The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina's Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History ed. by Carolyne Larson (review)

Reviewed by: The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina's Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History ed. by Carolyne Larson Alberto Harambour The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina's Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History By Carolyne Larson (ed. ). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020, p. 277, 29. 95. This book's title may lead to serious misunderstandings. Its first part, "the Conquest of the Desert" should be put in quotation marks. Since the second half of the 19th century, that is literally the name of the military campaign against the indigenous sovereignties that extended to the West and South of the province of Buenos Aires. One of the book's aims is to discuss Argentina´s numerous founding myths involving those critical expeditions for its state-building process, especially the long lasting ones that proclaimed the end of the indigenous agencies in La Pampa and northern Patagonia. And the book is rather successful in contributing to deconstruct those dominant narratives of civilizational frontier-taming. The second part of the title may also lead to a misunderstanding. The book is a great piece of U. S. - and Argentina-based academic scholarship, with eight professional historians, an anthropologist, a sociologist, and a professor of Spanish producing nine articles that deal with a number of different aspects of the continuously disputed experiences, narratives, and interpretations on and of the "Conquest of the Desert. " But there are no indigenous authors in Argentina's Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History, while the book rightfully aims to demonstrate that the battles have been multiple and are increasingly fought. Though there are very active new (and not so new) generations of Mapuche historians and anthropologists, they are not even quoted. There is no single mention to the important of Pablo Marimán, Héctor Nahuelpán, Fernando Pairicán, or Jimena Pichinao. Independent local researchers like as Pedro Cayuqueo, Martín Correa, or Adrián Moyano do not get any mention either, despite being just some of the many researchers and organizations who have been shifting the traditional political and historiographical debates on the so-called Conquest. Nineteenth-century imaginaries produced by the Argentinean state—including the Army, the Executive, Legislative and the Judiciary powers—produced and reproduced by the influential liberal-conservative ethnography and historiography, are seriously revisited here. The authors get into some crucial sources and loci of narration, to turning them and new materials into necessary recognitions of old and new indigenous repertoires of resilience. Departing from the interstices of the official story (Larson) to visit again the recurrent topics of mainstream frontier literature (Daniels), the patrimonialization of the living Indian in the infamous La Plata Museum (Salvatore), or some current indigenous cartographies (Warren), the book is able to connect those apparently separate focal points with the somehow abstract civic-military historical narrative. In its isolation, an innovative approach by Christensen brings climatic End Page 169 phenomena and foreign diseases to the explanations of the defeat of the Indian—here considered as "easily swept aside". If "indigenous perspectives" barely appear, there are two notable exceptions are the chapters by Vezub and Healey dealing with indigenous strategies of resistance as stated by themselves through individual and communitarian memories, testimonies, and reports. As the authors demonstrate, indigenous political action by both peaceful and military means pervades the official tale of a complete demise of indigenous agencies. The different tactics and phases of the genocidal strategy are further analyzed by Delrio and Perez, for whom the multiple forms of struggle displayed by communities and supracommunal organizations through the 20th and 21st century are the demonstration of the unfulfilled wish of total eradication. From a different standpoint, Ramos' chapter examines Mapuche memories through the nütram—oral and written memories incarnated in particular performances where violence is spoken and silenced, listened to and enacted on as an articulated memory—with the poetics of nutrum as a familiar, "national" historiography. The trope of the never-ended, never-ending conquest is also addressed by Sheinin´s article, which describes and analyzes the last Argentinean dictatorship's (1976–1983) policies and discourses around the commemoration of the Campaign´s centennial, coincidental with the peak. . .