The following document is an interview with José Marimán Quemenado, historian, social scientist and Mapuche activist. During the years of General Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile, he was expelled from the university in the mid 1980’s precisely because of these activities. He went to live in Denver, Colorado in 1994 and subsequently, after having resided outside Chile for eighteen years, Marimán joined in the study, on which little work had previously been done, related to the place, role and contributions of Mapuche intellectual thought as related to the territorial and cultural resignification and revindication processes of the Mapuche people. This pertains both to the people living in the Araucanía region in the southern part of the country and those living in Chilean cities, particularly Santiago, the nation’s capital. Clearly, the relevance of this matter means that this thinking may be extended to other regions of Latin America and the Caribbean.