Tierra del Fuego Travel Guide

Our knowledge of the Mannekenk (also known as the Haush or Aush), a relatively small ethnic group that was confined to the Península Mitre, is decidedly sketchy in comparison with other Fuegian tribes. Their culture was a mix of the Yámana and the Selk'nam ways, and intermarriage occurred with both these groups. Like the Yámana, they were heavily dependent on the sea for food, above all sea lion colonies, but they did not have canoe technology.

They were more similar, both physiologically and culturally, to the Selk'nam, of whom they too lived in fear, and it has been suggested that they were a related ancestral group, pushed into the less hospitable corner of the island by their more warlike cousins. And though their languages were unrelated, the Selk'nam adopted several Mannekenk terms in their sacred Hain ceremony, which may itself have derived in part from a Mannekenk initiation rite. "Haush" derives from a Yámana term meaning "seaweed-eaters", but Lucas Bridges tells us the Yámana called the Mannekenk "Etalum Ona", meaning "Eastern Ona", which suggests that the canoe-folk viewed them as a related race to the Selk'nam.

The first record we have of the Mannekenk came after a Spanish expedition in 1619. They were certainly acquainted with Europeans and their goods by the time Cook arrived, and he reported that they already had some Western trinkets at that time (possibly salvaged off shipwrecks). In the late nineteenth century, sealers and Eastern European gold miners made forays into their territory, bringing death through disease and sporadic skirmishing. Lucas Bridges, in 1890, estimated that there were only perhaps sixty left, a figure that had dropped to five by 1911. All that remains now is their shell middens