The Struggles of the Mapuche Indians: Rights and Responsibilities of the Chilean Government

Robert Macaibay Senior Division Individual Website

In the first quarter of our school year, our AP World History teacher presented us with the National History Day contest as our semester project. Since our class focuses on world history, we were required to focus on either Nevadas history or topics outside of the United States. Based on my teachers predictions that our AP exam may contain either an essay about Africa or Latin America, I focused on those regions, and I reviewed the sample NHD topics and examined other interesting topics. Native Americans in Latin America particularly caught my eye. After a lot of research, I came up with the Mapuche Indians in Chile because the problems between the Mapuche and the Chilean government still continue to this day, which ultimately confirmed my decision to make it my main topic. First and foremost, I needed to plan out what I wanted to cover. I began conducting my research by gathering as many articles as I could find about the Mapuche Indians. As a class, we went to the school library to learn how to find primary sources and cite them. I used what we learned from the library and went to various websites. Eventually, I went to my local library to find text on the Mapuche Indians. I would identify sources as either a primary source or secondary and determine the way they supported rights and responsibilities. Our first hurdle of the project required twenty primary sources and five additional secondary sources with correct MLA citations. Initially, I brainstormed on making either an exhibit or a website. I believed creating an exhibit would be interesting and creative; on the other hand, a website involves a lot of features I wanted to investigate, such as the code behind websites. Plus, creating a website does not require additional materials. After choosing to make a website for NHD, I built the website under Weebly, the official website creator for NHD. I

examined other websites and the previous winning entries to determine how to make an amazing website, and after a week, I organized a successful, beautiful website. My project relate to this years NHD theme by connecting the civil rights struggles that the Mapuche have been experiencing since the late 1970s, to the responsibility of the Chilean government to take care of their people. Most important of all, my project details events of the harshness and reality the Mapuche still go through from the Pinochet dictatorship of Chile.