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This paper explores the relationships between missionaries (either Franciscan and Salesian) and Indian groups who survived after the military campaigns of the late 1870's in the Pampas. It focuses especially on the role played by these missionaries in the integration of Indians into the Argentine 'nation' and in the 'Territorios Nacionales', performed through--among others--four kinds of tasks: a) registering births, deaths and marriages in collaboration with a poorly developed state, b) educating the main chiefs. sons and daughters in La Inmaculada school, away from their families, c) insisting on their abandoning of previous cultural patterns (such as polygamic matrimony), and d) promoting the Indian's identification with the "nation" in as many instances as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]