The Yámana 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 Kawéskar (Alacalufes) to the west.
Yámana 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
Yámana 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 Yámana 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". Yámana 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
Yámana as assuredly as a gun.
In 1884, the arrival of early settlers triggered a measles
epidemic that killed approximately half of the estimated 1000
Yámana. However incomprehensible it would have seemed to Europeans,
the Yámana 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 Yámana 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 Yámana'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 Yámana 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 Yámana to live in the manner of her ancestors, died in
1982. Nevertheless, a few Yámana 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 möpi reed basket-weaving, selling these items
to visitors.