My previous post explored the genetics of Southern Patagonia. It mentions final migratory wave that finalized around 2,000 years ago. I mentioned evidence supporting the movement of people of Amazonian origin into what is now Argentina, and then, across the Andes into Chile.
I also mentioned the possibility that the Mapuche people were latecomers to the region.
In today's post I will mention the people that the Mapuche displaced.
Kofkeche, the bread people
It is an interesting fact that the island of Chiloé and the Arauco region, home of the Trauco dwarf, were also the home of a branch of the Mapuche people, the “Huilliche” group (southern people).
Before the arrival of the Spaniards, pushed by the other Mapuche groups in Central Chile, these Huilliche left their homeland in the Arauco and invaded Chiloé, where they displaced and absorbed the original Chono “boat people” who lived there.
They also brought along their beliefs, among which was the devilish Trauco. American naturalist, Dillman Samuel Bullock Lytle (1878-1971), excavated the Huilliche’s Arauco homeland during the mid-twentieth century and uncovered funerary urns that were different from those used by the Huilliche and whose size indicated a small race. An adult’s mummy, five hundred years old, recently found in Angol was barely 1.30 m tall (4 ft. .2 in.)
These findings led Bullock to believe that the Mapuche (including the Huilliche) were not the area’s original inhabitants. He assumed that they had originated in the Argentine Pampas and then migrated to Chile. When they arrived there, they came across a race of “small people,” which he named Kofkeche.
Bullock’s archaeological proof and conjectures received corroboration from oral tradition; he uncovered a Mapuche legend that mentioned “small people” or “Kofkeche.” The Mapuche words kofke and che mean “bread” and “people.” They got that name because they were small like country loaves. Bullock also mentioned a story told by an old Mapuche woman named Cayetey Anteu, whose grandmother had told her that “when the first Mapuche arrived, there were people very different from them […] they were short and thick, somewhat fat, and the Mapuche called them Kofkeche.” (Source)
Mapuche cosmogony also mentions the Kofkeche; they are evil, dwarfish creatures from an underworld that interact with ours. The Mapuche conceive the universe as a series of platforms piled upon each other in space; below our platform, where the humans live, is another level, the land of the dwarves. It is named Kofkeche Mapu or Laftrache Mapu (land of the tiny people).
Maybe the Kofkeche were related to the other groups of “small” (short statured) people inhabiting the Pacific Ocean coast northwards, into Perú (like the Chinchorro-Chango people), and lived in peace until their destruction by the invading Mapuche groups who migrated to Chile later on.
Argentine historian Rodolfo Casamiquela suspected that the Mapuche of the Arauco area were alluding to the Chono boat people “who are short,” and mentioned that in 1975 they still considered the Chubut natives as “short people, one meter tall [3 ft], who speak another language.”
In other words, the arrival of the Mapuche around 2000 years ago displaced and replaced the Kofkeche, Poya, and Chono people from the Lake District area in Chile's northern Patagonia, between the Bio Bio River and the Gulf of Ancud.
Poyas
The mysterious Poya people are mentioned by different early explorers, but little is known about them. They used canose, and lived by the lakes of this area, and may have been related to the Chonos. I will write about them in a future post.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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