Fil: Pérez, Pilar. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Instituto de Investigaciones en Diversidad Cultural y Procesos del Cambio. Río Negro; Argentina.Fil: Delrio, Walter. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Instituto de Investigaciones en Diversidad Cultural y Procesos del Cambio. Río Negro; Argentina.This article deals with state policies, governmental mechanisms, and various social agencies involved within the process of state consolidation and the subjugation and incorporation of indigenous people in northern Patagonia (Argentina). The period focuses on the military occupation known as the “Conquest of the Desert” –1878 to 1885- in which concentration camps, deportations of Mapuche and Tehuelche people and the dismemberment of families took place. Second, we will analyze its short and long-term effects once the campaigns ended. The aim of this work is to balance the conceptual scope and limits of analyzing this complex process in terms of war, assimilation, or genocide. A second part of the article will attempt to periodize indigenous genocide bearing in mind the different steps that led to genocide as well as the after math of this event. Finally, we will acknowledge the particularities of the Argentinean experience in the construction of indigenous subalternity within the state-nation-territory matrix.