Kawésqar

Map showing the location of the Kawésqar in Southern Patagonia.

South part of the Kawésqar territory.

Strait of Magellan and south territory of the Kawésqar.

The kawésqar (also known as kawashkar among various other variants, and called by European sailors in the XIX as alacalufes, alakaluf or halakwulup ) are a native people of the southern zone of Chile and Argentina. Until the middle of the XX century they were nomads who traveled in canoes the southern channels of western Patagonia, between the Gulf of Penas and the Strait of Magellan. In the last century its population was reduced by massacres and death by disease, as well as abandonment of the group. On the other hand, their traditional way of life underwent a strong transformation after contact with Chileans and foreign navigators. In the XXI century, most of the Kawésqar live in the town of Puerto Edén and in the cities of Puerto Natales and Punta sands.

Their language is Kawésqar, the name by which they call themselves. In their language, this word means "person" or "human being." The name "alacalufe" originally has a derogatory intention and they do not use it. According to the 2002 census, there were 2,622 people in Chile who declared belonging to the Kawésqar people. In the 2017 census, this figure rose to 3,448 people, and since Chile recognized them by Indigenous Law 19,253 of 1993, they are currently organized into 14 Indigenous Communities.

Cultural flag of the Kawesqar people.

Origin

There are two hypotheses so far about the early settlement of the Kawésqar territory by its inhabitants:

• They were always navigators, who traveled along the coast from the north of the American continent, or crossed the Pacific following the currents from the southern islands of this vast ocean, and they stayed.
• They transformed into canoes, being the same land hunters of Eastern Patagonia, who inhabited 11 000 years ago AP this southern end of the continent and that about 6000 years ago AP would have adapted to life in the sea to populate the islands and canals, going up in canoes to the Gulf of Penas.

The area they occupied for their movements was enormous, but it can be said that they revolved around two points. One on the southern shore of the Strait of Magellan, on Clarence Island, and the other on the southern part of the Gulf of Penas on the Solitario islet in the Guayaneco. The cause of this focalization was obtaining fire. The Kawésqar needed fire to heat themselves and over the centuries they discovered these two points where there was iron pyrite, a mineral with which they achieved the necessary sparks to ignite it.

This ancestral territory has its own denominations, differentiated from north to south into four large areas: Sǽlam, Kčewíte, Kelǽlkčes and Tawókser, as well as two large regions, Jáutok to the east as an inland sea or influenced by the mainland and Málte to the west as an outer sea or near the Pacific coast.

History

The first Europeans who made contact with the Kawésqar were the Spaniards of the expedition led by García Jofre de Loaísa, who on April 22, 1526, at the western end of the Strait of Magellan, saw indigenous people presumably Kawéskar on the south coast:

Those Indians were blanding tizones and some of us thought they were going to fire the ships. They didn't dare to move forward and we couldn't pursue them in chalupa because they left us behind with their canoes.

At the end of the XVIII century, a large number of whaling and sea lion ships began to arrive in the area, especially of national English and American. From this time they began to contract the diseases that would soon lead to their numerical decline.

The Europeans, from their first contact, considered the Patagonian indigenous people as savages worthy of study. Starting in 1871, the exhibition of living indigenous people began in European and North American cities, a custom that ceased at the beginning of the XX century. Complete families of the Kawésqar, Yagán, Selknam and Mapuche ethnic groups were exhibited in France, England, Belgium and Germany. They arrived commissioned by scientific societies and by merchants who profited from their exhibition to the public. The trips lasted between 4 and 6 months and in them the indigenous people used to get sick and die. These facts are detailed in Christian Báez and Peter Mason's book Human Zoos.

At the end of the XIX century, Salesian missionaries obtained the concession of Dawson Island, where they established a mission with the purpose of to evangelize and “protect and care” for the indigenous people of the area. With this began the process of transforming their nomadic life into a sedentary one and changing their ancestral habits, such as clothing, ceasing to use sea lion oil and the cape that protected them from rainwater and cold, having to use Western clothing, which, being permanently wet, brought them new diseases. In 1900, a population of 1,000 Kawésqar was estimated, which by 1924 had fallen to 250.

In 1937 the Chilean government, through the Chilean Air Force, established a station in Puerto Edén. His first boss was Sergeant Carlos Gaymer Gómez, who arrived with his wife Raquel Verdugo Rojas and his mother-in-law Matilde Rojas. Sergeant Gaymer and his family remained in Puerto Edén until April 1950 without interruption, Mrs. Matilde died in 1949 and was buried in the Puerto Edén cemetery. During these 12 years the family devoted its efforts to educating and training the Kawésqar who came to live around the post. During this period, the Gaymer Verdugo family adopted two children: Ana Rosales Ulloa and Carlos Edén Maidel, Peteyem, who in 2009 lived in New York, United States.

At the end of 1940, the government authorized a ten-year-old Kawésqar boy who stood out for his vivacity and intelligence, with the authorization of his parents, to be transferred to Punta Arenas to study under the tutelage of Salesian priests. The president of the republic Pedro Aguirre Cerda learned of this case and decided to sponsor Lautaro Edén Wellington (Terwa Koyo) and arranged for him to be transferred to Santiago to finish his humanities education. Lautaro in 1947 entered the Air Force School of Specialties. In 1948 he married the nurse Raquel Toro Vilches and in 1949 he returned with the rank of 2nd mechanical corporal, being assigned to the Puerto Edén station. Terwa Koyo traveled without his wife and when he found himself among his people, he began to treat them like a troop, ordering them to do military exercises and haul work, which they accepted with a good grace, since they had come to admire him. Within a few months he deserted returning to the nomadic life of his ancestors. Practically the entire young population of Puerto Edén followed him. Lautaro died in 1953 when his boat sank. He was a person admired by his peers.

At that same time, Chilote seals frequented the area, who on many occasions committed murders, rapes and kidnappings of Kawésqar thanks to the fact that the Chilean State did not legally consider the Kawésqar as subjects of law.

In 1992 there were about 60 indigenous people living in Punta Arenas and the majority in Puerto Edén. According to the 2002 census, there were 2,622 people in Chile who claimed to belong to the Kawésqar people. In the 2017 census, this figure rose to 3,448 people.

Over time they have experienced a profound cultural and social transformation. Currently, their language and their traditions have diminished a lot, coming to fear their final disappearance.

The death on October 26, 2003 of Jérawr Asáwer —renamed Fresia Alessandri Baker— received press coverage, as an example of the population decline of this town. Added to this death were four or five others that have had national coverage, such as the death of Margarita Molinari, whose songs along with those of other members of the ethnic group are recorded in an audio library managed by the University of Chile.

On August 5, 2008, Alberto Achacaz Walakial died, approximately 79 years old, the oldest surviving Kawésqar until then.

In the framework of the 2021 Constitutional Convention, a quota was contemplated for the original Kawésqar people, with Margarita Vargas being elected as their representative.

Culture

Kawésqar woman selling handicrafts to the visitors of Puerto Edén, south of Chile, in 2006.

Social organization

The base unit is the family. Families traveled alone in their canoe in search of food. Occasionally two or three families were grouped together for specific tasks. When they were on land they made a very light hut with wooden, oak or cinnamon armor, which was covered with sea lion or otter skins.

The canoe

The canoe was the most important and prized piece of their tangible heritage. It was made with bark, preferably coigüe. Its length was variable, between 8 or 9 meters, and a family could accommodate in it. The canoe was, in addition to a means of transportation, a true floating house, since they spent a good part of the time in it. In the XX century and influenced by the Chilote sea lions, they began to build canoes from a hollowed-out trunk, similar to bongos from Chiloé.

Beliefs

It is said that they believed in a good being, Alep-láyp or according to others Arca kercis, a spirit to which they gave thanks when due to a shipwreck they received copious food and iron tools or when a whale washed up on a beach to die. Other beings they believed in are Ayayema, the spirit of chaos; Kawtcho, the haunting spirit of the night; and Mwomo, spirit of noise, which produces snow avalanches. These names, however, are later denied by the Kawésqar, since they come from Martín Gusinde, who insisted on looking for these spirits or deities to show the soul within the indigenous people to save. The Kawésqar on the other hand are animists, and have a broad sense of the natural world in which they live; they have their own origin from the world and connect to their ancestors while navigating or touring their territory or Kawésqar Wǽs.

Food

They mainly fed on sea lions, fish, birds and shellfish. Eventually also from whales that were found stranded on the beaches, which gave the opportunity for close families to meet for several weeks. There is even today a special sense of sharing that they call Čas, exchange of objects or food without expecting immediate or equivalent retribution. In this way, a family could distribute food to other groups on one occasion, and benefit from some object or food in the future, establishing a cycle of exchanges.

Tools

They worked a lot with stone, wood, whale bones and nerves, shellfish shells and otter skins. With these elements they made arrows, bows, slings, harpoons and knives to work the trunks with which they made their canoes. With vegetable fibers they made baskets and baskets. They only knew metal through their contact with the white man.

Occasional presence in Argentina

The Kawésqar lived in present-day Chilean territory, but due to its proximity, they were occasionally found in a border area of Argentina, between Lake Fagnano and the Fuegian Andes mountain range. They did not establish permanent settlements in those territories, but The main reasons for their occasional presence there may have been due to trade with the Selknam, Tehuelches and Yámanas (with the latter they also established some family ties). The Argentine bibliography frequently includes the Kawésqar among the original peoples of their territory, however, their presence in it was only marginal, although this is debatable.

Suggested bibliography

• Kawésqar Community Nomade Family Groups of the Sea, https://www.facebook.com/nomadesdelmar
• E. Lucas Bridges (1952). The Last Trust of Earth. Buenos Aires - Argentina: Emecé Editores S.A.
• Acuña D, Angel. (2016). The body in Kawésqar cultural memory. Magallania 44: 1, 103-129. https://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-22442016000100007
• Alberto de Agostini (1956). Thirty years in Tierra del Fuego. Buenos Aires - Argentina: Editions Peuser.
• Barrena, José, Harambour, Alberto, Lamers, M., Bush, S.R. "Contested mobilities in the maritory: Implications of boundary formation in a nomadic space", Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space (2021) doi:10.1177/23996544211016866
• J. Emperaire (2002). The nomads of the sea. SANTIAGO - CHILE: Lom editions. 27.028.
• Harambour, A. (2020). The Unpublished Look: Kawésqar women and men in the travel diary and the watercolors of Lieutenant Vereker (H.M.S. Alert, 1879). Atacameños 66, 155-173. https://doi.org/10.22199/issn.0718-1043-2020-0041
• Harambour, Alberto and José Barrena Ruiz, “Barbarie or justice in western Patagonia: colonial violence in the sunset of the Kawésqar people, the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century”. Critical History 71 (2019): 25-48, https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit71.2019.02
• A. Laming (1957). In Patagonia, trust the world. Santiago - Chile - Editorial del Pacífico S.A.
• Fresia Barrientos M. (2005). Peoples of Chile. Santiago - Chile - Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. 956-7382-09-3.
• Peter Mason and Christián Báez (2006). Human zoology.
• King, P. P. (1839), FitzRoy, Robert, ed., Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle's circumnavigation of the globe. Proceedings of the first expedition, 1826-30, under the command of Captain P. Parker King, R.N., F.R.S. I, London: Henry Colburn.
• Chapman, Anne (2012), Cape Horn Yaganes. I meet Europeans before and after Darwin., Santiago de Chile: Pehuén editors S.A..