While nations struggled to find political stability and commercial prosperity, native peoples within their borders and beyond claimed new independence. Inside Peru and Bolivia, natives consolidated production on the land and led regional trades. Beyond the nations’ fragile powers, the Chiriguano of lowland Bolivia and diverse Mapuche of the Argentine interior ruled extensive regions—the former dealing with a new generation of missionaries, the latter sustaining mounted forces and mobile livestock economies, and both profiting in trade with Hispanic peoples, who rarely found positions of strength. The chapter details rarely seen ways of independence as natives kept Hispanic states and peoples at bay. An epilogue notes parallels across the Americas: the autonomies claimed by former slaves in Haiti; those pressed by indigenous communities within a struggling Mexican nation; and the independence asserted by the Comanche in North America, pressing Mexicans south and holding the United States to the east for decades after 1810.