EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 29, 2023

EVENT: “Reflections on Chile’s Constitutional Process and the Proposal for Pluri-Nationality made by Indigenous Peoples”

Elisa Loncón Antileo, a prominent Indigenous rights and languages activist and linguist from the Mapuche community of Lefweluan in Chile, will provide an analysis of the factors that led to the rejection of the proposed constitution in Chile in 2022. She will explain the foundation basis of pluri-nationality, a concept that was incorporated into the proposed constitution through democratic negotiation within the Constitutional Convention.

As a representative of the Mapuche people to the Chilean Constitutional Convention, Loncón was elected as the convention’s first president in July 2021. The convention was tasked with drafting a replacement constitutional text following mass protests across the nation in 2019 and a national vote in 2020 in favor of replacing the constitution that dated back to the Pinochet dictatorship.

The process of developing the recommendations, which directly addressed issues of indigenous representation, gender parity and environmental protections, among other changes, was instructive and will inform subsequent efforts toward reform.

Through her lecture, Loncón, a professor of education at the University of Santiago, will invite the audience to consider indigenous and environmental issues in Latin America through an approach that is inclusive, democratic and equitable, and that recognizes the rights of nature. This strategy offers a contribution to the processes of decolonization and the toppling of patriarchy, which are unfolding within a crisis of democracy and of relationships between states and native peoples in the 21st century.

PLACE: 1014 Tisch Hall, 435 State St., Ann Arbor

REGISTER: The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required if participating virtually.

SPONSORS: Donia Human Rights Center, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, with additional co-sponsorship from the the Department of History, Michigan Law and Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies