176 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL, I33 



market for sale. Such land is called kiiie mapu. Anyone wishing 

 to do SO today, as formerly, will clear a portion of the common land, 

 cultivate it or graze his animals upon it, and thereby claim it, as 

 already stated. A non-Araucanian Alepue herbalist had heard children 

 say, "My father cleared that piece and that piece and that piece [point- 

 ing at cleared areas on mountain sides], and that is why we own all 

 that land." Clearing was, and is, done by burning (pi. i, j). 



No one appropriates exclusive rights, however, to lands on which 

 the araucaria grows — a pine, the nuts of which are a traditional staple 

 food (cf. p. 205). The same holds true for banks of rivers from which 

 fishing is done, for the shores of the Pacific where seafoods are gath- 

 ered, and for coves on the Pacific coast where fishing boats are landed 

 and docked. 



A Conaripe man explained the acquisition of communal lands by 

 individuals thus: "Much land in Cofiaripe area, which includes also 

 the land in the area known as Lliuco, has not been assigned ; it is all 

 still owned in common. We still have about 5,000 hectares [12,000 

 acres, approximately] of such land up in the mountains. The Chileans 

 call land owned in common, comuna ; the Mapuche call it kifie mapu. 

 Fathers of families do not know how much of it should belong to each 

 of them. Anybody from this area has the right to clear a piece of land 

 on which clearing has not already been begun. By that I mean my 

 neighbor, for instance, would not begin to clear or claim land near a 

 place where I had begun a clearing, nor would I clear a piece of land 

 near his. This is done so that people can eventually add land to that 

 which is near their homes. Once the land is cleared and cultivated 

 everyone knows to whom it belongs, and its ownership is marked off 

 on the cacique's chart. Everybody always cultivates the same land, but 

 not every piece of that land each year ; he lets one piece after another 

 lie fallow for a year. Before I married, I lived on the other side of 

 the river with my brother, and I cleared a piece of land there, and I 

 own that land now. The father of the woman I married had given 

 her a piece of his land — land that he had been cultivating. When we 

 married, we built our ruka on that land, for my land could only be 

 reached by crossing the river. My wife owns her land by right of radi- 

 cacion [an expression used by Chileans, meaning rights associated with 

 birthplace, habitat, or ancestral rights of ownership] and I own 

 mine across the river by the same right and in addition to that by the 

 right of clearing it [the former a Chilean right, the latter, an Arau- 

 canian one]. Radicacion was recently applied to Araucanians ; it gives 

 a woman the right to own land. It was introduced when I was about 

 as old as he [5 years old, approximately, in 1901]. Formerly, only sons 



