Haush

Map showing the location of the haush in southern Patagonia.

The haush, haus mánekenks or aush is an indigenous people who lived in the extreme southeast of the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, in the Argentine portion of the island, between Cape San Pablo and Aguirre Bay. Together with their Selknam neighbors they were the insular component of the Tehuelche complex. At present there are some descendants, who together with the descendants of Selknam are in the process of cultural recovery.

Features

Tenenisk, a haush shaman around 1899.

The Haush were nomadic and skilled guanaco hunters. They shared many customs with their Selknam or Ona neighbors, including their weapons. Especially the use of the small bow and arrow, as well as the clothing based on skins, and the joint practice of the male initiation ritual called hain. The German ethnologist Martin Gusinde witnessed this rite in 1923, performed by the shaman Tenenesk, who died in the winter of 1924 from measles.

They did not have caciques, but among them there were shamans (xo’on). They lived in groups of two or three families, they built huts that were simple bowers covered with moss and hides. They also developed the technique of basketry. The development of the material culture of the Haus people is explained by two main reasons: their geographical isolation and the adverse environment in which they lived (cold, humid and very windy area, with few natural resources).

Their mode of production was hunter-gatherer, with a high-fat and high-protein diet since most of their diet came from sea lions, guanacos, shellfish, crustaceans, penguins and fish that they hunted, fished or shellfished, the complement Such a diet was a fungus known as "Indian bread", which grows on lengas and ñires and the algae called kelp or cachiyuyo, to this was added the collective use of the meat obtained from cetaceans. who washed up on the beaches. Unlike the Selknam who depended on the guanacos, the Haus economy was dependent on the sea lions, which they used for clothing and food. For their clothing, they also used fox fur.

The denomination haus seems to be foreign to them and derives from a derogatory word in the language of the Yámanas, a word that meant "fish fat", however in its last times they seem to have adopted such a word as an autoethnonym, perhaps because of its ease of pronunciation and because they do not know its original meaning.

The Haush language (mánekenk(en, que)) was one of the Chon languages and was related to the Selknam language (although they were mutually unintelligible) and to the Tehuelche of the mainland.

History

According to Anne Chapman, the Haush did not own any boat, so their ancestors could have arrived on foot to Tierra del Fuego before the Strait of Magellan opened some 8,000 years ago.

The Haush first made contact with Europeans at Buen Suceso Bay during the Nodal brothers' expedition in January 1619.

Valuable facts about the Haush were provided by the Anglican missionary Lucas Bridges in his 1899 book Uttermost Part of the Earth:

I am convinced that the waves and aush came from the Tehuelches of Southern Patagonia, but the aush came to the Tierra del Fuego long before the waves (...) There was certainly much more difference between the aush and the ona between the latter and the language of the tehuelches. I think that at first the aush occupied the whole region, and they had to be content with the southeast tip, wet climate and plagued with swamps and thick matorals. It confirms my theory that in the land occupied by the waves there are names of places that have no meaning in your language; they are actually words that only have meaning in the aush language.

Due to their geographical location, it has been assumed that they were displaced from the 14th century by the Selknam to the extreme southeast of the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, which was confirmed by Lucas Bridges:

During the first years we spent in Harberton, we were visited several times by a small group of aush (...) These aush feared the waves, their neighbors from the North and the West, even more than the Yaganes, and with good reason. For several generations they had been forced to evacuate a good land, flee to the southeast end of the territory and reduce to live in the middle of the jungle and the swamp.

When Spanish explorers arrived in their small territory in 1619, there was barely a small population of this ethnic group left. According to the calculations of the archaeologist Samuel Kirkland Lothrop in 1850 there must have been about 300 mánekenk. Many Haush have been killed by wolves since the late 18th century century. In 1899 Lucas Bridges registered only sixty Mánekenk.

I spent all the time with Yoiyimmi and Saklhbarra to learn their language. If I had known at that time that the aush was spoken only by sixty indigenous people throughout the Tierra del Fuego, I would not have taken such a job.

Relation of Lucas Bridges

In 1910 Antonio Coiazza expressed that only one Haush family remained:

(...) lived between Thetis Bay and Fatley Bay, and has now been reduced to a single family composed of the father and two daughters, and to a woman of about thirty-nine years.

One of the latest news about them is Antonio Tonelli, who in 1926 claimed to know a single person.

In 2001, the Brazilian anthropologist Walter Neves published Fueguian Cranial Morphology: The Haush, a book in which he showed a study on 5 Haush skulls obtained in 1984 in excavations in San Valentín Bay.

A few descendants of Selknam and Haush live in Tierra del Fuego constituting the Selknam Rafaela Ishton community, whose cacique -self-identified as Haush- was Antonio Norberto Vera Illigoyen until his death on January 6, 2012 at the age of 90 His son Horacio Eugenio Vera is a member of the Autonomous Educational Council of Indigenous Peoples of the national government as a member of the Haush nation.