Mapuche People:Valuing a Colonial Past in the Official Primary History Textbook from an Intermodal Perspective of Historical Sources

This article explores from an intermodal perspective how visual and verbal historical documents contribute to the construction of value positions regarding the Mapuche people during colonial and early republican times in the latest official 5th grade primary Chilean History textbook.The study analyzes, in particular, the visual and verbal historical secondary sources that build in combination evaluative prosodies that in turn contribute to construct determinate ideological perspectives regarding Mapuche people.The discourse analysis takes a social and ideological intermodal approach (Oteíza & Pinuer 2016, 2019) focusing on an appraisal analysis (Martin & White 2005; Martin 2014; Hood 2010; Oteíza & Pinuer 2012, 2019) informed by socio-semiotic and Systemic Functional Linguistics theories.The cumulative intersemiotic reading of symbolic images and written documents privileges evaluative prosodies of negative integrity and of high conflict, in which Mapuche people are represented with more agency than Hispanics, emphasizing the stereotype of indigenous people as foreign, exotic and brave warriors, but also as violent, primitive and savage people that have had resisted Hispanic desires of slavering and cultural assimilation.Historical secondary sources offer alternative historical interpretations, although mainly constructed by evoked evaluations that could be less evident to children.