Research

INTRODUCTION

Kollof in Mapudungun, or cochayuyo in Spanish is an edible southern bull kelp harvested along the entirety of the long Chilean coastline, i.e., about 4300 km (2700 mi.) from top to bottom. There are many spelling variants, e.g., kollov, coyofe, coyoy, koyof, coyof, or collof, depending on the local variant and pronunciation of Mapudungun. Cochayuyo is a Quechua loan word in Spanish, meaning sea (cocha) and weed (yuyo). I use both kollof and cochayuyo throughout the article to refer to the same species: southern bull kelp (Durvillaea incurvata). Recently confirmed as an endemic species called Durvillaea incurvata, kollof is a kind of seaweed (the common name for marine macroalgae), specifically a kelp, which is a long, brown macroalgae with a holdfast, stipe, and blades (Fraser et al. 2020; Fig. 1). Indigenous people throughout Chile have harvested kollof from rocky coasts for thousands of years, including the Aymara, Quechua, and Mapuche peoples, trading across ecological zones from the sea to the Andean mountains (O’Connor 2018). Traces were found at the oldest archaeological site in South America in southern Chile at Monte Verde in the context of food preparation; thus, its earliest registry of consumption dates back over 14,000 years (Dillehay et al. 2008). Today, Indigenous and non-Indigenous artisanal seaweed gatherers (alguero/as) comb the coasts and sell their seaweed, both locally and overseas. The macroalgae is overexploited in parts of southern Chile, with a two-year extractive harvesting ban in the O’Higgins and Maule regions, even if picked up off the beach (SERNAPESCA 2018). However, further south in the Bío Bío, La Araucanía, and Los Lagos regions, where algueras carry out their trade, a harvesting ban has not been necessary.

This is likely due to Indigenous Lafkenche (lafken = waters and che = people) organizing to ensure Indigenous management of their ancestral coastline and local ecology. The Lafkenche are part of the Indigenous Mapuche (mapu = land and che =people) culture and live in southern coastal areas of Chile (Martínez Neira 1995). Kollof plays a key role in the Lafkenche cosmovision and traditional foodways (Castro Neira 2005, Montecino 2005, Rojas-Maturana and Peña-Cortés 2015) in which the concept of itrofill mogen recognizes the biodiverse relationship of life, and “human and non-human life are interdependent and linked together” (Loncón 2023, as cited by Ramay 2023:78). Therefore, reciprocal relationships are expected between plants, animals, and people, including seaweed.

Because kollof is central to Lafkenche identity and practices, a closer look is required to understand their management practices. Not only important to cultural identity, I argue that the relationship between kollof and the Lafkenche people is also ecological and territorial. In what follows, I develop a conceptual framework to understand Lafkenche-kollof relationships through my proposed concept of keystone foods, developed in conversation with literature on keystone species, traditional ecological knowledge, and foodways. Applying the analytical framework to two ethnographic case studies, I propose that kollof is a keystone food, which I define as a species consumed and commercialized that is central to cultural identity and local ecology that co-constitutes local landscapes.

Kollof: a keystone species

To propose the conceptual framework, I first reviewed the role of kollof/cochayuyo (in scientific literature and when sold to outsiders, it is more commonly called its Spanish name “cochayuyo”) in marine coastal environments as a keystone species. Coined by Paine’s (1969) research on starfish, keystone species form the ecological backbone of a local environment, and their alteration causes a cascading impact across different interspecies relationships (see Table 1 for an example of a keystone species). Marine biologists and coastal ecologists identify kelp as a keystone species in the intertidal zone. Charles Darwin wrote the earliest scientific recognition of how kelp forests are essential to both biodiversity and Indigenous food sources in Chile (Darwin [1839] 1997). The keystone species of kollof, or southern bull kelp, is the foundation for the intertidal habitat, and scientists indicate that its loss could lead to ecosystem collapse (Blake et al. 2017, Thomsen and South 2019, Carranza et al. 2024). It is well-documented as a species with a central ecological role in coastal habitats (Paredes-Mella et al. 2024). Southern bull kelp is also called an ecosystem engineer and an epibenthic engineer, that is, a marine coastal organism that plays a key role in ecosystem functionality and form, providing complex, multilevel habitats (Jones et al. 1994, Rigolet et al. 2014). Davic (2003) insisted that “a keystone species is a strongly interacting species whose top-down effect on species diversity and competition is large relative to its biomass dominance within a functional group.” Not only does kollof modify wave action and provide shading for other species, but it also shelters vertebrates and invertebrates in its long sheaths and at the point of attachment to rocky outcrops, the holdfast, creating massive kelp forests. In addition, the term’s utility, according to Davic (2003), is that “keystone species has applied value for the conservation of natural areas.” In other words, this approach to keystone species is focused on what their ecological or environmental roles could afford regarding conservation and ecosystem engineering (Lorimer 2017). One example is the Marine Station in Las Cruces, Chile, that enclosed a stretch of coast to study kollof undisturbed by human intervention. This study of a keystone species follows an epistemological and physical division in which the attempt to study and conserve species in a laboratory-like setting is imagined as without human interference, even though some anthropogenic factors (such as climate change) cannot be controlled for.

To Davic’s (2004) dismay, the concept of keystone species was adapted as a metaphor to consider culture-nature relationships through the concept of cultural keystone species, in which the plant or animal has “its key role in defining cultural identity; it may or may not be considered ecologically dominant” (Garibaldi and Turner 2004). Cristancho and Vining’s concept of culturally defined keystone species (CKS) “designate[s] those plant and animal species whose existence and symbolic value are essential to the stability of a culture over time” (Cristancho and Vining 2004:153). In sum, these concepts, though inspired by keystone species, give little importance to its ecological role and rather focus on the importance of the species to cultural longevity.

Reconciling these two definitions, I propose that kollof/cochayuyo can be considered both an ecological and cultural keystone species. On one hand, Davic (2004) argued that the cultural keystone species fails to consider the “trophic interactions in ecosystems and regulation of species diversity.” Kollof/cochayuyo fulfills the ecological definition as a keystone species, even beyond the intertidal zone. Ecologists and environmental scientists emphasize that kelp wrack from rocky nearshore reefs impacts sandy beach ecosystems (Walter et al. 2024), showing that coastal kelp ecosystems are interconnected, from rocky reef to shore. Therefore, kollof directly impacts onshore ecologies. Because Lafkenche livelihoods depend on this intercoastal region, and kollof/cochayuyo is incorporated into their foodways, it holds a key role in their cultural reproduction, fulfilling the role of cultural keystone species.

Recently, the concept of biocultural keystone species also bridges the ecological and cultural keystone debate (Levaggi and Ibarra 2025). Indeed, social-ecological systems thinking proposes that “natural and social systems are tightly interwoven through complex interactions and feedback loops” (Doran 2024). This echoes a basic tenet of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK): that people and ecology are interconnected (Agrawal 1995, Berkes 2009, Reyes-García and Martí-Sanz 2007, Doran 2024). However, above all, the role of kollof/cochayuyo in Lafkenche culture resides in its foodways because it is consumed and commercialized. To account for this complex interplay between kollof as a keystone species and its cultural importance as a Lafkenche food, I draw upon literature from traditional ecological knowledge and critical food studies.

Kollof’s TEK and biocultural importance in Lafkenche foodways

Understanding that kollof is a primary food in Lafkenche culture is fundamental to studying how Lafkenche-kollof relations unfold. Petipas (2024) related a key moment in his understanding of Indigenous Mapuche-pewen (Araucanian pine nut tree) relationships: Conservationists and biologists presented seed conservation strategies to Mapuche leaders, and one elder responded that the first thing they needed to understand was that the pine nut was not a seed; it was food, for people, for ceremony, and for culture.

The accumulation of knowledge of the care, harvesting practices, and consumption of kollof constitutes part of a local, Lafkenche traditional ecological knowledge (Berkes et al. 2003) that sustains its foodways and local livelihoods. One approach to studying TEK is to incorporate it into a resource management approach, such as maritime management, which looks at how TEK has adapted to the changing environment and resources. This enriches scientific knowledge of resilience and sustainability by placing TEK under the evaluative lens of the scientific approach. In this way, Lafkenche knowledge of kollof could be mobilized to make changes in Chilean fisheries law to establish seasonal harvesting and bans. However, Nadasdy (1999) brought up the thorny issue of TEK being incorporated into a Western framework purely for Western benefit, reproducing the power dynamics of outsiders over Indigenous people. Nadasdy (1999) outlined two key critiques: first, that Western disciplinary lines concentrate and divide TEK artificially so that sheep biologists work on the TEK of sheep, which discounts the holistic systems-view of much TEK. Second, he also critiques the “distillation” of complex systems of knowledge into numbers that just “sit on shelves.” Then, TEK is consolidated into management centers or policy as future-oriented solutions (Huntington 2000) or nature-based solutions that decenter Indigenous agency (Nelson and Reed 2025) and prioritize restoration with uneven political and economic results (Lorimer 2017). If not mobilized in dialogue with Indigenous communities, this approach to TEK could lead to oversimplification and can garner accusations of academic extractivism.

Another way is a collaborative approach to TEK, which develops in dialogue with Indigenous knowledge-as-process (Agrawal 1995, Reyes-García and Martí-Sanz 2007, Berkes 2009), without removing it from its ontological and relational frame. Berkes (2009), for example, argued that Indigenous communities navigate complex changes in their environment through their TEK framework, in which individuals, households, and the community adjusted both short- and long-term hunting strategies within their traditional ecological practices, showing that TEK is a changing, culturally informed multi-scalar process. Through co-management institutions, in which the “desire to maintain distinctions between scientific and traditional knowledge” is defunct (Agrawal, 1996:24), these concerns and adaptations can be transmitted to regional, national, and international levels, strengthening Indigenous autonomy.

This approach focuses on a similar framework to ‘nature-based solutions’ but extends the socio-ecological approach with a biocultural and relational orientation (Nelson and Reed 2025). By researching TEK within its cultural context, local or Indigenous frameworks for understanding changes of subsistence and resource use are also integral to understanding possible restorative ecological practices that are informed by local practices (see Anbleyth-Evans et al. 2019 for an example of collaborative restorative endeavors). Because TEK is dynamic and relational within communities, there are often different gender roles and divisions of knowledge between ages and genders that deserve attention, as is the case with kollof harvesting and processing. Indigenous knowledge and TEK are often transmitted through embodied practices and sensorial experiences (Ñanculef Huaiquinao 2016, Farina and James 2021) that are specifically territorial (Zanjani et al. 2023). These practice-oriented ways of knowing might be overlooked in ethnographic interviews or surveys, whereas participant observation affords an embodied learning experience of the lived, ecological and territorial practices around seaweed, through sensory perceptions and narratives.

Documenting the TEK of kollof/cochayuyo, historical accounts, and current research in other regions focus on male and non-Indigenous harvesters, often through a framework of natural resource exploitation. Harvesting practices on the Chilean coast were summarized under the Pinochet dictatorship by the Japanese anthropologist Masuda, who specialized in Chile and Peruvian coastal communities (Masuda 1986, 1988). He provided a historical overview of references to cochayuyo collection and consumption in Chile, beginning with Alonso de Ovalle in 1646 (1988). Chronicles written by Spanish explorers in the 17^th and 18^th centuries (Latcham 1924) point out the multiple uses of kollof as food, animal feed, medicine, and dye. In ceremonies, the ocean’s protector spirit, or ngen, Mankian (Montecino 2005) is offered kollof, and Mapuche shamans (machi) even wore the long strands of kelp as hair. Within the Araucanía region, Azócar Avedaño and Bravo Cuervo (1996) carried out documentary photography of cochayuyeros in the 1990s, focusing on the peddlers’ overland treks to trade for foodstuffs. Some texts mention the practice in passing, such as in Melville (1976) on Mapuche social and political relations. In central Chile, Araos (2006) looked at cochayuyo practices through the lens of mareros or “men of the sea,” and seaweed itself (Araos 2017), as well a useful overview of the macroalgae exploitation along the entire Chilean coast (Araos et al. 2018). Seaweed is seeing a boom in the blue bioeconomic sector in Chile, where unruly, weedy products are simplified vehicles for tecnobusiness imaginaries (Ureta et al. 2024).

A few works probe the human-non-human relationships with seaweed. Leon (2018) studied algueras in Navidad, women who harvest the sea, through an ecofeminist approach by mapping their trajectories and memories, and A. Lazo Corvalán, M. Ávila Lagos, F. Ther-Ríos, I. Yáñez Mena, A. Mansilla, G. Aroca Sánchez, and F. J. Vázquez Pinillos (2025; unpublished manuscript) look at women seaweed collectors’ imaginaries and mobility. These studies have provided initial insights into peoples’ embodied livelihoods on the coast.

However, the kelp must also be understood as central to Lafkenche foodways. I understand foodways as the social, economic, and material practices in particular places and ecologies that together define the cultural relationship between people and what they consume (Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014). The Mapuche people draw on extensive material knowledge and practices to harvest food and resources from the sea and shore in different environments. Though kollof receives mention in historical documents, it was overlooked, or looked down on, as a food of the poor. Indeed, Montecino (2005) argued that kollof as a food carries a class-based and racial stigma.

Kollof is instrumental in trafkin, or the economic and friendly exchange of different foods such as piñones (Araucanian pine nuts), potatoes, wheat, and beans (Ñanculef Huaiquinao 2015) that sustained Mapuche foodways and interconnects territories. Cochayuyeros established routes and networks from the sea to the Andean foothills, trading dried shellfish (machas y choritos) and jerky (charqui). More recently, the coastal highway impacted these routes and failed to respect Lafkenche and Mapuche ancestral land rights, with fewer families traveling to exchange and sell in the context of increasingly extractivist ecologies on the coast and inland.

Kollof/cochayuyo is also a key monetary resource for Lafkenche livelihoods (Los Hombres del Cochayuyo, https://youtu.be/li80fDR_B00?si=XjFgGi3EruAwaQQS ). Money earned from sales may be used to purchase foods that were previously obtained through trafkin (Ñanculef Huaiquinao 2015). This was carried out in different parts of Lafkenche Mapuche territory from Bío Bío to Los Lagos; today approximately 30 families travel from Tirúa to Temuco and nearby cities to sell kollof. In sum, kollof is central to Lafkenche foodways that link coastal territories to the interior, establishing trade routes that permit a flow of different foods throughout the region.

Taking into account the role of kollof as food in Lafkenche TEK allows us to better understand a Lafkenche kollof management approach. Like quinoa in Peru (McDonell 2019) or potatoes in Chiloé (Daughters 2018), kollof represents the history, work patterns, and social relations of nourishment that actively configure local identity and landscape, particularly relevant to the relationship between local ecological knowledge and territory through Lafkenche foodways.

METHODS

I carried out ethnographic research to center Lafkenche relationships to seaweed and the coast, their harvesting practices and commercialization, with an eye to understanding the ecological relationships and sensory experiences this implies. Who eats seaweed and who does not reveal cultural cleavages in Chile (Montecino 2005), signaling the stinky, sensory aspects of the food. This approach centers kollof as an ethnographic case study to apply the concept of keystone foods and untangle the relationships between Lafkenche communities and the pungent, buoyant, slippery strands of kollof/cochayuyo.

Research design: ethnographic case studies and Lafkenche participants

The study draws on the ecological knowledge of several generations of Lafkenche seaweed gatherers, consumers, and peddlers’ life experiences from Lafkenmapu in La Araucanía, XI Region of Chile, in two field sites in Lafkenmapu, or the Lafkenche sea-territory. Research was conducted in Spanish, with some key terms in Mapudungun, which were translated by the same speakers who used the terms into Spanish. The Spanish-English translations are my own as a bilingual speaker of Spanish and English. I used snowball sampling in hard-to-reach populations (Goodman 2011), in which each contact recommended others to contact, with their prior permission.

An ethical approach to research with Indigenous people interrogates the political, material, and economic conditions of local livelihoods and follows their defined procedures over how to share their knowledge and practices (Tuhiwai Smith 1999). I attended syndicate and community meetings to formally present the research projects and invite participation. The research materials underwent institutional ethical review and received approval through the university (anonymized) prior to fieldwork. This included safeguarding sensitive cultural knowledge according to their norms and socializing findings pre-publication for commentary.

The first field site is a Lafkenche community, Mozo Painen, which used to harvest kelp on its shore, but the brown seaweed beds have disappeared post a 1960 tsunami. Community leader Mr. Hermo Antilef was a collaborator on the project. We first conducted an ethnographic focus group and mapping activity (Agar and MacDonald 1995) modified to meeting dynamics of Trawün, a Mapuche group-based dialogue (n = 8). In the community meeting, they decided that each member would choose to participate in semi-structured interviews on Lafkenche foodways on an individual basis (n = 12), with the youngest participant in his 30s and the oldest in his late 80s, in which seaweed emerged as an important cultural food, despite their lack of immediate access.

The second is a Lafkenche women’s seaweed syndicate, Lafken Malen, further north, where kollof grows abundantly on the rocky, Carahue coast. I coordinated with their president to ask permission to attend the meeting and present the project. They voted and decided that all active members (n = 18) would be interviewed in pairs. During oral histories, I asked about their childhood experiences with seaweed. Reflecting on the past provided the opportunity for them to narrate “memory work” (Jelin 2002) to create a story that links them to their current lives and situates them in time. I asked about their relationship to seaweed and the sea during the oral histories. I attended women’s seaweed gatherers’ syndicate meetings from 2024–2025, as well as their annual gastronomic festival. Some of their family members participated in opportune interviews when I visited them at home (both men and women of different ages).

Applying a case-study method to Lafkenche kollof practices and beliefs allowed me to link ethnographic, context-specific data with more macro-level generalizations, paying attention to their lived experience (Byrne and Ragin 2009) and comparing participants with or without direct access to kollof. As part of participant observation, using all senses to study kollof harvests and commercialization was particularly relevant to cultural understandings of local ecologies and landscapes. These are embodied knowledge and practices, with a focus on what Pink (2008) called “sensory sociality:” attending to sight, hearing, touch, smell, and even taste. These insights into how people experience and reflect on the senses, in dialogue with the ethnographic researcher, provided a key to understanding their ways of being in the world. An embodied, sense-based approach to ethnography is supported by feminist and Indigenous methodologies and reflects how TEK is learned through centering the gendered, relational body (Seremetakis 1993, Jacobs 2014).

To complement the ethnographic studies, I also reviewed documentary sources on seaweed. I researched and reviewed the latest ecological, biological, and social studies of kollof in Chile. I read key laws (such as the Lafkenche Law) and political policies on seaweed management from Chilean government agencies and reviewed secondary sources from news and social media on kollof and commercialization. Finally, I reviewed field notes, interviews, and focus group reports to identify recurrent themes and selected categories once saturation was achieved (Ryan and Bernard 2003).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Although kollof played an important role in the foodscapes for both areas under study, the particular histories of each place led to different insights, and the results are divided into two sections, following the case studies. In the first section, I focus on the Lafkenche community Mozo Painen, which suffered the loss of its brown seaweed meadows. I highlight the cultural persistence of kollof as a keystone food for Lafkenche communities. In the second section, I focus on the women’s seaweed syndicate because they harvest and tend to the kelp meadows through their local ecological knowledge. Considering these two sites together from different areas of Lafkenche maritorio permits an initial test of the transversal importance of kollof as a keystone food. Emergent themes in this section are selective harvesting and social regulation of the seaweed, as well as the role that kollof plays in their everyday foodscapes and local ecologies. It is important to note that interviewees use both kollof and cochayuyo when referring to the kelp, and I transcribed their use accordingly.

Ecological loss with cultural keystone persistence

In 1960, the largest earthquake recorded by modern-day instruments generated a tsunami that altered the rocky coastline north of the Toltén river, wiping out the town of Toltén and decimating the kelp beds along the coast of the Lafkenche community Mozo Painen. Community members indicated this catastrophic event completely changed the local ecology and their local foodways. With the disappearance of brown macroalgae meadows, epifaunal and associated species living in that rocky intertidal ecosystem, such as crabs and mollusks, also dwindled (Field notes, Sra. Maria, 2024).

Collaborator Hermo Antilef confirmed:

No, no, I’ve traveled all around here, for kilometers, and you can’t find the cochayuyo that we had before. There’s no ulte [the tender cochayuyo stems] left either, no razor clams, Chilean abalone, for example. Recovering those things would be an uphill battle, so to speak, but maybe it isn’t impossible.

This disaster shows the unfortunate ecological impacts of losing a keystone food because seaweed provided shelter and sustenance for many micro and macro organisms (O’Connor 2018; see Fig. 2, which shows that the kollof holdfast is home to different microorganisms). However, despite this ecological loss, community members’ oral histories and current practices show that they seek out kollof beyond the devastated beds. Therefore, their oral histories about procuring kollof are an important entryway into understanding how kelp is a keystone food despite disappearing locally.

Community members, such as Juan Nuñez, reported that he mostly caught fish in the area and harvested kollof if it drifted ashore. During rough storms, the holdfasts break and can drift for long distances due to the blades’ internal, honeycomb structure (Fig. 3, a dried frond with honeycomb pattern). An example of this opportune collecting occurred with community president Feliciana Antilef, who picked up a small frond washed up on the beach and showed me, laughing, how she gnawed directly on the tender stem. “Some people say the flavor is too strong, but I love it,” she declared. The stem and blades have separate names in Mapudungun: the bright green stem is called ulte (or lunfo further south), whereas the blades are called kollof. Ulte can be prepared by scraping the outer layer or boiled in vinegar, but as Sra. Feliciana showed, it can also be eaten raw. She also has a bundle of dried kelp stored hanging in her kitchen above the stove (see Fig. 4), which keeps it dry and mold-free, ready to be rehydrated, cooked, and eaten whenever needed. Her father hung up kollof in the rafters, over the open fire in the middle of the traditional Mapuche house (ruka). Kollof blades can be dried and stored for long periods. Therefore, although this Lafkenche community only occasionally finds kollof washed up in their coastal territory, many continue to obtain it from further away.

Lafkenche interlocutors in Mozo Painen identified kollof as a readily available dietary element that stood in place of meat in their dietary traditions. Due to territorial disputes, many Lafkenche could not raise cattle due to the lack of sufficient pasture along the coast. Morales explained that his father used to hunt coypu (Myocastor coypus), but as they grew scarce and hunting them was banned, kollof was an important way his mother ensured they were fed. As Hermo Antilef explained:

In the past, according to our grandfather, the ‘supermarket’ wasn’t in the city; it was in our own territory and that was the lafken, or sea. Through the sea and territory, they had healthy foods and that’s how they provided for themselves. From there, they got all kinds of fish, seafood, cochayuyo, ulte.

Joel Painen explained that they generally collected kollof after a storm:

...going to the shoreline and collect cochayuyo, and when there were strong winds, there was a kind of kollof that maybe came from further out to sea— I don’t know from what part, but it was better for cooking, and we’d collect that. My father would bring it home and they’d put it into the wood stove, and it would explode ‘pop pop pop’ and that was fun for us, when we were young. They’d chop it up and make soup. My mom would bathe the seaweed in a broth with potatoes and other vegetables from the garden.

Kollof’s sensorial qualities are clear in Joel’s narrative, as his family passed the seaweed through the flames to enhance its flavors, the honeycomb interior popping as air expanded. To my palate, toasting kollof tones down its fishy flavor and adds the smokiness of the open fire, keeping its texture firm and less gelatinous. Kollof’s viscous, strong-smelling qualities are divisive, and some community members in the focus group observed that when they were younger, they didn’t like it but grew to love the taste over time.

María confirms the link between Lafkenche foods and identity, saying:

My grandson eats all of that [Lafkenche] food; I speak to him in Mapudungun, and he eats all of the food I prepare for him.

Therefore, Lafkenche cultural foodways, including consumption, storage, and preparation, continued in the area of Mozo Painen despite the ecological loss of the rocky coastline.

Consuming, caring, and co-constituting Lafkenche territory

Harvesting and preparing kollof is a dangerous task and brought up difficult emotions around scarcity and discrimination in my interviews with the Lafken Malen syndicate. Señora Yoyi remembered her youth, when she played along the beach with a warning to stay away from the treacherous sea, while her mother hauled heavy, slippery kollof up to 8 m long from the breakline. Further out in the water, male divers entered the Humbolt-current chilled waters when the tide was low to cut off large stalks and leave smaller ones. She wiped away tears as she remembered the physical labor her family carried out to feed themselves because her great-grandparents settled in the area from the mass Mapuche dispossession that led to these families settling along high cliffs in the early 1900s (Martínez Neira 1995), reliant on seafood, potatoes, and broad beans (Vicia faba L.). While men cut the kollof so that it would float to shore, women and older children would haul the heavy load up the cliffs on narrow footpaths, the families would cut and bundle dried kollof together to store for the winter and to trade for flour, oil, and other foodstuffs (see Fig. 5 for drying kollof at the beach). Whenever possible, they leave kollof drying on the beach because it is lighter to carry when dry, but if rain threatens, they need to bring it up in whatever stage of drying, since rainwater makes it rot. Some middlemen also purchase it by the kilo still wet, directly after harvesting, but do not haul it out themselves, so people must bring it up however they can. Although proud of their work and their food preparations, the syndicate members emphasized how difficult it was to maintain a livelihood, and that they had to help each other and rely on family to get by.

On a rainy day in September, I visited Sra. Cristina Llancapan of the seaweed syndicate at home. She explained that a young man, recently arrived from the capital, was harvesting up almost all of the kollof and some medicinal plants, leaving little for the rest of the local communities to consume. I asked how they addressed this issue because the young man lived with a local family, but was not necessarily familiar with their values, having grown up in a city. He earned the nickname Lightning Bolt for the speed with which he moved up and down the rocky coast and stripped it of seaweed. Her husband had gone down to the beach in the early morning hours to catch the low tide.

I was going down the cliffs to the water, and I thought I was getting down to the beach early to tend to the kollof, but as I was going down, Lighting Bolt was already on his way up with a load on his back! It was so dark I was worried it was the devil! he joked (Oct. 2025).

Sra. Cristina told me:

We have to talk to the people who are buying kollof and the medicines from him, to tell them to slow down. You can’t keep buying and buying to sell in Carahue because what he’s selling to you, he’s probably selling to other people too (Sept. 2024).

During their monthly meeting later that week, a different woman from a neighboring community brought up the issue, showing that various people had commented on Lighting Bolt’s quick and dirty style of harvesting. She said:

It’s a shame the women from the affected community aren’t here to explain, but we were talking the other day, and they said there’s almost nothing left for anyone else to harvest. We who purchase, we need to establish the cut-off point. They were ripping it up by the root (the disc of the seaweed that adheres to the rock) and cutting stems that weren’t even the size of a finger. Who is going to buy from us if there isn’t anything left? What are we going to take if we get sick and there are no medicinal plants left? We’re hurting ourselves. I’m not trying to fight between families; it’s about protecting us. No one should complain about what I’ve just said. (Sra. María Cristina, Sept. 2024).

This demonstrates how social relationships configured the algueras’ approach to taking care of the seaweed meadows. They avoided personal confrontations, and instead someone outside of the community in question brought up the issue at their meeting. Further, María Cristina made an inclusive appeal, speaking about “us,” ensuring that all who buy products from the newcomer would be careful about how it impacted their keystone food, while also highlighting their mutual responsibility to protect their coastal foodscape. She emphasized the need to care for its ecological viability because harvesting skinny, young kelp means that it cannot complete its lifecycle and reproduce.

During my fieldwork, I documented how Lafkenche Mapuche coastal livelihoods are intimately entangled with rhythms of water and the sea. The production of seaweed is seasonal; the process takes place over months as it is harvested, dried, and bundled. Even leftover seaweed is useful:

When it doesn’t dry enough and rots, we can use it as fertilizer in our garden. If it’s too rainy and the bundles don’t store well, you can put it out on the potato fields (Sras. Rosa and Luisa, Jan. 2024).

Thus, kollof (along with other organic materials and sea water) is a key ingredient to enrich their gardens, which are sites of Lafkenche ecological and cultural reproduction (S. M. Tapia, 2021).”

The lifecycle of the kelp also directly impacts when they harvest it, as noted:

When it rains in the winter, the kelp grows. It’s watered by the rain and that’s its growing period. It leaks out a kind of black oil from its fronds. Winter is the time of seafood (not seaweed)—when it’s low tide, the rocks and bottom are almost dry. There are great low tides in winter (Sras. Gloria and Yanet, Jan. 2024).

Kollof generally reproduces during the winter months, and they find the fronds tough and less appealing to eat, in addition to the black oil that stains their skin. By respecting the life cycle of the plant, following its sensory signals that it is not fit to eat, they ensure the biological reproductive cycle is completed.

Kollof continues to hold both cultural and ecological relevance to Lafkenche foodways in the case studies that confirm its central role as both an ecological keystone species (Paine 1969, Davic 2003), following the marine biology and ecology research on the central role of southern bull kelp, and as a cultural keystone species (Cristancho and Vining 2004, Garibaldi and Turner 2004). Community members in Mozo Painen continued to carry out opportune harvests of the seaweed as it washed ashore from further away. They also consumed the kelp in a variety of ways, from fresh off the beach, to passing it through an open flame before cooking, to rehydrating it from a bundle above their stovetop. These traditions were evident across multiple generations, even among community members such as Joel, who was born 30 years after the earthquake. Along with gathering kollof, community and syndicate members also fished and gathered other opportune species along the shoreline. Taylor and Anderson (2020) underlined that cultural keystone species can be grouped together to understand how people deliberately select certain foods as a “cultural keystone food group.” In this case, seaweeds and seafoods such as kollof, luche (Porphyra columbina), crabs, fish, and mollusks could constitute a Lafkenche cultural keystone food group.

Following Di Giminiani (2018), the relationship between land and the Mapuche people is mutually constitutive, so the algueras care for the seaweed and specific areas of the coast that also care for them, providing them with hard-won food products. Avoiding over-harvesting, letting the kelp rest in winter, and even making use of waste to fertilize soil are all ways that kollof is cared for and cares for them, while ensuring the ecological reproduction of a keystone food.

Even monitoring others’ harvesting practices and intervening through community-established relationships is a way that the algueras manage kollof. Their practice-oriented ways of knowing (Zanjani et al. 2023) constitute Lafkenche-kollof relations. This local TEK is embedded in their cultural values, social relations, and is not without conflict, as evidenced by their concerns about Lighting Bolt’s over-exploitation. Although they have use rights to certain rocky outcrops (huapi) passed down through families, they did not exclude new residents like the young man mentioned. At the same time, they expect him to maintain harvesting best-practices, established through years of co-relationships to their maritime foodscape. Thus, we saw how their sea-territory livelihood practices are organized around availability and seasonality, but they also called upon their social relationships to regulate and protect the kelp from overexploitation. Recalling Sra. María Cristina words, by over-harvesting, she said, “We’re hurting ourselves.” By placing herself and her syndicate members alongside the kollof as equally hurting if they lose it to overharvesting, she signals the co-constituting relationship they have as they care for and consume the seaweed. Through the lens of kollof as a keystone food, we understand the central role that the seaweed plays in Lafkenche foodways as they manage over-commercialization to ensure it is available for the community and to continue their traditions even if it is no longer available nearby.

CONCLUSION

Thus, considering kollof as a keystone food recenters Lafkenche perceptions and cosmovision of its importance in their own culture, as well as understanding its emplaced and corporeal knowledge, highlighting how local traditional knowledge and practices carry out small-scale conservation, rather than extrapolating what might be interesting or useful for conservation plans. The two case studies provide a comparative look into how kollof remains important in Lafkenche communities with both direct and indirect access to the food, and how they maintain their connections to the seaweed through food practices, preparations, and stories. Their relationship to kollof is not romanticized because harvesting is dangerous work for the divers in the Pacific surf, and it is carried out on a needs-based context, in which the syndicate members and their families work hard and carry out physical labor to wrangle the heavy wet kollof to dry and to haul it up from the beach, though now some areas use motorized zip lines to help bring up the harvest. This co-constituting relationship is not without danger and conflict, but it is above all reciprocal, both with families who share their harvests, which those who work and consider the well-being of kollof as it supports their families, and the macroalgae itself as it provides nourishment and ritual use, an ecosystem for other seafoods, and through its care, brings together territorial relationships.

The Lafkenche coastal foodscape is often conceptualized as a maritorio (Álvarez et al. 2019), fused from the Spanish words for sea and territory. This active and critical concept of the lived Indigenous seascape illustrates the territorial aspect of their relationship to the coast. Seascape is my imperfect translation of the lovely invention of maritorio (mar = sea and territorio = territory). It embraces the spatial and ecological particularities of the people-of-the-sea, where ocean, intertidal rocky outcrops (huapi), shore, and land all come together to compose the seascape and local ecological conditions. Each family has its rocky area off the coast where they protect and harvest kollof, indicating how the community distributes the care of the seaweed among families.

In the case of the community of Mozo Painen, kollof was a key ecological food that they could rely on instead of meat until the earthquake. Even with the loss of the brown seaweed meadows, the kelp remains an important food both in their family histories and current kitchens. With Lafken Malen, the seaweed syndicate, the women navigate over-harvesting and care for the seaweed so that it will flourish and nourish them as well.

In sum, I argue that kollof is both ecologically and culturally important to Lafkenche livelihoods as a keystone food, requiring social coordination, ecological considerations, and territorial practices. From a Lafkenche perspective, their coastal territory extends out to sea to the rocky offshore huapi (islands). They synchronize their gathering practices with kollof’s lifecycle, intimately connecting the rocky seaweed beds to their home hearths. They care for the macroalgae as they also consume it, and it nourishes them as they respect its ecological cycles. Therefore, I specifically drew on Lafkenche understandings of their coastal foodscapes as co-constituted with kollof as an ecological, territorial practice based on their TEK and foodways. In this way, I emphasize that kollof is not only a cultural or ecological keystone species, but also a keystone food, and as such it is a key element of Lafkenche foodscapes, revealing how local traditional foods co-constitute territories.

Finally, if keystone foods is to prove a useful concept, it should be applied to other cultural and ecological contexts, considering the TEK, foodways, and territorial impacts. Possible applications to consider: (1) Haida abalone gathering (Ojeda et al. 2025) in which food uses, TEK, and cultural meanings, include emotional experiences like that of kollof, in the context of commercialization, come together to signal abalone as a keystone food; (2) Berries in Northern Bush Cree traditions (Baker 2021) in which the berries are respected as kin, harvested, and consumed in relations of reciprocity, in the context of outside contamination; and (3) Jakaira avati, a local corn cared for and cultivated by the Paĩ Tavyterã Guarani (Tusing 2022) in forest gardens, threatened by deforestation. Approaching these species as keystone foods maintains TEK within its ontological and relational framework, facilitating the collaborative work integral to identifying possible restorative ecological practices informed by local practices and local realities.

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