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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
The spread of Western and Christian civilisation all over the world, during the last four hundred years, has been marked, on all continents, by the disappearance of large numbers of technically less advanced peoples, or by their numerical regression, which in turn was accompanied by the decadence and crumbling of their cultural inheritance. But such feats of extinction are not the prerogative of the white man of modern civilisation. Every point on the globe, at all times, has witnessed struggles for life, where victory went to the stronger. The extinction of Neanderthal man, some thirty thousand years ago, was probably due to the appearance of Cro-Magnon and Chancelade man, who entered Europe at that time and had attained a more advanced technical civilisation than their predecessors. In historic times, we know of several cases in which peoples were driven back and annihilated by neighbours whose civilisation was more advanced and who were endowed with a greater expansive force. The Negritos of South-east Asia had been ousted from a part of their original territory by the Malayans and Chinese long before the arrival of the Europeans. Several Melanesian tribes were exterminated in the course of the ancient Polynesian migrations. These examples could be multiplied. They are in fact so numerous that it has become customary to consider them almost as manifestations of a biological necessity, against which human will remains impotent.
1 The western Patagonian archipelagoes extend over 12 degrees of latitude, from Chiloé to Cape Horn. They are today practically uninhabited.
2 The details of this history may be found in ‘Evolution démographique des Indiens Alakaluf' by J. Emperaire, Journal de la Société des Américanistes, Nouvelle série, tome xxxix, 1950, pp. 187-218. Cf. also J. Emperaire, Les Nomades de la mer (publication imminent).
3 This time span may seem too narrowly calculated, because in general we allow thirty years per generation; but two facts should be kept in mind: first, that the fourth generation is still very young and second, that the Alakalups reach the age of reproduction very early and age very fast.
4 G.Ch. Müsters, At Home with the Patagonians: A Year's Wandering Over Untrodden Ground from the Straits of Magellan to the Rio Negro. London, 1871.
5 For the Fuegians of the Patagonian archipelagoes, three solutions have been tried by the Chilean government, with various degrees of success. The system of reservations, which had been tried with a certain measure of success in other places, was applied to the Yahgan group in the south. When the islands bordering the west coast of the Tierra del Fuego were invaded by white settlers, the Yahgans, whose numerical decline was similar to that of the Alakalups, were assigned a reservation of 10,000 hectares on the great island of Navarino. The government put at their disposal a certain number of sheep, cattle, and horses, in charge of a man of their race who was intelligent and had a good command of Spanish. Against all expectations, the Yahgans adapted themselves rather well to their new condition of small cattle raisers. In their new habitat, at Puerto Mejillones, they built ranches of wood planks and corrugated iron of the type usually met with in that region, and traded the ridiculously small products of their breeding and fishing for provisions, tools and clothing. After falling to twenty-seven, the Yahgan population seemed to have reached a stable equilibrium, which was helped along by numerous mixed marriages. At the time they received their reservation, they had lost practically all of their civilisation, with the exception of the language, and from then on they lived their lives just like any other group of small cattle breeders on the west coast of the Tierra del Fuego.
For the Alakalups other experiments were tried, in connexion or without connexion with the protective law. They all failed. A mission which was established in 1887 on the island of Dawson by the Salesian missionaries of Punta Arenas failed and dispersed around 1906 after the outbreak of a murderous epidemic. It seems this mission has left no positive trace among the Alakalups whom it had sheltered only temporarily and all of whom returned to nomadic life in their canoes.
Much later, at the time when the protective law was enacted, another attempt was made which seemed to be based on a sound idea. A young Alakalup, still in his teens and particu larly intelligent, was sent to Santiago to an Airforce Training Centre. The idea was to give him a good education, to ‘civilise' him, then to send him back to his group, to make of him the chief of the community, and thus to lead the Indians step by step, and under the guidance of one of their own men, to change their way of life. Young Lautaro Wellington adjusted remarkably well to his new situation. He passed his tests and left school with a degree and an instruction equivalent to those of a non-commissioned officer of the French army. He returned to Puerto Eden, with the official order to govern the little Alakalup group. This experiment turned into a catastrophe. For several weeks, Lautaro ordered the hapless Indians, who were bewildered but admiring, to execute the most senseless manœvres with shovel and axe; whereupon he disappeared from Puerto Eden eloping in an Indian canoe with a young Indian woman. The official civiliser, who incidentally was married to a nurse at Santiago, had taken up the life of the nomads of the sea. The Indians who had been half-settled at Puerto Eden lost no time joining him in his new habitat. A new life took shape, in collaboration with hunters from Chiloé. The little Indian community took to fur dealing; and had it not been for an over-consumption of wine and liquor, some kind of satisfactory economic equilibrium might have been reached. Around Lautaro the Indians found a type of life much like that of the loberos and not too different from that of their ancestors. The government wisely closed its eyes to Lautaro's defection and let the experiment take its course. It ended in a catastrophe. At the beginning of 1953 Lautaro and a whole group of Indians drowned themselves. The other Indians gradually returned to Puerto Eden.
From time to time the government tries to send young Alakalup Indians for their military service to Santiago or elsewhere. In general, these young men are enthusiastic at the moment of their departure, but then pass a whole year in contact with other young Chileans with out learning anything at all, hardly a few words of Spanish. As soon as they come back to Puerto Eden, they take up their former ways in huts and canoes, without any difficulty, and without the slightest attempt to change in any way the habits of the group.
The idea of civilising the Alakalups, by settling them in the neighbourhood of a military station or by educating some individual among them and counting on the strength of his example and authority to act on the others—this idea has failed completely. Given the lack of competent personnel—educators, psychologists, or anthropologists—these experiments were doomed to inevitable failure. Other solutions have been proposed spontaneously by the Indians themselves, with a varying measure of success, i.e., those of emigration and partial assimilation. But due to the bad medical conditions under which the majority of emigrations took place, these often ended catastrophically. The few Indians who live in the suburbs of Punta Arenas or Natales, have been more or less assimilated by the poorest classes of those suburbs. Misery, tuberculosis and alcoholism are their lot, and even if one or the other sur vived, we cannot justly speak of a success of this experiment. The Indians, in these cases, have but swelled the ranks of those for whom a solution has to be found in all countries. They have lost themselves in a multitude, and their problem does not present itself any longer in a particular form: but it has not been solved for all that.
There is another kind of half-emigration which, it seems, has yielded better results and which might provide a definite solution for the sixty or so Indians who have resisted decima tion. Several families, or in other cases also isolated individuals, have joined the woodsmen and hunters from Chiloé who live—not in very large numbers—in the archipelagoes. These men, as we have seen, have a way of life rather akin to that of the nomadic Indians, but they command better tools and equipment. They originally came from Chiloé, some 700 km north of Puerto Eden, and they seem to belong to the same human family as the Fuegians. The two groups show great physical resemblance, but the people from Chiloé, who were colonised by the Spanish four centuries ago and who have been in contact with old civilisa tions for much longer, have reached a much higher level of evolution. This assimilation through intermediaries, a process somewhat similar to the one chosen by Lautaro Wellington, might be the best alternative. It seems at any rate the only one which might offer to the Alakalups of our days the possibility of enduring and asserting themselves and finding some vital equilibrium.
Unfortunately the people from Chiloé who live on the archipelagoes often are the scum of their society—those who did not succeed on the native island and are seeking adventure elsewhere. Their influence is much more often damaging than useful to the Indians. Pro pagators of venereal diseases, of alcoholism, thefts, sometimes capital crimes, they are educa tors of doubtful value, and there is an ordinance which bars them in principle from Puerto Eden and from any contact with the Alakalups. It is impossible, however, to enforce any kind of control, and no one pays any attention to the ordinance.
6 Form of water burial, common among the Alakalups.
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