Indigenous Selk’nam People Reemerge on Chile’s Southern Tip

By Orlando Milesi (IPS)

HAVANA TIMES – In Chile, the history of the Selk’nam peoples on Tierra del Fuego goes back 10,000 years. Decimated by genocide in the nineteenth century, the indigenous group is currently reviving, thanks to the families’ efforts to reconstruct their personal histories and articulate their communities’ values.

The Selk’nams are also organizing to prevent the commercialization of their image and combat the ignorant view of them as an extinct tribe of indigenous people with painted bodies.

According to the 2017 census, 1,444 of Chile’s 19.5 million inhabitants identified as Selk’nam. This number is now increasing daily, due to the government’s official recognition of the group as an original people.

A Congressional bill in favor of their recognition was first proposed in August 2019. Four years later, the law was approved in Chile’s Parliament with 117 votes in favor and one abstention.

“The most important thing about the process, which was very hard, is that we were able to make it clear to the country and the world that we are not extinct. The passage of this bill demands a much-needed review of local history, and changes in the educational curriculum,” Hemany Molina told IPS.

Hemany, a writer and poet, currently serves as director of research and environmental care at the Hach Saye Foundation based in Porvenir, a town on the Chilean side of the archipelago known as “Tierra del Fuego,” at the far southern tip of South America.

“The state has listened, and now it must take responsibility for the families that begin to appear,” she added. Molina, 56, was key to the recognition of the Selk’nam people.

Historically, members of this indigenous group were hunters and gatherers. The first Europeans who made contact with them described them as men of great height. 

The genocide that nearly wiped them out began in 1881, with an ethnic cleaning operation aimed at taking over their lands. Among those responsible was a group that called itself the Society for the Exploitation of Tierra del Fuego, and other companies financed with British capital. The killings were also planned and carried out by the large ranch owners, in coordination with local authorities and with the consent of the Catholic missionaries.

In his book Selk’nam, Genocide and Resistance, Jose Luis Alonso documented how the desperate Selk’nam resistance was defeated through assassinations, slavery, deportations, and the kidnapping of children. Their near-elimination made possible the pasturing of over a million sheep, whose wool was exported to Great Britain.

The massacres included bounty killings, with the offer of one sheep for every murdered Selk’nam. During those years the group’s population plummeted from 4,000 to 297.

This genocide destroyed the Selk’nam’s traditional way of life on their lands located between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. “The actions to eliminate our culture were so aggressive that only a broken memory exists, which we’ve been reconstructing piece by piece from the shreds of recollections of the community elders,” writer Hemany Molina explains.

What it means to identify as a Selk’nam

Speaking with IPS, 60-year