Chaco > Wichí

The word Wichi is a self-denomination. The Wichi are also known as Mataco, a pejorative term that several authors have claimed is of Spanish origin and means "an unimportant animal." Until the nineteenth century, and in some cases until the early 1900s, the lifestyles of many Wichi groups had not been endangered by the society around them. The minimum social unit was an extended family of two generations. A group of families that shared a particular territory constituted a socio-political unit that anthropological literature refers to as "band." In turn, several of these bands joined together to form larger political alliances (Braunstein 1983). As long as the bands were large in number, the Wichi practiced endogamy. They depended on gathering, hunting, and fishing, and to a lesser degree on agricultural activities, all of which were organized according to the conditions of the ecosystem and to their seasonal nomadic circuit.

From the sixteenth century, Spanish conquerors pressured the local population until they were forced to relocate along the Bermejo River in the late 1700s (Kersten 1986). As from 1884, Benjamin Victorica, the War Minister, launched a military campaign to occupy the land and submit the regional population. The objective of the campaign, which ended in the 1920s, was to conquer the indigenous population and obtain workers for the mills, sawmills, and cotton plantations. Military control over the area and the growing incorporation of indigenous workers were two factors that gradually led to the sedentarization of these groups.

In the early seventeenth century the Catholic Church had made several unsuccessful attempts to evangelize the Wichi. This was not the case of the South American Mission of the Anglican Church that was able to consolidate its position in a large part of the Wichi world in the 1940s.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the growing relationships with new White cattle breeders and farmers generated ceaseless conflicts over the land. Moreover, the incorporation of cattle produced a progressive deterioration in the ecosystem. At the time, the Wichi were employed as a workforce in the emerging peripheral capitalism. They were hired as cheap labor in the sugar-cane plantations in the provinces of Salta, Jujuy, and Chaco. In sum, the establishment of churches, the building of roads, the employment in the mills, sawmills, and cotton plantations, the gradual development of villages, the deterioration of the ecosystem, and the access to food staples all conditioned the definitive sedentarization of the indigenous population. The residents of many settlements currently hold communal land titles of the small lots on which they live. In the early 1980s the Wichi adopted Evangelism to which they incorporated their own shamanic practices.