Imprensa: "Chile indigenous tribe fights extinction"

[Etnolinguistica.Org]

>From Yahoo! News (
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061008/ap_on_sc/apn_chile_s_kawesqar_1)

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Chile indigenous tribe fights extinction

By LYGIA NAVARRO, Associated Press Writer*Sat Oct 7, 9:38 PM ET*

A once-nomadic tribe of hunters and fishermen living in the frigid channels
near the bottom of the world is nearing extinction.

Down to just 15 full-blooded members, the Kawesqar people could soon go the
way of other indigenous tribes in Chile, its language and culture
disappearing to all but the history books.

Juan Carlos Tonko, however, is doing all he can to stop the Kawesqar's slow
march to oblivion.

Six months ago, the 40-year-old left the comforts of the capital, Santiago,
to return to Puerto Eden on Wellington Island in southern Chile and
re-embrace the traditions of the people he left 25 years before.

Tonko is the lone Kawesqar of his middle-aged generation to come home, and
now considers himself "the transmitter of history" for his tribe.

"I feel that I have a great responsibility," the soft-spoken father of four
said during a visit to Santiago with his children's school, a trip that took
two days by boat and a third by bus.

With support from the Chilean government, Tonko and a research team are
recording the handful of Kawesqar speakers left in Puerto Eden, most of whom
are in their 70s and 80s. "The immediacy is urgent," Tonko said.

The plan is to produce materials to teach the language in schools nationwide
as an optional subject to those interested. Then, if they can wrangle more
funds, they will complete a cultural and historical survey of the Kawesqars,
to correct the errors in the few existing texts written by outsiders.

Over the years, five of Chile's original 14 indigenous tribes — the
Aonikenk, Selk'nam, Pikunches, Changos and Chonos — have been lost to the
onslaught of colonialism, succumbing to disease, displacement and overuse of
their traditional sources of food.

The 600,000-strong Mapuche tribe is the largest and most vocal indigenous
group in Chile, a country with a population of 16 million.

Tonko says that because of the Mapuches' size and protests, their group gets
more help than smaller tribes struggling against extinction.

The federal government spends a total of $15.7 million on legal, social and
land programs for indigenous groups, said Evelyn Miller, a spokeswoman for
the government's National Indigenous Development Corporation.

At a celebration of the Mapuche New Year in June, President Michelle
Bachelet promised to improve Chile's indigenous policies by speaking with
the groups, which often suffer discrimination, poor environmental
protection, poverty and schools that separate them from their traditions.

Chile passed its first law offering protection, formal recognition and
development aid to indigenous groups only in 1993.

But in Puerto Eden, the damage to the Kawesqars has already been done, said
Pedro Torres, principal at the town's only school. "The arrival of Western
culture is eliminating them," he said.

About 80 percent of the 19,000 people in Puerto Eden have some relationship
to indigenous groups, mostly Mapuche. So the school, which teaches children
up to the eighth grade, makes lessons on Kawesqar and Mapuche culture part
of the core curriculum.

In art class they fashion harpoons from whale bone and miniature boats from
wolf skins. Ask them how to say "mother," "father" or "dog," and they rattle
off the words in Kawesqar, whose whistling tones are reminiscent of Mandarin
Chinese.

"My grandmother teaches me words, and I write them down," Tonko's 9-year-old
niece, Susan Vargas, said during the school trip to Santiago. She girl is
half Mapuche but lives with her Kawesqar grandparents.

Tonko's four children and wife, herself a Mapuche, speak just a few words of
Kawesqar so far. He is relearning words he had forgotten after leaving
Puerto Eden at age 15.

And as important as learning Kawesqar is to life in the town, Puerto Eden
also must make way for a new language: In the summer, cruise ships stop by
once a week, and the children will need to converse with English-speaking
tourists, said Torres, the school principal.

Tonko said townspeople would like tourists to share in daily Kawesqar
activities like fishing and basket-weaving, rather than just stopping by for
an hour. Someday it will happen, he said, his aim fixed firmly on the future
— a concept not traditionally embraced by the Kawesqar.

"In the Kawesqar concept, the future doesn't exist," Tonko said.

But now, he added, Kawesqars are working to "see how we can project
ourselves toward the future while remembering the past."

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