering of Mapuche archaeological heritage distributed among museums in Chile and around the world as part of the processes that generate Colonial Trauma and how its possible restitution or accompaniment to Mapuche archaeological heritage contributes to the restitution of the collective well-being of Mapuche people. Alvarado- Cañuta is an activist scholar who maintains family ties with her Mapuche community in Ercilla, where she is the community coordinator for Mapuche heritage restitution issues. She is currently a member of the Buen Vivir and Collective Healings Initiative, a research group that uses participatory action methodologies led by Dr. César Abadía-Barrero at the University of Connecticut. Catalina has recently taken on the role of Co-Coordinator of the Abiayala Working Group section of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

Harry van der Hulst (PhD 1984, Leiden University, Netherlands) specializes in phonology (of spoken and signed languages). He has published 5 books, over 180 articles, (co-)edited 32 books and 6 journal theme issues, among them The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony (with Nancy Ritter) in 2024. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Linguistic Review. He is professor of linguistics at the University of Connecticut. His most recent books include, Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony – A Representational Account (Oxford, 2018); Radical CV Phonology – A Theory of Segmental and Syllabic Structure (Edinburgh, 2020), A Mind for Language (Cambridge, 2024) and Genes, Brains and Evolution (Cambridge, forthcoming).

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible