The Yamana: A Life At Sea
The Yamana were a canoe-going people who lived in the channels of the Fuegian archipelago. The heartland of their territory was around the Beagle Channel, but they lived as far south as Cape Horn in the Wollaston Islands, and west as far as the Brecknock Peninsula, which formed a reasonably hermetic geographical divide between their people and the neighbouring canoe culture of the Kaweskar (Alacalufes) to the west. Yamana society was based on tribal groups of extended families, each of which lived for long periods aboard their equivalent of a houseboat: a canoe fashioned of lenga bark that they even cooked and slept in. When not living aboard their canoes, the Yamana stayed in dwellings made of guindo evergreen beech branches, building conical huts in winter (to shed snow), and more aerodynamic dome-shaped ones in the summer (when strong winds blow). Favoured campsites were used over millennia, and, at these sites, middens of discarded shells would accumulate in the shape of a ring, since the door was constantly being shifted to face away from the wind. The first Europeans to encounter the Yamana were a Dutch expedition that sailed near the Horn in 1624, but it was not until the era of the clipper ships, and especially the increase in sealing and whaling operations from the end of the eighteenth century, that contact became more frequent. These expeditions often resulted in suspicion, hatred and disease. Systematic contact only occurred once FitzRoy "discovered" the Beagle Channel, with the subsequent efforts of the Anglican South American Missionary Society to evangelize these "savages". Yamana culture, which depended on a finely tuned system of interaction with the environment developed over centuries, had few defences against these "civilizing" forces, even those forces which believed they were protecting the indigenous peoples. Civilization wiped out the Yamana as assuredly as a gun. In 1884, the arrival of early settlers triggered a measles epidemic that killed approximately half of the estimated 1000 Yamana. However incomprehensible it would have seemed to Europeans, the Yamana certainly fared better in their pre-contact naked state. Damp, dirty clothing - European cast-offs given by well-meaning missionaries - actually increased the risk of disease, which spread fast in the mission communities where the Yamana were grouped. Missionaries promoted a shift to sedentary agriculture, but the consequent change of diet, from one high in animal fats to one more reliant on vegetables, reduced the Yamana's resistance to the cold, further increasing the likelihood of disease. Outbreaks of scrofula, pneumonia and tuberculosis meant that, by 1911, a total of perhaps only 100 Yamana remained. Well before the 1930s, commentators had written off their chances of survival, referring to them as one of the "races soon to be extinct". Abuela Rosa, the last of the Yamana to live in the manner of her ancestors, died in 1982. Nevertheless, a few Yamana descendants do still live near Puerto Williams. Bilingual, they can converse in a restricted version of their forefathers' tongue, and they conserve traditional crafts such as mopi reed basket-weaving, selling these items to visitors.
Tierra del FuegoMaria says "A place along the coastline, mountains surround it and it is lovely."
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