In 1580, Sarmiento de Gamboa became the first European to
witness the Selk'nam themselves. He was impressed by these "Big
People", with their powerful frames, guanaco robes, and conical
goöchilh headgear. It was not long before their defiant
nature became evident, and the bloody skirmish with a Dutch
expedition in 1599 proved them to be superb warriors, a fact long
known by the Yámana, who feared the people they called the
Ona .
Selk'nam society revolved around the hunting of the
guanaco , a species they used not just for meat: the skins
were made into moccasins and capes; the bones were used for
fashioning arrowheads, and the sinews for bowstrings. Hunting was
done on foot, and they relied on stealth and teamwork to encircle
guanacos, bringing them down with bow and arrow, a weapon with
which they were expert. These proved to be of limited use, however,
in preventing the invasion of white settlers at the end of the
nineteenth century.
Selk'nam culture must bear some of the blame for its own demise.
The tribe had always embraced violence to an extent, and the
Selk'nam terrified other groups with their occasional sudden,
devastating raids. Access to guns meant these conflicts became
increasingly bitter and bloody. Later, when the Selk'nam realized
the survival of their race was in jeopardy, a general truce was
called, but not before it was too late. A covert campaign of
systematic genocide began with the arrival of sheep-farming
concerns. Hundreds of miles of wire fencing were erected, which the
Selk'nam, unsurprisingly, resented, seeing it as an incursion into
their ancestral hunting lands; however, they soon aquired a taste
for hunting these slow, stupid animals which they referred to as
white guanaco . For the settlers, this was an unpardonable
crime and represented a drain on their investment. The Selk'nam
were painted as "barbarous savages", who constituted an obstacle to
settlement and progress. Soon, isolated incidents of attack and
retaliation had escalated into bloody conflict. In a gruesome
inversion of the contemporary white prejudice, it was the whites
themselves who assumed the role of headhunters . Reliable
sources point to prices being paid to bounty hunters on receipt of
grisly invoices: a pair of severed ears (later to be modified to
the whole head, after earless Selk'nam began to be seen roaming the
countryside). Bonuses were paid for pregnant women. The headhunters
were paid £1 sterling per "trophy" - the same price as for a puma -
and some purchasers made a handsome profit, by selling the heads to
Europe's museums. Sheep and whale carcasses were laced with
strychnine to poison unsuspecting Selk'nam, and there were reports
of hunting with trained dogs and even of injecting captured
children with infectious diseases.
The assault on Selk'nam culture, too, was abrupt and
devastating, led by the "civilizing" techniques of the Salesian
missions, who were paid £5 sterling by landowners for each Selk'nam
that they "rehoused" in one of their missions. In 1881, at the
beginning of the colonizing phase of Tierra del Fuego's history,
some 3500 Selk'nam lived on Isla Grande. Fifteen hundred were
forced into the Salesian Candelaria mission in Río Grande in 1897,
and many were then deported from their homeland to the mission on
Isla Dawson , south of Punta Arenas. By 1911, an estimated
300 Selk'nam remained, but a measles epidemic in 1925 proved the
effective death knell of the tribe. By the late 1920s, there were
probably no indigenous Selk'nam living as their forefathers had
done. The survivors had no alternative but acculturization. Lucas
Bridges writes of the unparalleled skill of the Selk'nam as
shepherds and shearers, but comments that: "Those Indians who
avoided hard work soon became 'poor whites'." When pure-blooded
Lola Kiepje and Esteban Yshton passed away in 1966 and 1969
respectively, Selk'nam culture died with them.