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This chapter analyzes the process of colonization of the Mapuche people as they were forced into the Chilean State and capitalist political economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through a critical reading of archival sources and oral history, we review in detail the effects that colonization produced in the context of the political and territorial sovereignty of the Mapuche people, which includes converting them into minorities, the obliteration, eradication, and persecution of the use of Mapuchezugun (language of the Mapuche people) and Mapuche kimün (Mapuche knowledge), linked to racial subordination within the social interactions of subsequent generations in what we term "civilizing spaces." The argument developed in this chapter is that colonial violence against the Mapuche people, their language, ontology, and epistemology is part of the historical project of dispossession and genocide against indigenous peoples. Far from being passive subjects, the Mapuche people have displayed diverse forms of resistance, negotiation and response, and a struggle for life facing a project of death represented by colonization.

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