The Mapuche were never conquered by the Inca and held off the Spanish crown for three centuries, a resistance so durable that the Bío Bío river functioned as an international frontier until Chile occupied Araucanía by force in the 1880s. Their flag is much younger than their reputation. The Wenufoye dates to October 1992, chosen from an open competition by a Mapuche organization as the quincentenary of Columbus was being marked across the Americas. Within thirty years it had jumped from movement banner to something stranger: the flag non-Mapuche Chileans reached for when they marched against their own state.
Five hundred designs against a quincentenary
In March 1991 the Consejo de Todas las Tierras (Aukiñ Wallmapu Ngulam, the Council of All Lands), a Mapuche organization led by its werkén, or spokesman, Aucán Huilcamán, issued a call for a flag of the Mapuche nation. The timing was pointed. 1992 would bring official celebrations of five hundred years since Columbus, and Indigenous movements across Latin America were organizing a counter-commemoration of five hundred years of resistance. The council's position was that a nation negotiates better with a flag: the Mapuche, roughly a tenth of Chile's population with communities across the Argentine border in Puelmapu, had national symbols in ritual and textile but nothing on a flagpole.
About 500 designs came in. The winner was adopted on 5 October 1992 and given the name Wenufoye, usually translated as "winter's bark of the sky" or "canelo of the heavens." The canelo (foye) is the sacred tree of the Mapuche, planted at ritual sites and carried by the machi, so the name roots the flag in ceremony rather than politics, though it has done heavy political work ever since.
The drum at the centre
The Wenufoye is one of the more information-dense flags in the Americas. Three horizontal bands, blue over green over red, are framed by black borders along the top and bottom edges, and the borders carry a running white ngümin, the stepped-cross motif familiar from Mapuche weaving and silverwork, cousin to the Andean chakana. The ngümin is read as knowledge, craft, and science, the arts of making.
At the centre, on the green band, sits a yellow kultrun. This is the shallow kettle drum of the machi, the healer and ritual specialist who is the axis of Mapuche religious life, and its hide face is traditionally painted as a diagram of the cosmos: a cross dividing the world into the meli witran mapu, the four corners of the earth, with sun, moon, and morning star drawn between the arms. The flag reproduces that diagram, so the design contains a picture of the world as the Mapuche order it.
The colors come with Mapudungun names and established meanings. Kallfü, blue, is the deepest of them: life, order, abundance, and the sacred, the color of the eastern sky the Mapuche pray toward. Karü, green, is the land, nature, and fertility. Kelü, red, is strength and power, and the memory of a very long war. Chod, yellow, is the sun and renewal; lig, white, is healing, cleansing, and longevity. Nothing on the flag is decorative filler, which may be why it survives reproduction at protest-poster resolution.
From Araucanía to the Contraloría
The Wenufoye spent its first two decades as the emblem of Mapuche mobilization: land recuperations in Araucanía, marches against forestry companies and hydroelectric dams on the Bío Bío, commemorations, and funerals. The Chilean state's relationship with it was unsettled; flying unofficial flags at public buildings sat in legal gray space, and the flag was often treated by police and press as the mark of radicalism.
The formal question was answered in 2010, when Chile's Comptroller General (Contraloría General de la República) ruled that municipalities may raise the Mapuche flag beside the national flag at ceremonies and public acts. Municipalities in the Araucanía, and later cities as large as Valparaíso and Santiago communes, took it up; in areas with Mapuche majorities the Wenufoye now flies routinely outside town halls. Argentina has no equivalent ruling, but the flag is used freely by Mapuche communities in Neuquén, Río Negro, and Chubut.
It is worth saying plainly that the Wenufoye is not universal among the Mapuche. It was created by one organization, and some communities and lof prefer their own banners or older symbols, among them the guñelve, the eight-pointed star of Venus that appears in colonial-era accounts of Mapuche standards; the star on some historical Chilean insignia has been linked to it. "The Mapuche flag" is shorthand for the most successful of several.
October 2019, Plaza Italia
Chile's estallido social began in October 2019 with a Santiago metro fare rise and grew into the largest protests in the country's history. The flag those crowds flew, more than the Chilean tricolor, was the Wenufoye. It went up over Plaza Italia (renamed Plaza Dignidad by the crowds), and the photograph of a demonstrator waving it from the top of the General Baquedano equestrian statue became the image of the whole uprising.
The adoption was double-edged and much discussed. Non-Mapuche protesters flew the flag as the sharpest available symbol of grievance against the Chilean state, and as a claim to an identity with deeper roots than the republic being protested. Some Mapuche welcomed the embrace; others noted the irony of a state and society that had criminalized Mapuche protest in the south applauding the flag in the capital. The constitutional process that followed put a Mapuche academic, Elisa Loncón, in the chair of the 2021 convention, though the draft constitution recognizing plurinationality was rejected in 2022. The flag remains where it has been since 1992: over a nation without a state, now recognizable to everyone in one.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Flag of the Mapuches" and "Council of All Lands." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Mapuches
[2] Wikipedia (Spanish), "Bandera mapuche," with color symbolism in Mapudungun. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandera_mapuche
[3] "Bandera(s) mapuche, diseño e historia: Entrevista a Jorge Weke a 30 años del 'Wenüfoye'," Revistas Chilenas (2022). https://revistaschilenas.uchile.cl/handle/2250/252498
[4] Red Digital, "Wenu foye: Significado e Historia de la Bandera Mapuche." https://reddigital.cl/bandera_mapuche/
[5] Contraloría General de la República de Chile, dictamen of 2010 authorizing municipal use of the Mapuche flag alongside the national flag.
[6] "Narraciones del origen desde una materialidad nacional moderna: El proceso de creación del Wenufoye (Bandera Mapuche) y su proliferación no tradicional," ResearchGate (2020). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343318608