All images and text © Kevin Moloney


Small unmarked crosses tumble over the graves of now extinct Shelknam Indians in the cemetery of the Salesian mission in Río Grande, Argentina. The Shelknam were relocated in the 19th century to missions scattered among the islands of Tierra del Fuego to be civilized, educated and clothed, as well as to free land for grazing. They suffered greatly in confinement. Many died of European diseases such as influenza, smallpox and tuberculosis. Those still hunting ancestral lands found themselves the targets of European guns as ranchers paid by the head for their eradication. "Competition between cattle raisers and hunters leads to an ideology that supports genocide," said anthropologist Ernesto Piana, a researcher at Argentina's Austral Center for Scientific Research (CADIC) in Ushuaia, Argentina.



Ledgerbooks filled with penmanship exercises sit on display at the museum of the Salesian mission in Río Grande. On the wall behind a photo shows a nun teaching knitting to a clothed Shelknam girl. One of four tribal groups of Indians originally found on Tierra del Fuego, the Shelknam suffered most directly from the colonization of the Fuegian archipelago, losing land and nomadic freedom to white settlers. Priests hoping to save lives and souls paid one British pound per Indian brought to the mission in Río Grande and to another on Dawson Island, Chile, where more than 800 died. "You have more than one death per day," noted Piana, of the high rate of disease and the depression of confinement for a once nomadic tribe.



Artifacts from virtually-extinct Yamaná Indians await study at the Museo del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia, Argentina. Though spared the conflict over land with European settlers, Tierra del Fuego's sea-going Yamaná may have been on the decline before Darwin arrived in the 1830s. After centuries of seal hunting, settlement and disease, only a handful of people claiming Yamaná ancestry survives.



Overlooking Lapataia Bay in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego National Park, a midden — or waste pile of mussel shells, seal bones and other discarded material — forms a ring around an indentation where a Yamaná hut once stood. Unlike their Shelknam counterparts who suffered directly from the colonization of the archipelago, the Yamaná probably suffered rapid population decline as a result of the growth of commercial seal hunting for oil. "The extinction started before Fitzroy entered the Beagle Channel," Piana said, naming the captain of the ship that brought Charles Darwin to Tierra del Fuego. Europeans and Americans that began hunting seals in Antarctic waters early in the 19th century destroyed the tribe's principle food source, he said.



A mural on the walls of the post office in Ushuaia paints a stylized image of the area's original inhabitants. "These were the most abject and miserable creatures I any where beheld," Darwin wrote after his first encounter with Yamaná Indians in 1832. "These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world." Early perceptions of Fuegian Indians as a lower form of humanity continue to color their image today.


All images and text © Kevin Moloney

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