Imprensa: Patagonia Indian tribe faces extinction

[Moderadores Etnolinguistica.Org]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081210/sc_nm/us_chile_tribe

Patagonia Indian tribe faces extinction

By Simon Gardner Simon Gardner Wed Dec 10, 10:29 am ET

PUERTO EDEN, Chile (Reuters) – Hawking sea lion skin souvenir canoes
at one of South America's most remote outposts, Francisco Arroyo is
among the last members of a Patagonian tribe staring down the barrel
of extinction.

The elderly Arroyo recalls wending the icy channels and fjords of
southern Chile's Patagonia region with his father as a boy, tending a
fire lit on dried earth on the bottom of their canoe and diving naked
for giant mussels to survive.

With only an estimated 12-20 pure-blooded members of his nomadic
Kawesqar tribe surviving, most of them elderly, another of the
far-flung region's tribes will soon disappear.

"It ends with our generation," Arroyo said, huddling against chill
wind and spitting rain in a polar fleece and hat on a wooden walkway
that skirts the tiny fishing port of Puerto Eden on an island around
1,300 miles south of the capital, Santiago.

Arroyo does not know how old he is. A state census hazarded a guess,
assigning him a birth date that makes him 66.

"We are old now. We can't go out in the channels any more. I am not
sad. Life is easier now," he said in Spanish, as European tourists in
bright orange life vests paid a lightning visit to the far-flung
settlement of 120 people, reachable only by boat or helicopter.

He sold a few trinkets, earning less than $10.

His ancestors lived in their canoes, even sleeping and cooking in
them, wearing nothing other than a piece of sea lion skin on their
backs and smothering themselves in grease and fat when diving for
food.

TRIBE RAVAGED BY ILLNESS

As with the tribe of Yaganes further south, of which only one
pure-blooded member now survives in Chile, and Indian tribes from the
Amazon to Asia, outbreaks of respiratory illness through contact with
Europeans and hunters devastated the Kawesqar in the 19th century and
again in the 1940s.

"They are in decline because the historic causes (illnesses) have
continued until relatively recently," said Eugenio Aspillaga, a
bio-anthropologist at the University of Chile.

"Another factor is restrictions on their movement," he added,
referring to a program in the 1960s to settle survivors in Puerto
Eden. "There is a lesson in survival and human adaptability that we
are losing. It is a part of humanity we neither know nor understand."

The youngest full-blooded tribe members are two brothers aged around
40. One married outside the tribe. Oscar Aguilera, an ethno-linguist
and leading authority on the Kawesqar who has compiled a dictionary of
their language to help preserve it, estimates there are 200 people of
mixed Kawesqar descent.

"Their culture is becoming extinct, and their language is also in
danger," said Aguilera, who has studied the tribe since 1975.

"Once the few survivors in Puerto Eden disappear, the oldest ones,
then the culture will be lost and the tongue will no longer be
spoken," he added.

Puerto Eden is a smattering of tiny, brightly colored wood and
corrugated sheet metal houses set among dense scrub in the shadow of
snow-encrusted Andean peaks.

Many residents who moved to the area in search of work in the fishing
industry disagree, but the nearest town is an overnight boat trip away
and only one ship passes a week, meaning they are cut off from the
rest of the world.

"I never liked it," said 32-year-old Luisa Chiay, who grew up in
Puerto Eden but later moved to the town of Puerto Natales further
south, where her daughter goes to school.

Chiay, who descends from Chile's most populous indigenous group, the
Mapuche, returns for weeks at a time to drive a launch as her brother
dives, in full diving suit, for shellfish.

"It's so isolated. There is too much silence. The education is poor.
If you fall ill, there is no hospital nearby," she added.

Her sister died eight years ago from a heart attack in Puerto Eden. No
ship was passing to carry her for treatment.

(Editing by Kieran Murray)

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