The maintenance of wild plant gathering in a Mapuche community of Patagonia

LADIO ANA

ECONOMIC BOTANY

Society for Economic Botany

Lugar: New York; Año: 2001 vol. 55 p. 243 - 254

0013-0001

It has been widely established that Mapuche communities in Argentina and Chile have a vast knowledge of useful plants from temperate forests of Patagonia. However, present processes of transculturation and uprooting seem to have caused a decline in wild plant gathering. This is a case study of a Mapuche community that now lives far away from the forests that their ancestors inhabited. Nineteen families from the Rams Mapuche community in the province of Neuquén (Argentina) were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire, with the aim of finding out which edible wild species are still used, what their abundance is in the area and what factors, according to the people themselves, have caused the decline. They cited a total 49 edible wild plants including four types of resources: Araucaria araucana seeds, the fruits and roots of bushes or herbs, and leaves of edible weeds. They cite a proportionally higher number of resources from the A. araucana forests although the community now lives over 50 km away from the forest. In spite of the fact that there is a strong cultural inertia towards use of wild plants, several factors, including the difficulty access to these forests which no longer belong to them, drought and soil deterioration from overgrazing, act negatively on the preservation of the knowledge of plants in the younger generations.