There is currently a political struggle for the Mapuche and the government of Chile, and to an extent, Argentina.
The History
This photo was taken in 2017 in the Municipalidad De Peñalolén and is part of a series on Flickr.
After Chile declared independence from Spain, the Mapuche began returning to their ancestral lands. As mentioned previously, they had been somewhat scattered in a successful effort to thwart Spanish conquest and maintain their culture and civilizations. However, this 300 year game of cat and mouse, otherwise known as the Arauco War, was not over just because the Spanish had picked up and went home unsuccessful. The government of Chile began to see what profits could be made off of the Mapuche lands, and therefore started large scale movements which began to relocate all of the Mapuche onto reservations. To give one estimate for scale, the original land that had always belonged to the Mapuche once numbered around 100,000 square kilometers, otherwise, the size of Portugal. The reservations that they were moved to were more so around 5,000 square kilometers now. Leaders of the Mapuche community believe that restoration needs to be repaid to the Mapuche, primarily in officially giving their land back to them. Over the years, traditional Mapuche communities have started returning to their old homes, only to find that new people are on their lands, and there is suddenly no room for them. They argue that the government cannot give away their lands, titles and homes, but the government comes back saying the land never truly belonged to them in the first place, but rather to Chile as a whole. Upon removing the Mapuche from their communities, something else the Chilean government did was give all of the Mapuche citizenship, claiming this was all that was really needed for them to have a successful integration into society, neglecting all of the other issues that come along with an indigenous community being forced off of their lands.