Their Canoes were Their Homes
11 Dec
When we saw THIS dispiriting story from Reuters today, reporting on the impending demise of the Kawesqar tribe in Patagonia, we were reminded of the role the canoe played in the lives of the Kawesqar and other tribes living on the southern tip of South America.
According to the story, with only 12-20 pure-blooded members of the once-nomadic tribe still alive — and many of them in old age — the tribe, its culture, and its language are not expected to last long. An estimated 200 people of mixed Kawesqar descent still exist.
The Kawesqar, like other original inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, for all practical purposes lived on their 26-29-foot-long boats. According the National Museum of the American Indian, they “lived a life that can best be described as nomads of the sea, because they traveled from place to place and didn’t stay very long in one area.”
Reuters reporter Simon Gardner reports that the Kawesqar, “lived in their canoes, even sleeping and cooking in them, wearing nothing other than a piece of sea lion skin on their backs and smothering themselves in grease and fat when diving for food.”
There’s an interesting book called The Yamana Canoe in which the author, Carlos Pedro Vairo, attempts to reconstruct a bark canoe of the more southerly Yamana or Yaganes tribe, and thereby understand their long-lost lifestyle . (Gardner reports that only a single full-blooded member of the Yamana or Yaganes tribe survives in Chile.)
Charles Darwin encountered the natives of Tierra del Fuego in 1831 and wrote about them at some length in The Voyage of the Beagle.
