Faumelisa Manquepillan Calfuleo

Faumelisa Manquepillan Calfuleo is a Mapuche artist born in Puquiñe, in the territory of Futawillimapu, now part of the municipality of Lanco, in Chile’s Los Ríos Region, in 1960. A poet, sculptor, craftswoman, weaver and singer-songwriter, she is descended through her maternal line from the last cacique of the locality of Puquiñe, a connection that runs through a body of work deeply linked to memory, orality, nature and the ancestral knowledge of her people.

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In 2000 she published Sueños de Mujer / Pewma zomo, a bilingual edition produced by the National Corporation for Indigenous Development, and in 2017 she published Lykan Küra Ñi Purrun. Danza de la Piedra, also with the support of CONADI. Her poems have been included in important anthologies of Indigenous and contemporary Mapuche poetry, among them Futawillimapu.

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Ensayos, poesía y documentos (CONADI / Universidad de Los Lagos, 2001), Epu mari ülkatufe ta fachantü. 20 poetas mapuche contemporáneos (LOM Ediciones, 2004), Hilando en la memoria. Epu rupa (Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2009), Mamihlapinatapai. Poesía de mujeres mapuche, selk’nam y yámana (Editorial Desde la Gente, Argentina, 2010), and Reuëmn. Poesía de mujeres mapuche, selk’nam y yámana (Espacio Hudson, Argentina, 2017). Her work brings together poetry, music and traditional crafts —stone, wood, textiles and plant fibers— and has also extended into intercultural education, where she has worked as a traditional educator, cultural advisor and community cultural organizer in her territory. In 2021 she entered politics as a candidate for the Senate in Circumscription 12 of the Los Ríos Region, expanding her public trajectory from artistic creation into territorial and cultural representation.