In this article, which is linked to two research projects, we identify the representations of otherness present in the scientific/scholarly discourse on the indigenous population in Chile during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This period sees the institutionalization of a science referred to the study of indigenous peoples in Chile (material culture, anthropometry, customs and language), which manifests itself in the foundation of museums, scientific societies and the creation of specialized journals. Along with describing some aspects that refer to the material and social conditions from which this knowledge is constructed, we focus on characterizing the representations of the natives that circulated in a corpus of specialized articles that were published in this period, in order to identify the structures of meaning from which variants or models of representation of the otherness can be derived. In this analysis we have defined four prototypical forms of representation, which emerge from the identification of argumentation patterns from which "the other" is constructed as an object of the world, being different and more or less distant from "us", we outline types of relationship and we establish the potential contribution of the indigenous "others" to a national project.