Published in Journal of Latin American Studies 49(1) pp 143-168. Accepted date: 25 August 2015Online date: 25 July 2016Print date: 1 February 2017

Welsh-Indigenous Relationships in Nineteenth Century Patagonia: ‘Friendship’ and the Coloniality of Power

Lucy Taylor

Abstract:This article discusses the colonial encounter of the Welsh and Tehuelche/Mapuche in the Welsh colony (Y Wladfa Gymreig), founded 1865. They sought to create a Welsh-speaking utopia in the ‘empty’ lands of Patagonia, paradoxically using this colonization as a way to resist disparagement of the Welsh language and culture by an English-dominated state. The article deploys a ‘coloniality of power’ perspective and explores archive materials that reveal how both the Welsh and the Indigenous communities whose land they colonized were caught up in coloniality and expanding captialist modernity. I conclude that exploring the ambiguous relationship which results from this encounter complicates and deepens our understanding of how the coloniality of power works. Particularly, I argue that stripping away the ‘myth of friendship’ between the Welsh and Indigenous is vital, not to diminish moments of genuine mutual affinity but rather to show how these too are caught up in processes of colonialization.

In 1865, 153 Welsh migrants boarded the ship Mimosa, bound for the Chubut1 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 theirs2. Over the next twenty 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 frontier3,

1 In the sources, the name ‘Chupat’ is used but the spelling changed towards the end of the 1880s to Chubut. I use Chubut here, but ‘Chupat’ remains in some quotations. 2 During the early encounters there is no early mention of trade with Mapuche; trade may well have taken place as the Mapuche were displaced southwards by the military’s Conquest of the Desert which arrived in Chubut in 1882. Certainly, Mapuche communities lived in Argentina as well as Chile in 1865 and many regularly traversed this frontier which often existed only on maps. See, Ana Ramos and Walter Delrio ‘Trayectorias de Oposición. Los Mapuches y Tehuelches frente a la hegemonía en Chubut’ in Claudia Briones (ed.) Cartografís Argentinas: Políticas Indígenas y Formaciónes Provinciales de Alteridad (Buenos Aires: Editorial Antropofagia, 2005), 79-118.3 Claudia Briones and Walter Delrio ‘The “Conquest of the Desert” as a Trope and Enactment of Argentina’s Manifest Destiny’ in David Maybury-Lewis, Theodore Macdonald and Bjorn Maybury-Lewis Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 51-83.

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 colonizer and the colonized 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) 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 too4. 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 way that such seemingly harmless myths might act politically to delegitimize indigenous resistance5. That is, it exposes the highly political consequences of foregrounding friendship.

On the other hand, though, 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 benefit6. While Welsh thinking was shaped by nineteenth century tropes such as civilization/barbarism, such ideas were challenged on an everyday basis by the reality of interaction with the indigenous peoples who came to trade with the Welsh 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 becomes all too obvious in the face of the violent, racism 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 Indigenous relations during the first twenty 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

4 Lorenzo Veracini ‘Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal: the Settler Colonial Situation’ Journal of Intercultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2008): 363-379.5 A similar point is made by Geraldine Lublin ‘Y Wladfa: gladychu heb defedigaethu?’ Gwerddon 4 (2009), 8-23.6 See also Geraldine Lublin ‘Fred Green a’r “Cyfeillgarwch Parhaol” rhwng y Cymry a Brodorion Patagonia’ Taliesin 133, (2010), 81-92.

reminiscences, in contrast, are typically written twenty 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 (1878-9) reported news and also reprinted items from Y Brut, a pamphlet newspaper which ran to 6 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 Islands7.

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 Patagonia8. 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 Welsh9. 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, Earl of Clarendon by Mr Watson, Secretary to Her Majesty’s Legation who went to visit the colony on HMS Triton10; the others are noted by Lewis Jones, leader of the Welsh colony (translated from an unknown original language into Welsh)11. Capturing indigenous voices and views of the Welsh proves to be elusive and it limits our capacity to really explore the Indigenous/Welsh 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 that I encountered 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 7 My sincere thanks to the staff of the National Library of Wales, the Archive at Bangor University Library, the Museo Histórico Regional Gaiman and the Museo Regional Trevelin for all their hard work. All work cited from sources referenced in Spanish or Welsh were translated by the author. 8 For example the work of Walter Delrio Memorias de expropriación: Sometimiento e incorporación Indígena en la Patagonia, 1872-1943 (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2005). 9 Jorge Pávez Ojeda (ed.) Cartas Mapuches: Siglo XIX (Santiago de Chile: CoLibris & Ocho Libros, 2008).10 ‘Correspondence respecting the Establishment of a Welsh Colony on the River Chupat, in Patagonia, presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of her Majesty, 1867’, (Government papers relating to the Welsh Colony in Patagonia NLW 20903D), 33. 11 Lewis Jones, Hanes y Wladva Gymreig (Caernarfon: Gwasg Genedlaethol Gymraeg, 1898).

Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo shows how ‘Latin America’ was and is shaped today by global hierarchies of race, knowledge and labour which assume the superiority of Eurocentric ways of knowing and being in the world. Firstly, the work of Quijano helps to identify the hidden assumptions about race, extraction and civilization which shape patterns of powerfulness and subordination in the Americas12. Mignolo developed this perspective, firstly by making explicit the linkage between hierarchies of knowledge and hierarchies of race13 and secondly by exploring further the global reach of the coloniality of power14. 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 places15. Other scholars such as Nelson Maldonado Torres and Santiago Castro-Gómez trace the way in which lived experience of colonialism and racial injustice impacts on ordinary people and reproduces the coloniality of power at the micro level16. 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 mobilizations of 199217. 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 dignity18. 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

12 Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, Nepantla 1, no.3 (2000): 533-580.13 Walter Mignolo Darker side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).14 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).15 For a detailed engagement with the issue, see Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel and carlos A Jáuregui (eds) Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)16 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘Sobre la colonialidad del ser: contribuciones al desarrollode un concepto’, in El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, eds. Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramon Grosfoguel (Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007); Santiago Castro-Gomez ‘The Social Sciences, Epistemic Violence and the Problem of the ‘Invention of the Other’. Nepantla 3, no. 2 (2002): 269-285.17 Rachel Sieder Multiculturalism in Latin America: Indigenous Rights, Diversity and Democracy (London: Palgrave, 2002); Phillip Wearne Return of the Indian: Conquest and Revival in the Americas (London: Latin America Bureau: 1996).18 See the collection of essays: Claudia Briones (ed.) Cartografías Argentinas: Políticas Indígenas y Formaciones Provinciales de Alteridad (Buenos Aires, Antropofagia, 2005).

colonization19. 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 resistance20. 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 justify both violent interventions and everyday erasures of indigenous peoples21.

With this tool-kit in mind, I approached the Welsh archive looking for relationships of power, framed especially by motifs of civilization 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 people22. Yet the archive always presented me with the breathing people caught up in these global dynamics, their human relationships and responses and the possiblities, 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 TrerawsonA 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 HeddwchOn March 2nd and 3rd and 4th planted seedsOn 12th Brother J and self killed a puma”23.

19 For example, Karen Ordahl Kupperman Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2000); Richard White The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Much of the Australian debate takes place in the journal Settler Colonial Studies; see also Lorenzo Veracini ‘”Settler Colonialism”: Career of a Concept’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, No.2 (2013), 313-333.. 20 See the collection of essays edited by Lynette Russell (ed) Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 21 Scott Lauria Morgensen ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now” Settler Colonial Studies 1, No.1, (2011). 52-76. 22 This is also a key concern of Marcelo Gavirati’s work El contacto entre galeses, pampas y tehuelches: la conformación de un modelo de convivencia pacífica en la Patagonia central (1865-1885) (Universidad del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Doctorado Interuniversitario en Historia, 2012).23 Richard Ellis, Diary 1865-1916, (Glaniad http://www.glaniad.com/index.php?lang=en&id=34348&t=2, accessed 8 April 2014) 2-3 (English original).

The Welsh had been in the Chupat for around 9 months when the first encounter occurred. This moment is captured in the reminiscences of many memoires, 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 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]24 approached, …the Welshman stood empty-handed – but the women behind the door each held a tool – axe, pole, pitchfork – ready to face these two”25.

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 light of experiences in the USA reported in the newspapers and probably recounted first-hand by one of the settlers, Edwyn C. Roberts, who was from Oshkosh, Wisconsin26. W. Casnodyn Rhys, for example, explains that “they had read about the Patagonian Indians – big men, veritable giants and cannibals”27 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)28. 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 H.M. Stanley’s account of his African journeys in Through the Dark Continent29.

The Welsh had been granted permission to colonize the Chubut Valley by President Guillermo Rawson who supported their colony with 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

24 Berwyn uses the Welsh word brodor which literally translates as ‘native’ but does not carry the racial connotations usually associated with this word, especially at this time. Brodor translates as ‘person of/in their homeland’ (bro means ‘homeland’ or ‘home-patch’ and is still used widely). Given the difficulties of accurate translation, I will use the term brodor where the word appears in the original. 25 Richard Jones Berwyn, ‘Gyda’r Gwladvawrwyr yn Nyfryn y Camwy, Patagonia: Gweled Brodorion Anwar’ Cyfaill yr Aelwyd VII, no. 2, Tachwedd (1866): 40-42, 40; Welsh original, my translation. 26 Edwyn Roberts Y Wladfa Gymreig yn Mhatagonia (Bethesda: J.F. Williams, 1893); see also Fernando Williams Entre el desierto y el jardín: viaje, literatura y paisaje en la colonia galesa de la patagonia (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2010),117-118. 27 ibid: December 1919., 8. 28 Jonathan Ceredig Davies ‘Deunydd a Defnyddiwyd gan Jonathan Ceredig Davies yn ei ‘Patagonia: a description of the country’, NLW MS8545-8B (n.d., circa 1890): 181, handwritten notes. 29 William Hughes, ‘Letter to Rev. Michael D Jones, 22 July 1879’ (Glaniad: http://www.glaniad.com/index.php?lang=en&subj=5749&id=33075&t=2, accessed 8 April 2014): 2.

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 expanding state jurisdiction to the south30. Central to this mission was the desire to implant civilization 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 colonizing-civilizing 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 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 friendshipBerwyn’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”31.

There had been 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; then 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’”32.

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 Peoples controlled fully half of the Argentine territory, especially in the south (Patagonia), the west (towards the Andes) and in the far

30 Tulio Halperin Donghi Una Nacion para el Desierto Argentino (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Básica Argentina). 31 Berwyn, ‘Gyda’r Gwladvafrwyr’, 40. 32 Ibid., 41.

north (Chaco)33. However, the expansion of settlements and vast ranches into these Indigenous homelands created tensions between Indigenous and settler communities which became increasingly violent. Aggressive colonizing incursions and broken treaties generated Indigenous attacks or malones against ranches and settlements, sometimes leading to organised resistance on the part of Indigenous alliances34. 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 resistance35.

This policy of cultural and racial elimination and capitalist appropriation vividly reveals, as Patrick Wolfe suggests, the presence of a genocidal logic within settler colonization; that is, colonization moves beyond resource appropriation to demand the imposition of Western modes of thinking and being36. The ‘Conquest of the Desert’ was a war of genocide and colonization, which simultaneously sought to create and destroy 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 government37) and prove the legitimacy of its colonizing project; it was the supposed erasure of the indigenous ‘barbarian’ which branded Argentina as modern38. 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 servants39. Thus, colonial oppression was completed by assimilation, while the ‘internal other’ persisted as a despised and subordinate object of state policies40.

While the Conquest of the Desert was yet to arrive in 1866 Chubut, knowledge of what was occurring to the north spread, and it was far from surprising that the ‘two Indians’ might look pale and distressed when they heard the gun shots41. Indeed something of this

33 Monica Quijada ‘La Ciudadanización del ‘Indio Bárbaro’: Políticas Oficiales y Oficiosos hacia la Población Indígena de la Pampa y la Patagonia, 1870-1920’, Revista de Indias 59, no. 217 (1999): 675-704.34 Briones and Delrio ‘The “Conquest of the Desert”’. 35 Miguel Bartolomé ‘Los Pobladores del “Desierto” Genocidio, Etnocidio y Etnogénesis en la Argentina’, Cuadernos de Antropologia Social 17, (2003): 162-189.36 Patrick Wolfe ‘Settler Colonialism and the elimination of the native’ Journal of Genocide Research 8, No 4, (2006) 387-409. 37 Carlos Martínez Sarasola ‘The Conquest of the Desert and the Free Indigenous Communities of the Argentine Plains’ in Nicola Foote and René Harder Horst (eds) Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America (Gainsville: University Press fo Florida, 2010), 201-223. 38 Claudia Briones ‘Construccinoes de aboriginalidad en Argentina’ Bulletin Société Suisse de Américanistes 68, (2004) 73-90. 39 Alexis Papazian and Mariano Nagy ‘Prácticas de disciplinamiento Indígena en la Isla Martín García hacia fines del signlo XIX’, Revista TEFROS 8, December 2010. 40 Briones article about the military 41 Walter Mario Delrio, Memorias de Expropriación: Sometimiento e Incorporación Indígena en la Patagonia, 1872-1943 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2005).

colonialist approach existed within the Welsh colony, as reported by both William Phillips42 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”43.

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 Patagonia44 but also (now) for the region of Chubut which has taken this story to its heart as a way of articulating today’s official multicultural Argentine identity45. Understanding this relationship as one of friendship is important because it justifies the colonial project, erasing the violences 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 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”46. 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

42 William Phillips ‘Fifteen Years in Patagonia’, NLW MS1653B, (n.d.): 24, handwritten notes, . 43 Berwyn, ‘Gyda’r Gwladvafrwyr’, 42. 44 Esther Whitfield, ‘Empire, nation and the fate of a language: Patagonia in Argentine and Welsh literature’, Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 1 (2011): 73-93. 45 Geraldine Lublin ‘La Identidad en la encrujida: al comunidad galesa del Chubut y la conmemoraciones del Centenario y Bicentenario de la Revolucion de Mayo’, Identidades 3, no.5 (2013): 115-130. 46 W. Casnodyn Rhys, ‘Articles by B.Q in the Gowertonian’, (NLW, MS20549E: April 1920): 2, handwritten notes, 12. See also William Casnodyn Rhys Patagonia que Canta (Memoria Argentina) (Buenos Aires: Emece, 2000).

assuming their own advancement on the path of history which is reinforced by drawing comparison to children, thus compounding that subordination with infantilisation47. For example, for Rhys the “aborigenes” are “shy and simple children of nature whose ancestors long ago passed out of the sweep of ancient civilization, 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”48. 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”49.

Thus equality was a superficial performance, underpinned by the certainties of European civilization 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”50. The fear of quixotic savagery, and the disdain it merits, remains vivid.

These stories of merry neighbours, while laden with disdain, 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”51. 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

47 Geraldine Lublin draws on different examples but reaches similar conclusions, see ‘Y Wladfa’, 22. Gwladychu heb defedigaethu?’ gwerddon 4 (2009), 8-23.48 W. Casnodyn Rhys ‘Borderland of Civilization’, NLW MS20549E (1902). 49 W. Casnodyn Rhys ‘Pioneering in Patagonia’, NLW MS16654C (no date): 56, handwritten manuscript for a book. 50 Rhys ‘Borderland…’, 10. 51 George C. Musters, At Home with the Patagonians (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005 [1871]), 97.

One fascinating and important document that bring the indigenous voice to this history is the letter sent to Lewis Jones (leader of the Welsh settlement). It was dictated by Cacique Antonio to the Swiss naturalist, Claraz52:

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 colonize 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 colonize 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 colonize 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 Antonio53

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 52 The insightful circumstances of this amanuensis are detailed by Claraz in: Georges Claraz (Rodolfo Casamiquela, ed.) Viaje al Rio Chubut: Aspectos Naturalisticos y Etnologicos (1865-1866) (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Continente, 2008), 103. 53 ‘Correspondence respecting the Establishment’; also, and with analysis, Williams, Entretelones, 28-37.

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 colonize 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 foster54.

Interestingly, the Welsh are also clear that this land belonged to the Indigenous – as well as being available for colonization. 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’55. In this way they are iterating dominant, Lockean justifications of colonialism which also inform Argentine policies of colonization 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 civilization56. While the colonists imagine that they are filling an ‘empty’ space, at the same time many voices in the archive agree with Reverend William Phillips’ observation that the indigenous are “the rightful owner of the soil on which the settlers had located themselves”57. This presents a paradox – how can the Welsh claim the right to colonize 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 to the colony 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”58. Thus right from the start of the enterprise, fair dealing was understood to justify colonization, which was in turn promoted as the vehicle that would bring progress and prosperity to the nation59.

The ‘two Indians’ (who turn out to be Cacique Francisco and his wife) whose arrival Berwyn recounts also came as emissaries seeking connection and trade:

54 See Marcelo Gavirati El contacto entre galeses, pampas y tehuelches for an comprehensive analysis of Welsh-Indigenous trade. 55 Fernando Williams Entre el desierto y el jardín: Viaje, literatura y paisaje en la colonia galesa de la Patagonia (Buenos Aires,: Prometeo, 2010), 68. 56 Domingo Sarmiento Facundo or, Civilization and Barbarism (London: Penguin, 1998 [1845]); for a detailed discussion, see Susana Villavicencio Sarmiento y la Nación Cívica: Ciudadania y Filosofías de la Nación Argentina (Buenos Aires: Eudaba, 2008), 47-76. 57 Phillips ‘Fifteen Years’, 23.58 Hugh Hughes ‘Cadfan’, Llawlyfr y Wladychfa Gymreig (Llynlleifiad, Lewis Jones, 1862) 19.59 Geraldine Lublin ‘Y Wladfa: gwladychu heb drefedigaethu?’ Gwerddon 4, Gorfennaf (2009) 8.

“... 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”60.

Cacique Antonio’s group 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”61. 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 enmeshed62. 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, accruing especially from their expertise in negotiating the 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. Cacique Francisco realized that the Welsh could not really support themselves and on a later visit 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 barbeque] and many other necessary items of value in their new culinary and changed life”63.

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… The huntsmen would regale them with tales of the chase, of the prowess of their

60 Berwyn ‘Gyda’r Gwladvawrwyr’, 42.61 ‘Letter, Commander Denniston to Captain Bedingfield, ‘Cracker’ April 17, 1871’, (Papurau’r Llywodraeth 1867-1898, NLW 20903D), 18.62 Alberto Harambour Ross ‘Region, nation, statebuilding: on the configuration of Hegemonic Identities in Patagonia, Argentina nad Chile, 1870s-1920s’ in Sibylle Baumbach (ed.) Regions of Culture – Regions of Identity (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher verlag Trier, 2010), 49-62; Bascopé ‘De la Exploración’. 63 Rhys, ‘Pioneering…’, 46. Marcelo Gavirati argues convincingly that such help was offered in order to ensure that the settlement, and the trading arrangement, did not fail; El contacto entre galeses, pampas y tehuelches, 219-279.

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’”64.

This admiration for the hunting skills of the Tehuelche marks a space in their relationship in which the familiar racial/civilizational power relations are upended and different kinds of knowledge and capacity, at which Francisco excelled, are valued. The travel journals of Llwyd ap Iwan65 or John Daniel Evans’ memoires66, 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”67, expressing the camaraderie and cooperation necessary to hunt and survive in this tough environment. Indeed, in the diaries and journals of expeditions encounters with indigenous travellers are noted as a welcome encounter. They will often camp together, share food and information, and often letters are given to the indigenous (usually travelling to the Chubut Valley) to be passed to loved ones back home. For example John Murray Thomas was surveynig and exploring in 1877. He notes that 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”68. The open plains are a place which erodes the hierarchies of global coloniality replacing this with the hospitalities of survival and camaraderie in the wide, wild landscape.

Welsh embrace of the Indigenous hunt also tapped into the power relationships and perceived injustices experienced back home in Wales. Rhys explains:

“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”69. 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 culture70. 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 64 Ibid, 48.65 Llwyd ap Iwan ‘Dyddiaduron’ NLW MS7258. Edited and published as Diarios del Explorador Llwyd ap Iwan (Buenos Aires: Patagonia Sur, 2008). 66 Clery Evans (ed.) John Daniel Evans, El Molinero: Una Historia entre Gales y la Colonia 16 de Octubre, (Esquel: Grafica Alfa, 1994). 67 Ibid, 19 & 93. 68 Diary of a Journey, John Murray Thomas NLW facs 3960404, facs 396 (1877). 69 Rhys, ‘Pioneering…’, 48.70 Glyn Williams The Desert and the Dream: A Study of Welsh Colonization in Chubut, 1865-1915 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1975), 1-8.

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”71. 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 colonized not only physically but also in the realm of fantasy – even before the colonizers arrive72. This dream of a better future in another (colonized) place acts to “energiz[e] the present with the anticipation of what is to come”73 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 this rural working class Welsh, like their counterparts elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, this economic motivation was predominant74.

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, colonization 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 civilizing influence on the ‘barbarians’ of Britain75. 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 promoted76. It states that: “The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial

71 Captain Brent ‘Report on the Welsh Colony in Chupat, March 26, 1885’ (Papurau’r Llywodraeth 1867-1898, NLW 20903D) 2. 72 Lyman Tower Sergeant ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Utopias’ in Gregory Claeys (ed.) Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 205. 73 Ashcroft, ‘Introduction’, 4. 74 Aled Jones and Bill Jones ‘The Welsh World and the British Empire, c.1851-1939: An Exploration’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 14, no. 2 (2010): 57-81; Glyn Williams ‘Desert and the Dream’, 33-38. 75 Gwyneth Tyson Roberts ‘Language of the Blue Books: the perfect instrument of Empire’ (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998). 76 Ibid.; Prys Morgan, Brad y Llyfrau Gleision (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1991).

prosperity of the people. It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects”77. 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 possessions78.

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 Matthews79 and Edwyn Roberts80 and galvanised the Reverend Michael D. Jones to lead (and largely finance) the colonizing 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”81. For him then, the initiative was “not a mercantile company at all but a patriotic movement to found a Welsh colony”82.

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”83. 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”84. 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 which was written only sixteen years after Amerigo Vespucci sailed to chart the ‘New World’85. In More’s Utopia, the country is created following the colonization 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

77 “Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales” (http://digidol.llgc.org.uk/METS/SEW00003b/frames?div=56&subdiv=0&locale=en&mode=reference, 1847, accessed, 8/4/2014) 66. 78 Chris Williams ‘Problematizing Wales: an Exploration in Historiography and Postcoloniality’ in Jane Aaron and Chris Williams (eds), Postcolonial Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005) 3-22. 79 Abraham Matthews Hanes y Wladfa Gymreig yn Patagonia (Aberdar: Mills ac Evans, 1894), 3-5. 80 Edwyn Roberts Hanes Dechreuad Y Wladfa Gymreig yn Patagonia (Bethesda: J.F. Philllips, 1893), 8-11.81 Michael D Jones, Gwladychfa Gymreig (Liverpool: J Lloyd, 1860), 5-7; Abraham Matthews, Hanes y Wladfa Gymreig yn Patagonia (Aberdar: Mills and Evans, 1894), 3-4. 82 ‘Michael D Jones’ written response to questions, Liverpool, May 27 1865’ 1885’ (Papurau’r Llywodraeth 1867-1898, NLW 20903D) 3.83 Ashcroft ‘Introduction’ 12.84 Ibid., 5. 85 Susan Bruce (ed), Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis and the Isle of Pines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), liii.

shapes understandings of colonization86. Moreover, the supposedly clean slate offered by New World, understood to be a terra nullis, had been attractive to colonists from the start precisely because of its supposed emptiness suggested that it was an Eden87. It was this which inspired religious idealists who colonized the USA, 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 lit during a visit there, where he also met Edwyn Roberts who conceived the idea of the Wladfa in Patagonia88. 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 Jerusalem89. 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 colonization 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 colonize 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 civilization/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 1882-4 and is universally described by the Welsh diarists and essayists as a time of horror and violence. For Jonathan Ceredig Davies the

86 Karl Hardy, “Unsettling Hope: Contemporary Indigenous Politics. Settler-colonialism and Utopianism”, Spaces of Utopia 2, no.1, (2012): 123-136, 124. 87 Sargent, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Utopias’, 206-7. 88 Michael D. Jones Gwladychfa Gymreig (Liverpool J. Lloyd, 1860). 89 Fernando Williams Entre el desierto y el jardín, 78.

Conquest was “a regular wave of extermination”90 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”91.

Cacique Valentín Sayhueke wrote to Lewis Jones (the Welsh leader in Gaiman), reporting deceptions and assaults practiced 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”92.

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)”93.

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. 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 Valchetta94.

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, the Welsh were entirely self-governing; they made their own rules and governed through a council of settlers which recognised the political personhood of women as well as men, and which met when necessary in a large meeting open to all95. Indeed, there was no permanent state presence at all until the appointment of Sr. Oneto who arrived as Comisario in 1875. The exact relationships of power between the Welsh colonists, led by Lewis Jones and the lonely

90 Jonathan Ceredig Davies ‘Deunydd a Defnyddiwyd’, 284.91 Rhys, ‘Borderland’, 28, 24. 92 Lewis Jones, Hanes y Wladva Gymreig (Gwasg Genedlaethol Gymraeg, 1898), 116. 93 Williams, Entretelones, 209. 94 Clery A Evans (ed) John Daniel Evans ‘El Molinero’ (Esquel: Grafica Alfa, 1994), 38-9 & 92-3; Ana Ramos and Walter Delrio ‘Mapas y narrativas de desplazamiento. Memorias mapuche-tehuelche sobre el sometimiento estatal en Norpatagonia’ Antítesis 4, no.8 2011: 515-532. 95 R. Bryn Williams, Y Wladfa (Cardiff: Wales University Press: 1967).

Comisario was not clear. 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 187996. 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 home97. Antagonisms were compounded by the opening of state schools where the language of instruction was Spanish98. The children of Welsh colonists were 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 over99. 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 1882100. 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]”101. 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

96 Jones Hanes y Wladfa, 97. 97 Lewis Jones, ‘Y Carchariaid a’i ganlyniadau’, NLW MS12200A (January 20, 1882 - March 21 1883). handwritten notes and clippings, 1-598 R. Bryn Williams Y Wladfa (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1962) 169-185. 99 Ibid., 155-159.100 Lewis Jones, ‘Y Carchariaid a’i ganlyniadau’, NLW MS12200A (January 20, 1882 - March 21 1883). handwritten notes and clippings, 1-5101 Juan Finoquetto ‘Resultado de los exámenes en las escuelas del Chubut, Diciembre 31, 1883’ El Monitor de la Educación Común 3, no. 59 (1884) 607-608.

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”102. 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 to 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 boney 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 extensions and be reduced to this little corral”103.

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”104. 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 civilization and progress. 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 102 Davies ‘Deunydd a defnyddiwyd…’ 285. 103 Clery A Evans John Daniel Evans ‘El Molinero’, 92-3, emphasis in original.104 Ibid, 93.

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 colonizer and colonized.

Firstly, 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 ‘civilize’ the Welsh and equip them with the superior linguistic/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 civilization and slipped easily into the discourse of the noble savage. It was this set of Euro-centric, racialised ideas which made possible this paradoxical anti-colonial strategy; colonization in a place that could be imagined as ‘empty’ because those who lived there were ‘Indian’, and 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 twenty 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 colonized 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 colonization is only ever an oppressive violation, the colonizers themselves can have a complex and ambiguous relationship to the social world that they come to inhabit. Thinking beyond the caricature of the colonizer 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 multiculturalism105. In the Province of Chubut, this multiculturalism has deployed the ‘friendship’ between indigenous and Welsh settler to implicitly argue that inter-ethnic relationships (that is, colonialism) were not fraught by violence and oppression but rather

105 Reference to author’s publication.

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 identity106. 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”107.

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’”108. This image of unproblematic friendship is particularly performed by the annual re-enactment (beginning in 2010) 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 hands109. 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 delegitimize 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 colonizer-colonized 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 civilizational 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 106 Lublin ‘La identidad en la encrujida’ 122-127. 107 Cited in ibid, 123. The use of ‘Tehuelche’ here refers to the controversial notion that the Tehuelche were the ‘original’ peoples of the region, and that the Mapuche are migrants further north and from ‘Chile’; see footnote 25 of Lublin ‘La identidad en la encrujida’, 122. 108 Ibid,124. 109 Geraldine Lublin ‘Shifting Memories in Welsh Patagonia’ Latin Americanists in Wales Seminar, Aberystwyth University, January 24 2014.

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 twenty 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 civilization/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.