Introduction
In 1865, 153 Welsh migrants boarded the ship Mimosa, bound for the ChubutFootnote 1 valley in Patagonia (Argentina) where they would establish the Welsh colony, Y Wladfa Gymreig, following agreement with the Argentine government. There they encountered nomadic Tehuelche and Pampa indigenous communities who understood the land to be theirs.Footnote 2 Over the next 20 years a peaceful trading and social relationship developed between the two communities which was often labelled ‘friendship’ by the Welsh. This colonial encounter contrasts in many ways to more typically violent engagements at the Argentine frontierFootnote 3 and as such it offers a fresh perspective on settler/indigenous relationships in Patagonia, and beyond. It defies the easy caricatures of binaried thinking and encourages us to understand both the coloniser and the colonised as actors in a complex social world. Notions of indigenous isolation and passivity are being comprehensively dismantled by current scholarship and contested by indigenous activism, both of which fundamentally undermine the assumptions which underpin the binary. But it is also necessary to scrutinise and unpack simplistic assumptions about the settler element of the colonial story too.Footnote 4 Doing so complicates our thinking and thus generates a more nuanced interpretation of colonial relations. Here I argue that the Welsh example demonstrates how the global reach of racialised ideas placed the Welsh in the complex position of being both the subject and the agent of colonial domination. This matters not only for the historical record, but also, as I suggest in the conclusion, because the myth of friendship is a powerful contemporary discourse in both Wales and the province of Chubut which serves to justify this ‘soft’ colonialism. Complicating that friendship by framing it in wider dynamics of colonial thinking, allows us to detect the ways that such seemingly harmless myths might act politically to delegitimise indigenous resistance.Footnote 5 That is, it exposes the highly political consequences of foregrounding friendship.
The research confirms that this friendship was not a mere rhetorical device, but had its roots in genuine and enduring relationships based on dependency and gratitude, reciprocal exchange, and mutual benefit.Footnote 6 While Welsh thinking was shaped by nineteenth-century tropes such as civilisation/barbarism, such ideas were challenged on an everyday basis by the reality of interaction with the indigenous peoples who came to trade with the colony. Indeed, the Welsh sought to defend indigenous autonomy from the Argentine military, motivated not only by a desire to maintain profitable trade, but also an affinity for their freedom and way of life. The limits of such affinities and friendships became all too obvious, though, in the face of the violence and racialised oppression brought by General Vinnter and his troops as part of the Conquest of the Desert. It points to the fragility of ambiguous relations when faced by the juggernaut of capitalist modernity, exposing their incapacity then, and now, to smooth over the injustices of colonial relations.
My research uses a wide range of sources, diaries, journals, reminiscences, newspaper articles and reports, to build a broad picture of Welsh and indigenous relations during the first 20 years or so of the colony. It is not surprising, but still worth mentioning, that none of the sources available for this period are written by women. Generally, the diaries are sparse documents charting expeditions, noting campsites, routes and leagues marched, horses, hunting for food, weather and people encountered. The journals are parallel accounts of expeditions and provide more detail; they are not dated, but appear to be written contemporaneously or shortly after these expeditions. The reminiscences, in contrast, are typically written 20 years or so after the events they describe and with an eye to entertainment. They are often drafts for (sometimes unwritten) books, notes or scripts for lectures and provide rich detail of encounters and opinions, but are obviously shaped by hindsight and nostalgia. I consulted a range of newspapers; in Patagonia, Ein Breiniad (1878–89) reported news and also reprinted items from Y Brut, a pamphlet newspaper which ran to six issues in 1868, as well as relevant issues of Y Drafod which ran from 1891 onwards. I also came across writings by Welsh settlers in Argentine newspapers such as the English-language Buenos Aires Standard and looked at Welsh newspapers which reported on the settlement (e.g. Herald Cymraeg) and reprinted letters from Chubut settlers. Finally, a number of detailed reports were written for the British government by sea captains visiting the settlement en route from the Falkland Islands.
It is important to note that all these sources are written by Europeans whose voice concerning this relationship is over-privileged. Important oral history projects have begun which attempt to capture indigenous experience of the mid- to late nineteenth century in Patagonia.Footnote 7 However, relations with the Welsh do not figure in such accounts which naturally focus on the social turmoil and war which engulfed indigenous communities with the arrival of the Argentine military. Similarly the valuable collections of letters now emerging provide fascinating insight and clear (male, elite) indigenous voices which resonate in the previous silences, but they tend to chart indigenous engagement with the Argentine state, rather than with the Welsh.Footnote 8 A few letters written by indigenous leaders to the Welsh do exist, but only because they were kept and reproduced by Europeans; one is translated (presumably from Spanish) and reprinted in a report written for the Foreign Secretary, the Earl of Clarendon by Mr Watson, Secretary to Her Majesty's Legation who went to visit the colony on HMS Triton;Footnote 9 the others are noted by Lewis Jones, leader of the Welsh colony (translated from an unknown original language into Welsh).Footnote 10 Capturing indigenous voices and views of the Welsh proves to be elusive and it limits our capacity to really explore the relationship. For that reason this article cannot be an even-handed assessment of the relationship but rather it is an analysis of the Welsh settler view. Indigenous perspectives largely remain a pregnant, but not passive, silence.
I interpreted the texts through a perspective inspired by the Latin American ‘coloniality of power’ scholarship. I approach this literature not as a set of truths but rather as a series of approaches and questions that we can ask of conventional interpretations of history and international politics. Starting with the premise that colonialism is the silent yet integral component of modernity (and capitalism), the work of Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo shows how ‘Latin America’ was, and is today, shaped by global hierarchies of race, knowledge and labour which assume the superiority of Eurocentric ways of knowing and being in the world. First, the work of Quijano helps to identify the hidden assumptions about race, extraction and civilisation which shape patterns of powerfulness and subordination in the Americas.Footnote 11 Mignolo developed this perspective, first by making explicit the linkage between hierarchies of knowledge and hierarchies of raceFootnote 12 and second by exploring further the global reach of the coloniality of power.Footnote 13 While the particularity of the (Latin) American experience should not be simply subsumed within the wider rubric of postcolonial studies, this global perspective opens opportunities to identify resonances and connections in widely different places.Footnote 14 Other scholars such as Nelson Maldonado Torres and Santiago Castro-Gómez trace the way in which lived experiences of colonialism and racial injustice impact on ordinary people and reproduces the coloniality of power at the micro level.Footnote 15 Their work urges us to look at ordinary people's lives in order to discern the complex ways in which the ambiguous power relations of the everyday are shaped by ideas and dynamics with a global reach, such as ‘natural’ racial hierarchies, capitalism and liberal thought. It is clear, however, that such theorists would not have begun to think such thoughts without the explosion of indigenous political movements across the Americas, especially after the quincentennial anniversary mobilisations of 1992.Footnote 16 Such movements, even in less headline-grabbing places like Patagonia, have played a key role in generating significant legislative and social change as communities fight for land and rights, and assert their dignity.Footnote 17 While indigenous communities are undoubtedly the protagonists of such struggle, academics also have a role to play in attempting to shift thinking at the core and about the core of knowledge and power.
A key site of such academic activity is settler studies. Settler studies scholarship in the United States and Australia has begun the process of disentangling the imperial ambitions and global dynamics of colonialism and the more ambiguous experiences of lived colonisation.Footnote 18 Such work seeks to foreground the complexities of indigenous settler relations with an eye to processes of transculturation and affinity, as well as settler responses to indigenous resistance.Footnote 19 While such work is highly revealing, there is a continued need to foreground the coloniality of power within the settler colony and the way in which racial hierarchies are used to justify both violent interventions and the everyday erasures of indigenous peoples.Footnote 20
With this tool-kit in mind, I approached the Welsh archive looking for relationships of power, framed especially by motifs of civilisation and barbarism, and dominant ideas concerning power, race and knowledge (thinking about these both in Patagonia and in Wales). I also called to mind the global flows and connections of capitalism and empire which circulated, not only as Western ideas and policies but also as flows of money, goods and migrants.Footnote 21 Yet the archive always presented me with the breathing people caught up in these global dynamics, their human relationships and responses and the possibilities, not only of racism and violence but also of exchange, dependency and affinity. So now, let us take these people, the settlers and the indigenous, seriously and leap into the empirical material and Patagonian life in 1865.
Encounter: Cacique Francisco and his Wife Ride into Trerawson
A sense of the colonists' daily lives, and the significance of the indigenous arrival, is reflected in the sparse diary of one colonist, Richard Ellis:
Got married on 13 April 1865;
Left Liverpool for Patagonia on bark Mimosa, May 18th; …;
Nov 8th Managed to get first cow
Nov 13th Churned the first time; …;
March 17th [1866] Present of a daughter Mary Anne …;
April 19th First visit by two Indians;
24th The [‘Indian’] family encamped y Plas Heddwch
On March 2nd and 3rd and 4th planted seeds
On 12th Brother J and self killed a pumaFootnote 22
The Welsh had been in Chubut for around nine months when the first encounter occurred. This moment is captured in the reminiscences of many settlers, but the most detailed account is Richard Berwyn's who witnessed the event. However, we should read the text (written 20 years after the event) less as a factual account than as the iteration of a myth telling a happy story of anxiety, relief and friendship.
Early in the day, when Rhydderch Huws … had just brought his horse to go and see the [double] weddings [in the settlement], he spied two horsemen, strange-looking, coming from the direction of open country. … The brodor [natives]Footnote 23 approached … the Welshman stood empty-handed – but the women behind the door each held a tool – axe, pole, pitchfork – ready to face these two’.Footnote 24
It is not surprising that the Welsh settlers were fearful because this encounter was pre-steeped in stories of the savage ‘other’. The Welsh were well accustomed to the idea of ‘savage Indians’, especially in the light of experiences in the United States reported in the newspapers and probably recounted first-hand by one of the settlers, Edwyn C. Roberts, who was from Oshkosh, Wisconsin.Footnote 25 W. Casnodyn Rhys, for example, explains that ‘they had read about the Patagonian Indians – big men, veritable giants and cannibals’Footnote 26 in the Welsh press. Novels too played a role; Jonathan Ceredig Davies heard a noise one night ‘[while] reading Robinson Crusoe … [and] I was perturbed at the thought that some wild Indians might come at any moment from the camp [open country] and kill me’ (the noise turned out to be a puma in the chicken run).Footnote 27 Moreover, in a letter from William Hughes to Michael D. Jones (the intellectual and financial founder of the settlement), he compares Jones' observations on Patagonia to Henry Morton Stanley's account of his African journeys in Through the Dark Continent. Footnote 28
The Welsh had been granted permission to colonise the Chubut Valley by President Guillermo Rawson who supported their colony with the promise of legal title to an extensive territory and an agreement to supply food, water, animals and building materials to the colonists to help them get established. They were to settle an area in the centre of indigenous-controlled territory; the nearest fortified town of Patagones was hundreds of miles away. Argentina had gained independence in 1810 but the government had paid little attention to Patagonia until this point, absorbed as it was in the violent political struggle between Federalists and Unitarians, and also in resolving Argentina's borders in the River Plate region. With these issues largely resolved and liberal elites controlling government, attention turned to expanding state control of the interior and extending state jurisdiction to the south.Footnote 29 Central to this mission was the desire to implant civilisation in the form of European settlers in territories made barbaric by the indigenous nomads who claimed them as their homeland. In this sense, the Welsh both embodied and enacted the Argentina's colonising-civilising project.
The Welsh settlement was framed, then, by the discourses of nineteenth-century colonialism which shaped their very presence as a colony, as well as everyday thinking about ‘Indians’. Welsh confidence in European superiority was thus tinged with the fear of indigenous barbarity; it was this which led the women to hide with axe in hand. However, the relationships which developed after the encounter were far more complex.
The possibility of friendship
Berwyn's story of the encounter continues:
‘Weno ddias’ (‘Good Day’ – Spanish)
‘Bono Dias’ responded the Welshman, both of them pronouncing wrongly, though each in his own way. They then shook hands warmly… The brodor said a long ribbon of words that his listeners did not understand a word of. He spoke in Spanish … Through sign language they got on better …, and soon the Indian … indicat[ed] that he was hungry. They held out a cup of water and a piece of bread and butter.Footnote 30
There was a double wedding that day, with some of the celebrants dressed in official army-type uniforms. Edwyn Roberts had organised a militia which had been set up in defence against fears of marauding ‘Indians’, furnished with guns bought in Liverpool and also supplied by the Argentine army. As the indigenous couple, accompanied by two Welshmen, rode onwards they heard celebratory gun shots and shouts of ‘Hooray’:
The Indians stared and they went pale… they saw an armed rider in full military outfit galloping to meet them. They cried ‘Y Lachy! Y Lachy! Galylê! Galylê!’ …
[The wedding party then saw them and shouted] ‘They have come, the Indians have come!’…
… two [Welshmen] went to shake the hand of the first [indigenous person] and to greet them. ‘Bono dias amigo’.Footnote 31
While the Welsh were nervous because they imagined these ‘Indians’ to be savage, for the indigenous the sound of gun shots and military uniforms were rooted in bitter experience of violence.
Even as late as 1865, indigenous groups controlled fully half of the Argentine territory, especially in the south (Patagonia), the west (towards the Andes) and in the far north (Chaco).Footnote 32 However, the expansion of settlements and vast ranches into these indigenous homelands created tensions between indigenous and settler communities which became increasingly violent. Aggressive colonising incursions and broken treaties generated indigenous attacks or malones against ranches and settlements, sometimes leading to organised resistance on the part of indigenous alliances.Footnote 33 The Argentine military pushed the indigenous westwards and southwards in order to establish state rule across the Argentine territory, claiming and engendering the nation-state. This de facto war, known as the ‘Conquest of the Desert’, swept indigenous communities off their homelands and imprisoned and killed all those who mounted resistance.Footnote 34
This policy of cultural and racial elimination and capitalist appropriation vividly reveals, as Patrick Wolfe suggests, the presence of a genocidal logic within settler colonisation; that is, colonisation moves beyond resource appropriation to demand the imposition of Western modes of thinking and being.Footnote 35 The ‘Conquest of the Desert’ was a war of genocide and colonisation, which simultaneously sought to identify, destroy and recreate an internal ‘other’, as Claudia Briones puts it, whose presence inside the nation was necessary as an emblem of barbarism. The Argentine state could then eradicate this internal other (sometimes using ‘Indian’ fighters whose leaders sought advantage by fighting for the governmentFootnote 36 ) and prove the legitimacy of its colonising project; it was the supposed erasure of the indigenous ‘barbarian’ which branded Argentina as modern.Footnote 37 As Papazian and Nagy's work reveals, those who survived the genocidal onslaught were sent to concentration camps, from where they were shipped off to fulfil an appropriate economic role in the burgeoning capitalist economy of Argentina; men were hauled to the sugar plantations of the north while the women and children were sent to Buenos Aires to work as servants.Footnote 38 Thus, colonial oppression was completed by assimilation, while the ‘internal other’ persisted as a despised and subordinate object of state policies.Footnote 39
While the Conquest of the Desert was yet to arrive in the Chubut Valley of 1866, knowledge of what was occurring to the north had spread, and it is far from surprising that the ‘two Indians’ might have looked pale and distressed when they heard the wedding party's gun shots.Footnote 40 Indeed something of this colonialist approach existed within the Welsh colony, as reported by both William PhillipsFootnote 41 and Berwyn, who continues thus:
One of the main officers of the colony came forward and said ‘Well I think that we have had enough of looking at the wild animals now. I think that it is time to draw an end to the preaching and bring these two along at once and put an end to them. They are just robbers and spies, and they came here just to spy on behalf of a swarm of other savages. Kill them both!’
‘I will not do that’ said one. …
‘The face of this man’ added another ‘is not that of a savage killer. Let us show more courage and more of our Christian nature than rushing to take the life of an old man and his wife’.
Everyone agreed with this. … In this way we laid the foundations of friendship.’Footnote 42
This founding myth of the Welsh ‘friendship’ with the indigenous peoples of Patagonia is a central motif of identity, not only for the Welsh (both in Wales and in Patagonia)Footnote 43 but also for the region of Chubut which has taken this story to its heart as a way of articulating today's official multicultural Argentine identity.Footnote 44 Understanding this relationship as one of friendship is important because it justifies the colonial project, erasing the violence and injustices of displacement, and marking the moments and practices of settlement as legitimate. Of course, exercising generosity and mercy is indeed far more benign than killing, concentration camps and forced exile, and the Welsh might indeed be lauded for their peaceable impulses in a global context of colonial brutality. However, this does not obviate Welsh appropriation of indigenous lands, nor does it eliminate the colonial/racial hierarchies of power within this relationship.
This becomes clear when we recognise the ‘noble savage’ discourse within Welsh thinking which is iterated neatly by W. Casnodyn Rhys. He recalls that founding moment when a policy of friendship was chosen, and (repeatedly) quotes this phrase: ‘let us treat the Indians as we treat each other and even extend to them, as we do to children, the leniency due to ignorance’.Footnote 45 Rhys' formulation indicates that while the Welsh ‘officially’ recognised the full presence of the indigenous as agents, they were nevertheless of lower rank. Thus the statement promotes respect for the ‘other’ based on human equality, ‘let us treat the Indians as we treat each other’, but that equality is one of practice (‘treat’) but not one of regard or dignity. To compound this veiled subordination he asserts the need for exceptional indulgence, ‘even extend to them, as we do to children, the leniency due to ignorance’, a move which asserts Welsh dominance as civilised beings. They do so by assuming their own advancement on the path of history which is reinforced by drawing comparison to children, thus compounding that subordination with infantilisation.Footnote 46 For example, for Rhys the ‘aborigenes’ are ‘shy and simple children of nature whose ancestors long ago passed out of the sweep of ancient civilisation, relegating their offspring to habits and modes of life that were getting more and more out of touch with the march of intellect and human progress’.Footnote 47 Moreover, such ideas were enacted in everyday relationships and practices, as this anecdote reveals:
At first the thievish propensities of the Indians were very trying to put up with. Very much like children they would pick up articles such as spoons, knives etc. and, concealing them in the ample folds of their mantles, march out of a house with the spoil. The colonists soon found a remedy for this propensity. They would good humouredly take hold of the mantle as they went out and shake it well. As the articles fell to the ground the Indians and the colonists would laugh together over the discovery.Footnote 48
Thus equality was a superficial performance, underpinned by the certainties of European civilisation on the one hand and shrewd people-management on the other; Rhys adds: ‘You would treat the whole thing in the light of a joke and create a little merriment and would guard against the least sign of a vindictive spirit.’Footnote 49 The fear of quixotic savagery, and the disdain it merits, remains vivid.
These stories of merry neighbours, while laden with condescension, offer a preferable contrast to experiences of exploitation, massacre and imprisonment, and it seems that the indigenous also appreciated this contrast in treatment. The Englishman George C. Musters (who travelled with various indigenous groups in the region) recounts that in the opinion of Hinchel's people ‘the honest Welsh colonists were much pleasanter and safer to deal with than “the Christians” [Argentines] of Rio Negro. … [Cacique] Jackechan often expatiated on the liberality of the colonists and the goodness of their bread. These men also felt strongly the kindness with which an Indian, if overtaken with rum, would be covered up or carried into an out-house by the Chupat people; whereas at Rio Negro the only attention paid to him would be to strip and plunder him completely’.Footnote 50 It was perhaps this contrast in treatment which generated good feeling; whether they felt at times the sting of Welsh disdain might be imagined, but goes unreported.
The possibility of affinity
One fascinating and important document that brings the indigenous voice to this history is the letter sent to Lewis Jones (leader of the Welsh settlement) by the indigenous leader Cacique Antonio who dictated the letter to the Swiss naturalist, Claraz:Footnote 51
To Mr Jones, Superintendent of the Colony of Chupat.
Tschetschgoo, December 8, 1865.
Without having the pleasure of knowing you personally, I know as a fact that you are peopling the Chupat with a people from the other side of the sea. … Now I say that the plains between the Chupat and the Rio Negro are ours and that we never sold them. Our father sold the plains of Bahia Blanca and Patagones, but nothing more. I am the Cacique of the tribe of Pampa Indians to whom belong the plains of the Chupat. … I know very well that you have negotiated with the Government to colonise the Chupat but you ought also to negotiate with us who are the owners of these lands.
But never mind my friend, I and my people are not accustomed to rob like the Chileno Indians. Our plains have plenty of guanacos and plenty of ostriches. … our property that were given to us by our God, the God of the Indians. … I have arranged with my good friend the Comandante [Murga, of Patagones], who is my very good friend, to go with him to Chupat to visit you … [but] I shall not now go to see you before winter and ere I come I hope to receive a letter from you. … Afterwards I shall go and put up my tents in front of your village in order that I may become acquainted with you and you with me and with my people; you see that I have a good heart and a good will.
Be not afraid of us my friend, I and my people are contented to see you colonise on the Chupat, for we shall have a nearer place to go to in order to trade, without the necessity of going to Patagones, where they steal our horses and where the ‘pulperos’ (tavern keepers) rob and cheat us. If you treat us well … we shall always negotiate with you. … We sell ostrich feathers … We also sell guanaco skins and … guanaco mantles [that] … the traders sell … to rich persons who put them as carpets. Enquire as to the prices of those articles in order that you may pay us properly when we come in the winter.
Tell me in your letter what kind of money you are using at the Chupat, whether paper or silver money. Try to get an interpreter. We all know a little Spanish but English we do not understand. … See to it that those things which we buy and want are good but, moreover, the yerba (Paraguayan tea) ought to be good. … You ought, for my portion of the land, to negotiate with the Government. See you what they can pay me for it. Everywhere they sell and buy but they do not colonise without buying. … Mr Aguirre [pre-eminent businessman in Patagones] has read a letter of the Government to me in which I am told to leave you to increase in numbers and not to do anything to you and also to speak to the other Caciques that they should not molest you. I promised to do all in my power for you. … I send this letter by my grandson. … Give him your answer and if you … mean to enter into friendly intercourse with us make us some presents … All my people who are collected here to see this letter written send you many salutations. From the Cacique Antonio.Footnote 52
Through this letter we come to understand the indigenous position a little better. Rather than ‘simple children of the desert’, Cacique Antonio demonstrates that he is an astute politician, who is already well integrated within the regional economy, and traverses the political worlds of the pampa and the settler outposts with ease, demonstrating linguistic facility and an acute appreciation of the market for his goods, their value, price and destination. He is careful to remind the Welsh that they are encroaching on his land, and that it is he, not the Argentine state, who has authority over the ‘Chupat’ valley. He is not unwilling for them to colonise but argues that he requires payment, and asks that the Welsh intercede with the government in order to agree a price. However, in a show of powerfulness and self-assurance Cacique Antonio offers to share his bountiful lands, and sees benefits accruing from the settlement in the form of trade links which he seeks to foster.Footnote 53
Interestingly, the Welsh are also clear that this land belonged to the indigenous, as well as being available for colonisation. Patagonia was understood by both the Argentine government and the Welsh to be a ‘desert’, that is, a deserted place. As Fernando Williams argues, this embodied two key features: the absence of proper human settlement, which facilitated and justified colonialism, and its potential to be transformed from a wasteland into a productive ‘garden’.Footnote 54 In this way they are iterating dominant, Lockean justifications of colonialism which also inform Argentine policies of colonisation in the region. These are expressed most forcefully by Domingo Sarmiento whose desire to exploit Argentina's full potential is predicated on erasing ‘barbaric’ elements and importing northern Europeans who are understood to embody civilisation.Footnote 55 While the colonists imagine that they are filling an ‘empty’ space, at the same time many voices in the archive agree with the Reverend William Phillips' observation that the indigenous are ‘the rightful owner of the soil on which the settlers had located themselves’.Footnote 56 This presents a paradox. How can the Welsh claim the right to colonise and yet explicitly recognise that this land belongs to others? The solution was provided by Hugh Hughes ‘Cadfan’, author of the Handbook of the Welsh Colony, a guide which was meant to be read by prospective settlers. He proposed that ‘We cannot disregard the rights of the Indians of the land but … we should attempt to make friends of them, giving them whatever is honest, whatever is just’.Footnote 57 Thus, right from the start of the enterprise, fair dealing was understood to justify colonisation which was in turn promoted as the vehicle that would bring progress and prosperity to the nation.Footnote 58
The ‘two Indians’ whose arrival Berwyn recounts (actually, Cacique Francisco and his wife) also came as emissaries seeking connection and trade:
… they had heard in Rio Negro that we were here and he came to us in the hope that we would be friendly, that it was good to see us and he welcomed us to his country, that he would like to trade with us because we were closer than the other white people.Footnote 59
Indeed, the Welsh settlement was a new potential gateway into an ‘international’ market. Cacique Antonio's people supplied ostrich feathers which eventually adorned hats in Buenos Aires, London and Paris, and sometimes acted as a middle-man bringing ‘rugs and ponchos manufactured by the Chileno Indians of the Andes …; at times even the trade of goods of European manufacture obtained at Patagones or from traders visiting the interior’.Footnote 60 It is a mistake, then, to think of Patagonia as being isolated or remote; rather, it is profoundly, though sporadically, enmeshed in global patterns of trade and social connection. This is also true of south Patagonia where flows of money, people and identities created a Babel of capitalism in which indigenous people were thoroughly enmeshed.Footnote 61 So, while undoubtedly the terms of trade did not favour the indigenous, and we know that voracious capitalism is seldom content to pursue petty trade, at this point indigenous people were not simply victims of capitalism but were willing participants, able to call their own terms (if not always to get them).
The powerful, as yet unchallenged, position of freedom that the indigenous communities enjoyed thus allowed them to enter relations with the Welsh from a position of relative strength. This accrued in particular from their expertise in negotiating the difficult Patagonian environment. Indeed, the supremacy of nineteenth-century ‘modern’ Europe was profoundly questioned by issues of basic survival, especially the search for food. The Welsh arrived ill-equipped with knowledge to sustain life in the Patagonian winter and their diet was monotonous and sometimes scarce; they lacked meat. After spending some time with the Welsh, Cacique Francisco realised that they could not really support themselves, so he offered to help:
[He] taught the colonists how to manage the horses and cows, how to use the bolas and lasso and how to turn rawhide into whips, lassos, fetters, halters and saddles. They learnt of him also the mysteries of the preparation of puchero [stew] asado [camp-fire barbecue] and many other necessary items of value in their new culinary and changed life.Footnote 62
More than anything, he taught them how to hunt ostrich and guanaco:
They looked forward with joy to a day of hunting under the direction of Francisco. Mounted on his well-trained horses they would scour valley and pampa for quarry… [Later, at home] The huntsmen would regale them with tales of the chase, of the prowess of their leader Francisco, his marvellous dexterity with the bolas and lasso and the fleetness of his horses, the cleverness of his dogs and most of all his kindness and patience with the inexperienced ‘gringos’.Footnote 63
This admiration for the hunting skills of the Tehuelche marks a space in their relationship in which the familiar racial/civilisational power relations are upended and different kinds of knowledge and capacity, at which Francisco excelled, are valued. The travel journals of Llwyd ap IwanFootnote 64 or John Daniel Evans' memoiresFootnote 65 , for example, are filled with references to hunting for everyday use, using indigenous skills. In this mode of co-relationship they are referred to as not ‘children’ but rather as ‘Brothers of the desert’,Footnote 66 expressing the camaraderie and cooperation necessary to hunt and survive in this tough environment. Indeed, in the diaries and journals of expeditions, meetings with indigenous travellers were noted as a welcome encounter. They would often camp together, share food and information, and often letters were given to the indigenous (usually travelling to the Chubut Valley) to be passed to loved ones back home. John Murray Thomas was surveying and exploring the Chubut Valley in 1877, for example, and noted (on 23 July) ‘After Indians arrived in camp gave them mate and bread; packed up and started about 9.30am. Met Galatch in the Upper Valley, gave him a letter for home.’Footnote 67 The open plains were a place which eroded the hierarchies of global coloniality replacing this with the hospitalities of survival and camaraderie in the wide, wild landscape.
The Welsh embrace of the indigenous hunt also tapped into the power relationships and perceived injustices experienced back home in Wales. Rhys explained:
In Wales it [hunting] was the closed privilege of squires and rich landlords. And what a fuss they made of hunting down a poor fox! … Many a farmer cursed them as they went through his fields. Among these settlers were farmers who had suffered in this way. … Game was reserved for the gentry in the old country, now the settlers are privileged to enjoy it in abundance and variety.Footnote 68
One of the forces that drove Welsh migration was the prevalence of large landed estates run by absentee (usually English) landlords who exacted high rents and denied rights to roam and hunt, yet cared little for their tenants. This freedom to wander and hunt as one pleased in the open space of the Pampas embodied the freedoms of a life beyond the social stratifications and rigid economic structures which kept the Welsh rural working class in their place through hierarchies of class and culture.Footnote 69 The colonial experience of Chubut offered labourers and struggling tenant farmers the chance of both economic improvement and social dignity. In a report written for the British government in 1885, Captain Brent reports that, on asking a Welshman ‘are you better off here or at home’, he replied ‘yes, at home one had to keep working without cessation to earn daily wages; … out here I have to work hard at times but then there are times when I need not work but can go two or three days hunting in the camp. Each man, however poor, has a horse and a good one.’Footnote 70 Liberation from the rural class system implied enhanced personal dignity and standing as well as autonomy, the freedom to do as one pleased.
In this sense, the Patagonian experience fits with the idea of a settler utopia in which individualised dreams of personal improvement become anchored in a shared geographical space. This space is colonised not only physically but also in the realm of fantasy, even before the colonisers arrive.Footnote 71 This dream of a better future in another (colonised) place acts to ‘energiz[e] the present with the anticipation of what is to come’Footnote 72 and drives settler migrants to risk everything by relocating themselves to another world. The supposed emptiness of this ‘New World’ only enhances its appeal; they can leave the past behind (in space and time), and start afresh, bringing with them only that which they intend to keep. For the rural working class Welsh, like their counterparts elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, this economic motivation was predominant.Footnote 73
However, this notion of utopia included a powerful additional dynamic which particularly galvanised the middle-class colonists' cultural and linguistic dignity. For the preachers and leaders whose voices dominate the written archive, colonisation was driven by a fervent desire for the linguistic freedom to speak and organise, pray and learn in Welsh without the prohibitions of ‘English’ law and the pernicious effects of thinly veiled racism. The Welsh had long been disparaged by the English-dominated political class which applied the colonial logic employed across the empire to the ‘others’ at home, promoting modernity's agenda and civilising influence on the ‘barbarians’ of Britain.Footnote 74 The Welsh language was the focal point for this racialised disparagement. Welsh had not been the official medium of public discourse since the Act of Union in 1536, but the impact of this legal fact became increasingly apparent as the British state became a more intrusive part of everyday life for a population which was largely monoglot Welsh. The infamous ‘Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales’ of 1847 or ‘Blue Books’ was an important statement which placed the blame for Wales' economic, social and moral ‘backwardness’ on the prevalence of the Welsh language and the superstitious, inward-looking and deceiving cultural habits that it promoted.Footnote 75 It states that: ‘The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects.’Footnote 76 These Reports served to reflect and solidify the Welsh place in the British ethnic and linguistic hierarchy, drawing Wales into portrayals of barbarism associated with its imperial possessions.Footnote 77
For the numerous, well-educated, Welsh-speaking preachers this assault on the moral character of the Welsh was a deep insult. It was this which motivated colonists like Abraham MatthewsFootnote 78 and Edwyn RobertsFootnote 79 and galvanised the Reverend Michael D. Jones to lead (and largely finance) the colonising mission (though he remained in Bala). Like Matthews and Roberts, he identified a clear link between linguistic and cultural freedom, and political autonomy, advocating a fresh start in an empty place that could be filled with Welsh-ness: ‘If there were a Welsh colony, the Welsh migrants would feel more at home; and if they felt that the foundations of a Welsh land had been laid, where there was a Welsh parliament, and the law was conducted in Welsh, they would be more courageous and more public spirited in carrying out patriotic plans’Footnote 80 . For him, the initiative was ‘not a mercantile company at all but a patriotic movement to found a Welsh colony’.Footnote 81
Michael D. Jones thus imagines Patagonia as a linguistic utopia for Welsh culture (which is itself caricatured and idealised). The creation of such anti-colonial utopias is a vital tool in generating hope and resistance among subordinated groups; as Bill Ashcroft (following Ernst Bloch) argues: ‘the dynamic function of the utopian impulse [is] a dual one: to engage power and to imagine change’.Footnote 82 This is precisely the spirit of hope in which the Welsh elite imagined the Patagonian colony as a utopian space, an ‘empty’ place in which subordination might be thrown off and new social relations created. This articulates what Bloch calls Heimat: ‘a word for the home that we have all sensed but have never experienced or known’.Footnote 83 The Gwladfa or Welsh colony in Chubut is, for the Welsh intellectual elite, a means to create that longed-for Welsh-speaking ‘homeland’, a utopia made real.
The link between the search for utopia and the practice of colonialism is strong and deep. It goes back to More's original text, Utopia, which was written only 16 years after Amerigo Vespucci sailed to chart the ‘New World’.Footnote 84 In More's book, Utopia is a country created following the colonisation of the island of Abraxa by King Utopus who deploys his ‘benign’ totalitarian rule to organise a well-ordered society. As such, the text both responds to and shapes understandings of colonisation.Footnote 85 Moreover, the supposedly clean slate offered by the New World, understood to be a terra nullis, had been attractive to colonists from the start precisely because its supposed emptiness suggested that it was an Eden.Footnote 86 It was this which inspired religious idealists who colonised the United States, such as John Winthrop's Puritans or William Penn's Quakers. Indeed, these communities were themselves an inspiration for the architects of the Welsh Colony; Michael D. Jones's passion for the project was ignited during a visit there, where he also met Edwyn Roberts who conceived the idea of the Wladfa in Patagonia.Footnote 87 More than that, as Fernando Williams observes, the difficulties and then triumphs of life in the Wladfa were interpreted through religious metaphors which understood the ‘desert’ of Patagonia as a space which set a test of their faith in God. The hardship of the early years (and the alien environment) required an act of faith to sustain their endurance, and the notion of conversion allowed them (the chosen people) to progress to Jerusalem.Footnote 88 This promised land was achieved by bringing fertility to the desert, transforming it into a ‘garden’ or imagined Eden. This idea dovetailed neatly with the more utilitarian desire of nineteenth-century capitalist modernity in Argentina to bring the wilderness of Patagonia into production for the good of a burgeoning nation.
The Welsh colony, then, was imbued with colonial/utopian fantasies which perhaps helped to gloss over the contradictory realities of life and power in Chubut. The Welsh were simultaneously resisting racialised cultural imperialism and keenly promoting colonisation as the means of resistance. Moreover, they did not reject modernity but sought to carve out a space in which they might prosper, whilst retaining their cultural integrity. This ambiguity of position allowed the Welsh to think of the indigenous as both ‘children of the desert’ (which sets them apart) and ‘Brothers of the Desert’ (which recognises affinity). Similarly, it allowed them to feel justified in claiming their right to colonise their plots of land, whilst simultaneously recognising that the indigenous were the ‘rightful owners’ of that land. This duality and the ambiguity it fostered was relatively unproblematic whilst Chubut remained a fluid place which could tolerate parallel life-ways and unresolved contradicions. However, the arrival of the Conquest of the Desert demanded the ordering of Patagonian society into the binaried mode of civilisation/barbarism.
Coloniality of Power and the ‘Conquest of the Desert’
The Argentine military had been pushing southwards throughout the 1860s and 1870s, metaphorically sweeping the indigenous away in a holocaust of killing and concentration camps. It arrived in the Chubut Valley in 1882–84 and is universally described by the Welsh diarists and essayists as a time of horror and violence. For Jonathan Ceredig Davies the Conquest was ‘a regular wave of extermination’Footnote 89 while W. Casnodyn Rhys proclaims that ‘The wrong done to the savage population … is one of the blackest blots on modern civilization’ adding that ‘those were terrible days for the settlers of the borderland for our own sympathies were with the Indians’.Footnote 90
Cacique Valentín Sayhueke wrote to Lewis Jones (the Welsh leader in Gaiman), reporting deceptions and assaults practised by General Vintter's troops. He explained:
I now find myself ruined and sacrificed – my lands which my father and God left me, stolen from me, as well as my animals … and a numberless mass of women, children and old people. Because of this, friend, I ask you to place my complaints … before the government … to intercede on my behalf with the authorities, to protect the peace and tranquillity for my people, to return to us … my lands.Footnote 91
The Welsh did attempt to intercede. Lewis Jones wrote to General Vintter:
We, the inhabitants of Chubut plead for your clemency and in this way express our strong feelings in favour of some of the ‘aborigines’ of these regions, known to us … We desire that you might, as well as fulfilling your military obligations, and according to your own judgement, leave our old indigenous neighbours in their homes, whilst they remain so peaceful and harmless as they have up to today. (Signed in the name of all, 20 July 1883)Footnote 92
As we can see, this plea for mercy, whilst laudable and brave, does not escape the hierarchies and logics of colonial thinking; rather, the Welsh pleadings went with (not against) the grain of coloniality. Jones adopted a paternalistic stance, portraying the indigenous as tame and harmless, subdued by Welsh ‘friendship’ without the need for military intervention. Jones effectively recognised the legitimacy of General Vintter's ‘military obligations’, and implied that should the ‘Indians’ cease to be peaceful, such military intervention would be justified. This intercession, though, was ignored. Following a complex period of negotiation, resistance and flight south, the Tehuelche, Pampa and now Mapuche communities of Chubut were disciplined by the army and the state, with many sent to the concentration camp at Valchetta.Footnote 93
However, the Welsh themselves were in no position to confront the military, nor the Argentine state, even if they had wanted to. For the first nine years of the colony, the Welsh were entirely self-governing; they made their own rules and governed through a council of settlers which met when necessary in a large meeting open to all.Footnote 94 Indeed, there was no permanent state presence at all until the appointment of Sr. Oneto who arrived as Comisario in 1875. The exact relationship of power between the Welsh colonists, led by Lewis Jones and the lonely Comisario was not clear but the arrival of more officials generated power struggles over legal jurisdication, including the imprisonment of a Welsh colonist by Major Vivanco, the new Harbour Master in 1879.Footnote 95 The advent of Juan Finoquetto as Comisario in 1882 created escalated tensions between the colonists who sought to maintain autonomy, and Argentine officials who aimed to extend the norms and institutions of the expanding Argentine state and depoliticise the Welsh, reducing their cultural distinction to a matter for the chapel and home.Footnote 96
Antagonisms were compounded by the opening of state schools where the language of instruction was Spanish.Footnote 97 The children of Welsh colonists had been taught at Welsh-speaking schools which were established early in the colony's history, even though they lacked school houses and the children were taught by preachers. Given their experiences of linguistic/racialised discrimination in Wales, the state's assertion of Spanish-language teaching was a charged issue for the colonists and became a battleground on which Welsh autonomy was fought.Footnote 98 The arguments culminated in Lewis Jones' refusal to supply education statistics to Finoquetto, following the perceived misuse of earlier data which portrayed the Welsh as largely illiterate in an article in La Nación, early in 1882.Footnote 99 This portrayal re-opened the bitter wounds of the ‘Blue Books’ and their defamation of the Welsh language and people, tapping into feelings of indignation but also exposing the vulnerability of the Welsh Heimat within the Argentine state. Indeed, the Welsh were right to be concerned; in an 1883 letter to the President of the National Education Council, Juan Finoquetto reports on the two state schools: ‘in which the child can be educated knowing the language of the country in which he is born; in the private schools that existed in other years, they were only taught the dead language of Welsh [la lengua muerta Galense]’.Footnote 100 Lewis' refusal to submit the statistics led, in a show of state force, to his imprisonment alongside another leader (and author of the ‘encounter’ story) Richard Berwyn, and their removal to be tried in Buenos Aires. Although shortly released, Finoquetto thus demonstrated the utter dominance of the Argentine state and the obliteration of any autonomy that the Welsh colony had enjoyed. The arrival of General Vinttner and the Conquest of the Desert was, thus, the final step in this process of absorption and soon afterwards the Chubut Province was created in 1884, headed by Governor Luis Fontana. From now on Chubut was a fully integrated part of Argentina and the Welsh became Argentine citizens.
The juggernaut of coloniality engulfed both communities. Though obviously the Welsh suffered far less than the indigenous, they seemed to genuinely rue the indigenous suppression: ‘I well remember seeing passing me one day some hundreds of these unfortunate prisoners surrounded by soldiers on their march to the sea’ recalls Jonathan Ceredig Davies, ‘I could not help shedding tears to see the poor Indians thus treated for trying to defend their own liberties.’Footnote 101 Perhaps Davies and the Welsh were also mourning the loss of their own freedom and the end of an inter-ethnic relationship, so intimately connected to making the Welsh utopia briefly come true. The recollections of John Daniel Evans give us a sense that for some these were more than sentimental tears. In June of 1888 Evans was travelling from the Chubut Valley to Valcheta, a town which was also the site of an indigenous concentration camp:
and what I experienced there pained me and I regret it still, what happened there struck my soul hard … On the way we went between the tents of the Indians that the government had enclosed in a reformatory. Here, I think, were most of the Indians of Patagonia … they were enclosed in a high wire mesh fence and here they wandered, they recognised us, they knew that we were Welsh from the Chubut Valley, and they knew that where a Welsh man went he was bound to have a piece of bread, and some were maddened by hunger, and with their great hands all bony and dried out by the wind tried to make themselves understood, speaking a mix of Spanish and Welsh ‘A little bread, Señor’. … He was my childhood friend, my BROTHER OF THE DESERT who I had shared so much bread with. This fact filled my heart with pain and anguish, I felt powerless, I felt that I could do nothing to alleviate his hunger, his lack of freedom, his eternal exile after having been the owner and commander of the vast Patagonian expanses and be reduced to this little corral.Footnote 102
Evans bribed the guard to try and secure his friend's release, and even returned ‘with enough money to get him out whatever the price, and bring him home, but he couldn't wait for me and died of grief’.Footnote 103 While of course we cannot extrapolate the sentiments expressed here to the whole of the Welsh community in Patagonia, this example suggests that for some at least the experience of the Conquest of the Desert was traumatic because of the brutal treatment of people whom they counted as friends, not just in a strategic trading sense but also as friendships of shared experience, perhaps affection. As this example indicates, the arrival of the Conquest of the Desert forced the Welsh to take the final step of the journey away from ambiguity, over the boundary to become a member of the modern Argentine nation, tagged with civilisation and progress; the Welshman can walk by while the indigenous man is encaged. And indeed, though the Welsh lost autonomy, theirs was the easier road to follow; the indigenous who survived the conquest, by contrast, were silenced and made invisible by an oppressive Europeanised state which smothered their languages, disparaged their way of life and imposed a regime of liberal values and capitalist practices that cut to the heart of indigenous identity.
Conclusion: The Coloniality of Power in Chubut
The example of the Welsh settlers in Chubut suggests two insights which enrich our understanding of the coloniality of power, insights which question the easy division between coloniser and colonised.
First, it is very clear that the Welsh settlers were caught up in the coloniality of power as both agents of global capitalist modernity and also as its object, a people labelled as barbarous and disparaged for their linguistic difference and subordinate position within the United Kingdom. The British state sought to ‘civilise’ the Welsh and equip them with the superior linguistic and cultural skills which would allow them to participate fully, as English speakers, in the expanding modern, capitalist British Empire. While the leadership of the Wladfa movement resisted this impulse, they never doubted the superiority of Western civilisation and slipped easily into the discourse of the noble savage. It was this set of Eurocentric, racialised ideas which made possible this paradoxical anti-colonial strategy; colonisation in a place that could be imagined as ‘empty’ because those who lived there were ‘Indian’; those who wanted to settle there were backed by both their spiritual zeal and the justice of their anti-colonial cause, as well as the advance of ‘progress’. After 20 years of independence, though, they became entangled once more in the dynamics of coloniality. The new utopian space of political autonomy and linguistic hegemony was colonised by an expanding Argentine state which aimed principally to conquer the indigenous territories but also absorbed this settler colony within the nation-state matrix. While they suffered much less, the Welsh were thus subject to the same global dynamics of coloniality as the Tehuelche, Pampa and Mapuche.
Taking the settler seriously, looking beyond the caricature, thus allows us to recognise that while the process of colonisation is only ever an oppressive violation, the colonisers themselves can have a complex and ambiguous relationship to the social world that they come to inhabit. Thinking beyond the caricature of the coloniser therefore opens a series of questions about how power works in colonial scenarios which focus not only on oppression but also on connections, dependencies and genuine affinities that might be generated. While the broader relationships of global and racial power are inescapable, the inter-community and inter-personal relations offer spaces of connection between peoples, over and above transculturation, which acknowledge the agency of both indigenous and settler. These openings offer a rich terrain for future research and theoretical engagement which I will take up in subsequent publications.
Revealing the messiness and ambiguity of this ‘friendship’ is also very important, though, because it plays such a vital role in multicultural power relations in Argentina today. After 150 years cultivating an identity as a ‘white’ and Europeanised country, resurgent indigenous movements in Latin America have obliged the Argentine state to recognise the continuing presence of indigenous (and Afro-descendant) Argentines, utilising a discourse of multiculturalism.Footnote 104 In the Province of Chubut, this multiculturalism has deployed the ‘friendship’ between indigenous and Welsh settlers to implicitly argue that inter-ethnic relationships (that is, colonialism) were not fraught by violence and oppression but rather by peaceful cooperation. Geradline Lublin's work shows that ‘friendship’ was a particular motif of the bicentennial celebrations of 2010 which offered an opportunity to enunciate national and provincial identity.Footnote 105 She explains that the Welsh Associations played a prominent role in provincial celebrations and, in their press release, made the myth of friendship a centrepiece of their identity, expressing their gratitude for:
the valuable support that the national government offered to the pioneers of the Mimosa during the difficult early years of the colony… and to which must be added the friendly and supportive [solidario] assistance that they received from those they called the brothers of the desert, that is, the Tehuelche.Footnote 106
Moreover, the provincial stand at the bicentennial exhibition in Buenos Aires described Chubut as a product of ‘the Tehuelche community and the Welsh community, this fusion of two cultures so distinctive but which really transformed Chubut into what it is today’.Footnote 107 This image of unproblematic friendship is particularly performed by the annual re-enactment (beginning in 2000) of the sharing of bread and water, described by Berwyn and discussed earlier. While highly controversial, this costumed performance features representatives of an indigenous group and Welsh descendants sharing sustenance and shaking hands.Footnote 108 In this way, ‘soft’ settler colonialism seems justified and the descendants of settlers (Welsh and otherwise), as well as the Argentine state, are relieved of the unnerving anxieties that attend confrontation with the abusive realities of colonialism. The story of friendship, then, serves to defuse or delegitimise the on-going indigenous struggle for land rights and cultural dignity, and reinforces notions of indigenous passivity and receptivity through discourses of friendship. This notion of ‘friendship’ does not unsettle the coloniser-colonised relationship, then; it promotes its desirability in a softer form and as such severely undermines decolonial politics.
For this reason it is extremely important that the relationship between the Welsh and indigenous communities is explored to reveal its ambiguity. This is not in order to strip away what often seems to have been warm goodwill and mutual regard but rather to expose the way that the coloniality of power operated on and through them both to strengthen the claims of capitalist modernity in Chubut. It is essential, then, to reveal the pernicious work of the noble savage rhetoric and patronising convictions of civilisational superiority, but also the shared joy of the hunting together and the recognition of a mutual desire for autonomy and cultural respect.
Decolonial struggle must constantly return to the violences and oppressions of the colonial project, struggling to reassert indigenous presence. It is also vital, though, that the assumptions about settler society are challenged in order to shake up entrenched racial hierarchies which condition global politics and the everyday social world. Questioning assumptions and the myths that sustain them is essential work; for this reason, I suggest that recognising the ambiguities and complexity of power within the life of the Welsh colony, especially in the first 20 years, is vital in order to expose the powerfulness of caciques like Antonio and Francisco, the vulnerabilities of the half-starved Welsh as well as the way in which discourses and hierarchies of race and civilisation/barbarism shaped the way people thought, their actions and indeed the course of history in Chubut. By looking beyond the binaries, we can then perceive the human stories of colonial encounter, as well as the operation of global dynamics of coloniality. It is only by accepting the complexity of such stories and the power relations that underpin them that more equal relationships might be nurtured today.
