Safeguarding Indigenous Heritage in the Chilean Atacama Desert: Negotiating Identity Claims and Community Perceptions of Long-term Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change has become the largest threat to cultural heritage in the twenty-first century. While it is known that the world’s most vulnerable populations, including Indigenous peoples, will disproportionately face the effects of climate change, there is less knowledge of the wider cultural frameworks that influence Indigenous understandings of climate change. This article seeks to understand the local perceptions of natural and anthropogenic climate change and its impact on heritage among contemporary indigenous or originario peoples in small oases in the Atacama Desert of Chile’s Tarapacá region. Theories from critical heritage studies are used to explore the impacts of both anthropogenic and natural climate change on what is understood as Indigenous heritage. The authors examine how these changes have intersected with national and regional socio-political events in the past century to impact contemporary Indigenous identities in the communities of Pica and Matilla. Semi-structured interviews and oral histories were discontinuously conducted between March 2016 and April 2018 and included lay Aymara and Quechua community members as well as the representatives of local organizations such as Neighbour Councils and Indigenous Development Areas (ADIs) in the communities. These accounts illustrate how recent climate change is being used as a rhetorical device to facilitate the revitalization and regeneration of local ethnicities in northern Chile today. Furthermore, the article demonstrates the value of originario knowledge in understanding the nuances of local cultural context and how essential it is in the implementation of environmental and heritage policies in the wider Chilean context.

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