Quilapan’s Araucanian view of history

Quilapan’s Araucanian view of history is the counter-history Oscar Amalfitano encounters in a short 1978 book that recasts Chile as an Araucanian state and Bernardo O’Higgins as the son of an Araucanian woman. Its assertions range from telepathy and coded branch-messages to migrations linking Chile with India, ancient Germania, and Greece. As Amalfitano reads, the book becomes at once an absurd historical construction, a possible sign of the atmosphere under Chile’s military dictatorship, and a provocation to question who writes national history and whose identities it contains.

The Book and Its Historical Claim

The text Amalfitano remembers is titled O’Higgins Is Araucanian, subtitled 17 Proofs, Taken from the Secret History of Araucania. It is attributed to Lonko Kilapan, who presents himself as Historian of the Race, President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, and Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language. Its prologue bears the additional declaration that it was approved by the Araucanian History Council. Those credentials give the little book the outward form of institutional history even as its claims unsettle the distinction between scholarship and invention.

The prologue rejects the official account of O’Higgins’s birth and identifies his mother as an Araucanian woman married to Ambrosio O’Higgins under Admapu law. It names the traditional Gapitun ceremony as part of that marriage and presents Bernardo as the legitimate son of this union, rather than the illegitimate son described by historians. The book’s revision is therefore not merely geographical or cultural: it makes the national Liberator’s parentage the point where an alternative account of Chilean history confronts the official one.

The first proof, “He was born in the Araucanian state,” declares that the Yekmonchi, called Chile, was geographically and politically equivalent to the Greek state. Kilapan describes its territory through rivers, a central region, and related peoples, and gives this imagined polity an organized political and military character. In a further episode Amalfitano reads, Kilapan claims to have opened the tomb of Kurillanka and describes objects found there, including a stone, a vessel, and an obsidian ornament. The account links the dead person’s passage across the sea to a Greek figure and distributes the objects among Araucanian museums. Historical geography, archaeology, and classical allusion thus appear together as parts of the book’s claim to recover a suppressed past.

Telepathy, Writing, and a Global Past

The second proof, “He was born to an Araucanian woman,” builds its account around two communication systems: telepathy and Adkintuwe. In Kilapan’s version, Araucanians used telepathy to exchange information across distance, while Adkintuwe sent messages through the movement of branches positioned along routes from Santiago. The Spanish learned that this method existed but, according to the book, could not decipher it. Kilapan also proposes that telepathy belonged to an older, nature-connected mode of communication and that its loss followed the destruction of telepaths and the movement of people into cities.

The book adds two systems of writing, knotting called Prom and secret triangular writing called Adentunemul, while extending Araucanian kinship and communication across a startlingly broad map. It connects Chilean migrants with India, ancient Germania, and the Peloponnese, and describes a route returning to Chile across the Pacific. Kilapan’s footnotes reinforce the mixture of asserted scholarship and free association: they derive terms from Greek, gloss Machi through the Greek word for diviner, and supply an explanation of the seasonal timing of conception and birth under Admapu law. The result is not a single alternative origin story but a totalizing account in which language, migration, religion, political organization, and military knowledge all confirm one another.

Amalfitano distills the book’s consequences into a list of deductions. Most Araucanians, he concludes, must be telepathic; their language must be closely related to Homer’s; and their people must have traveled widely and mastered navigation. He notes the two forms of writing, questions what Adkintuwe actually involved, and follows the argument toward further possibilities: whether O’Higgins himself was telepathic and whether Kilapan was too. The humor of this inventory lies in its method. Amalfitano treats the text’s propositions as if their internal logic could be followed to its end, allowing their accumulating extravagance to expose the uncertain ground beneath every claim.

Amalfitano’s Changing Reading

Amalfitano first recalls reading Kilapan’s book with open laughter. Returning to it later, he finds that laughter mixed with sorrow. The shift follows his attention to the book’s oddities: why its prologue explains one Indigenous term with a footnote but leaves others unexplained, and what its insistence on O’Higgins’s legitimacy reveals about the private judgments concealed inside public national history. The text’s contradictions do not simply make it comic; they direct him toward the political and intimate meanings that historical accounts can carry.

The book’s 1978 publication date leads Amalfitano to imagine its production during the military dictatorship. He pictures Kilapan bargaining with a printer at Editorial Universitaria on Calle San Francisco in Santiago, trying to secure a discount by promising further books, including proposed works on Araucanian and Greek legends and on the kinship of Araucanians, Aryans, early Germans, and Greeks. Amalfitano’s imagined scene places an Indigenous intellectual’s extravagant project within practical constraints: printing costs, a publisher’s prestige, and the promise of future work. The word “distinguished,” used to persuade the printer, becomes a source of near-physical laughter for Amalfitano as he recognizes the collision between grand claims and the ordinary negotiations required to put a book into circulation.

Yet he refuses to settle on one explanation of the text. He considers whether Kilapan might be a fabrication, perhaps a pseudonym for a political figure or an instrument of an intelligence service. He then widens the suspicion rather than resolving it: Kilapan’s prose could, in Amalfitano’s speculation, belong to politicians across Chile’s political spectrum. This possibility turns the book’s uncertain authorship into a larger uncertainty about national language itself. Rather than providing a reliable counter-history, the text becomes a surface on which competing political voices, styles, and assumptions might be projected.

The Name at the End of the Inquiry

After testing the book’s historical argument and its possible political origins, Amalfitano arrives at a more personal question: the name of O’Higgins’s mother. Kilapan gives it as Kinturay Treulen, daughter of Killenkusi and Waramanke Treulen; the official story gives it as Doña Isabel Riquelme. The names do not reconcile the two versions. Instead, the contrast redirects Amalfitano from the national figure’s disputed ancestry to his own mother, Doña Eugenia Riquelme, whose full name he recalls as Doña Filia Maria Eugenia Riquelme Grana.

For a few seconds he is startled and cannot laugh. That brief reaction gives the book’s grand historical construction an intimate consequence: an argument about the identity of a nation’s founding figure brings Amalfitano up against a name from his own family. The episode does not establish Kilapan’s history as fact. It shows how a dubious or impossible account can nevertheless make the reader attend to the exclusions, memories, and private associations embedded in the act of naming.

Narrative Significance

Amalfitano’s reading unfolds through a sustained oscillation between ridicule, historical suspicion, and personal unease. The book’s claims are too expansive to function as ordinary documentary history, but Amalfitano does not dismiss them and move on. He tests their internal logic, imagines the conditions of their publication, entertains alternative accounts of their authorship, and finally follows their competing maternal names into his own memory. Each shift changes what the book can mean without making its factual claims more secure.

The episode presents history not as a settled account opposed to invention, but as an argument over authority, evidence, and the names that official narratives preserve or displace. Kilapan’s imagined Araucanian past claims global reach and intellectual sovereignty; Amalfitano’s questions expose the book’s instability and the political atmosphere in which it appeared. Its most consequential movement is from a sweeping national genealogy to a single family name: the uncertain counter-history does not resolve Chile’s past, but makes the personal and political stakes of historical naming newly visible.