The current entanglement of intercultural health and küme mongen (good health or good life) in the Williche territory of Chile is an unstable and contradictory construction that emerged as an ideological and utopian response to three simultaneous processes: the neoliberal acceleration of dispossession and eco-social degradation, the neoliberal implementation of a special health care policy for indigenous peoples, and various forms of lack of access to health care. El entrelazamiento actual de la salud intercultural y el küme mongen (buena salud o buena vida) en el territorio williche de Chile es una construcción inestable y contradictoria que surgió como una respuesta ideológica y utópica a tres procesos simultáneos: la aceleración neoliberal del despojo y la degradación ecosocial, la implementación neoliberal de una política especial de atención de la salud para los pueblos indígenas, y diversas manifestaciones de falta de acceso a la atención médica.
Abstract:The aim of this essay is to present my experience attempting to practice some ideas of decolonial thinking within a doctoral research project. In 2010, I lived in a Williche Community in Chiloé/Buta Wapi Chilwe. As a retribution for the possibility of conducting my research there, I fulfilled several tasks defined by the Community's Health Team. A project revolving around expressive creation with children and teenagers arose: The Weche Folil. After presenting some key features of my personal trajectory and those of the regional context in which Weche Folil is grounded; I propose to think of this project as a practice that points toward the subversion of ways of thinking, feeling and being which express the colonial dimension. I understand coloniality as a key dimension of our collective existence featured by inequality, arrogance, and pain. Love, time, dedication and caring are at the hearth of this decolonizing doing. Ambivalences, contradictions and paradoxes are also part of it. This personal account may be of interest for researchers who are planning to work among indigenous peoples, especially in rural settings and in Chiloé.
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