WHOLE VOL. ARAUCANIAN CHILD LIFE — HILGER 1 79 



The author of the above summary comes to the conclusion that the 

 legal problem to be dealt with should be one of "reforming" the an- 

 cestral communities based on collective ownership rather than their 

 "division" or "liquidation" ; that the solution to the question of private 

 initiative in Indian agriculture should be found without damage to 

 the perpetuity of the ancestral community ; that this could possibly be 

 achieved by admitting the coexistence of a share in collective owner- 

 ship and of a small private holding by the same person ; that coordina- 

 tion of the fundamental law of an Indian Office with that regulating 

 the activities of the community is desirable. (Lipschiitz, 1948, pp. 

 321-326.) 



Because of the Chilean law regarding inheritance of land, care is 

 now taken, when an Araucanian child's name is recorded in public or 

 permanent records, that the names of parents, too, are recorded. 

 Often, too, today parents insist that records show the father's given 

 name as the child's surname — the father having no surname to give 

 to the child (cf. pp. 40-41). Where no written information is avail- 

 able regarding the child's lineage, as was formerly the case, signatures 

 of persons who know the parentage of a child (now an adult) must be 

 obtained for legal and other documents. Because of this parents often 

 come to the Mission requesting that their names be inserted near their 

 children's in old baptismal records. A 50-year-old woman asked 

 Father Sigifredo, who had known her family for as many years, to 

 sign a Government document testifying to the death of her husband 

 and to the parentage of her 30-year-old son: "My son needs your 

 signature in order to get the land that rightfully belongs to him and 

 that his father wanted him to have." Also the custom of substituting 

 a child's name with a second name during childhood has practically 

 died out; parents have learned that there is less confusion about in- 

 heritance if a person is known by only one name during his lifetime. 

 (Cf. pp. 37-38.) 



AGRICULTURE AND HORTICULTURE 



Informants older than 50 years of age remembered the days when 

 seeds of wild grass were harvested — a time when every family already 

 raised wheat in natural glades. Seeds collected were those of quinoa, 

 yerba vinagrillo, mango, and lanko kachu. An occasional family culti- 

 vated quinoa. All these grasses are now nearly extinct. "Maybe you 

 can find lanko on the pampa still ; formerly the pampa was overgrown 

 with it. My father-in-law (older than 100 years) told me last evening 

 that when he was young several families would set out to collect 

 quinoa or lanko kachu. Each family took along several pelts of the 



