The Tehuelche
The name Tehuelche, meaning "Brave People", is derived from the language of the Chilean Araucanian groups. The Tehuelche actually consisted of three different tribal groups - the Gununa'kuna, Mecharnuek'enk and Aonik'enk - each of whom spoke a different language but shared common bonds of culture and a similar way of life. Great inter-tribal parliaments were held on occasion to discuss trade or common threats to the community, but any alliances formed would be temporary and shifting, and sporadic warfare occurred between different tribes. The Tehuelche's nomadic culture - centred on the hunting of the guanaco and the rhea - that Magellan and the first Europeans came into contact with had probably existed for well over three thousand years, but it was not static, and contact with Europeans soon brought change. By 1580, Sarmiento de Gamboa reported the use of the horse by indigenous Patagones around the Magellan Straits, and by the early eighteenth century it had become integral to Tehuelche life both for hunting and carrying. Intertribal contact and intermarriage thus became more regular, and hunting techniques evolved, with boleadoras and lances increasingly preferred to the older bow and arrow. The boleadora consisted of two or three stones wrapped in guanaco hide and connected by long thongs made from the sinews of rheas or guanacos. Whirled around the head, these were thrown to ensnare animals for dispatching at close quarters. Boleadoras are the only real physical legacy of Tehuelche culture in today's Argentina, and are still used on occasion by rural workers. Women's life centred around their guanaco-skin shelters called toldos (or kau ) - women were responsible for taking down the toldo and reassembling it whenever the group shifted camp - and around gathering firewood, cooking, preparing skins, sewing cloaks and caring for young children. Although women's workloads were definitely onerous, few observers spoke of men mistreating their womenfolk. The Victorian adventurer, George Musters (who in 1869-70 became the first white person to ride with them as a free man), reported that "The finest trait ? is their love for their wives and children; matrimonial disputes are rare, and wife-beating unknown; and the intense grief with which the loss of a wife is mourned is certainly not 'civilized', for the widower will destroy all his stock and burn all his possessions." There was definitely an egalitarian streak in Tehuelche society: leadership was meritocratic, and there were no strict hierarchies. Caciques led groups of families, but territorial overlords in the manner of the Mapuche did not exist. Tehuelche religious belief recognized a benign supreme God (variously named Kooch, Maipe, or Taarken-Kets), but he did not figure greatly in any outward devotions and was always rather distant in normal life. In contrast, the malign spirit, Gualicho, was a much-feared figure who was the regular beneficiary of horse sacrifices and the object of shamanistic attentions. The idea of a Gualicho is the only spiritual legacy of the Tehuelche to have survived into the present, being recognized today not just in Argentina, but also in parts of Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The greatest of the Tehuelche divine heroes was Elal, the being who created man, gave him fire, established the sacred relationships that exist both between the sexes and between man and beasts - he featured prominently in the rich seam of Tehuelche legends. The decline of Tehuelche civilization came fast. In 1839, the French scientist Alcides d'Orbigny estimated that there were up to ten thousand indigenous people of all groups in Patagonia; Musters, in 1870, put the figure for the Tehuelche at 1500; while a 1931 census in the province of Santa Cruz (which had the greatest population of Tehuelche) recorded only 350. As with other indigenous tribes in the south, the causes for the destruction of this civilization are complex and interrelated. Wars with the huincas (white men) were catastrophic - above all the Campaigns of the Desert in the years following 1879 - and were exacerbated by intertribal conflicts between Tehuelche groups themselves and with the Araucanians. Contact with huinca civilization, even when conducted on a peaceful basis through trade, led to severe problems: diseases such as measles, smallpox and tuberculosis wiped out whole tribal groups, while exposure to a market economy destroyed the delicate environmental balance that had existed for millennia. Alcohol played a particularly destructive role, and the aura of fear and mystery that had once insulated the Tehuelche against huinca incursions was replaced by contempt as alcohol abuse led whites to replace one misconception (that of the "noble savage") with another (the "moral delinquent"). The pressure to settle ancestral Tehuelche lands, motivated by the huge profits to be gained from sheep farming, thus gained a spurious moral justification as part of a greater plan to "civilize the indio ". The remaining Tehuelche were pushed into increasingly marginal lands. Guanaco populations, which once numbered in the millions, crashed, and Tehuelche life, culturally dislocated and increasingly derided, became one of dependency. Many found the closest substitute to the old way of life was to join the estancias that had displaced them as peon shepherds. In this way, they were absorbed into the rural underclass that consisted mainly of poorer immigrants. Whereas Mapuche customs and language have managed, tenuously, to survive into the twenty-first century, Tehuelche populations were much more fragmented geographically, and fell below that imprecise, critical number that is necessary for the survival of a cultural heritage. The last speaker of Gununa'kuna died in 1960, and with him the pronunciation of the tongue, while the Aonik'enk tongue can be spoken, at least partially, by some half a dozen people, though it's extremely rare that two of these people actually meet, and most refuse point blank to speak it when they do, at least with whites present.
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