Through travelling light projection, Corporation Traitraico and Delight Lab artists help highlight the depossession history of the Selk’nam people and the fight for their recognition and repair.
Translated from Spanish – Article from the El Mostrador newspaper (Chile)
A light art piece travelled through the Chilean South Patagonia to shine light on the recognition and repair of the Selk’nam people.
The Selk’nam people has been indigenous to Patagonia for thousands of years. During colonization, they suffered persecution, murder, rape and hostage to be shown in European human zoos. The Church banished them and forced them to abandon their culture; and the Chilean State did not recognize them as subjects to rights and later even considered the culture as extinct.
Thanks to two decades of fight, the Chilean Congress finally approved, in September 2023, bill 19.253 for the State to recognize the Selk’nam as an Indigenous people and its culture as living, adding them to the list of other ethnic groups such as Mapuche and Aimara.
« We will now be able to promote our culture more heavily. We need a political presence, and laws to protect our heritage because we suffer from a lot of cultural appropriation. It is the responsibility of the State to repair, through education, the content that is taught today and that leave the Selk’nam people for dead”, says Mauricio Astroza, young Selk’nam individual and member of the Telkacher Assembly.
To help remember, highlight and support the people, cultural and environmental organization Corporation Traitraico and video projection team Delight Lab have gathered the testimonials of Selk’nam individuals from Chile and Argentina and projected them, using their territory as a background.
The projections are part of the “Relatos de Luz” (Stories of Light) project started in 2019 and that travels through the Southern territories. The team also went to Los Lagos, Aysén, Los Ríos et La Araucanía.
The project was made possible thanks to the 2021 Regional Artistic Fund for the Culture of the Native Peoples of the Magallanes Region and Chilean Antarctica; the National Arts Foundations; the Visual Arts and Creation and Production; the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage. The Telkacher Assembly, Bandera Selk’nam, the Selk’nam Language Academy, the Selk’nam Women Group Khol Hool Na from the Lola Kjepja Lineage and representants of the Rafaela Ishton Indigenous community also help support the initiative.
The Assembly has approved a bill to add the Selk’nam people among the list of Indigenous Ethnic Groups recognized by the State.
Before it moved to the Executive for enactment into law, a bill was still waiting on a vote (bulletin 12862) to officially integrate the Selk’nam people to the Indigenous Ethnies recognized by the State.
This was made possible thanks to the Chamber Assembly, who approvel the modifications that were asked by Senate. The requested amendments were mainly about formality.
For the first review, the Chamber had drafted a text that specified the inclusion of the Selk’nam people into the norm of law 19.253 about Protection, Promotion and Development of Indigenous People. The Senate chose to refer to this norm and re-write the bill to include the Selk’nam people.
On this topic, the official bill now states:
“The State recognizes the following as main people or Indigenous ethnies of Chile: Mapuches, Aimara, Rapa Nui or Pascuense, Atacameño, Quechua, Colla, Diaguita, North Chango, Kawashkar or Alacalufe, Yámana or Yagán of the Southern Canals, and Selk’nam. The State recognizes their existence as an integral part of the foundation of the Chilean Nation, as well as their integrity and development, in accordance with their customs and values.”
The initiative started back in 2019 with a motion brought on by Claudia Mix (Comunes), Emilia Nuyado (PS), Camila Rojas (Comunes), Andrés Longton (RN), Jorge Rathgeb (RN) and Cristóbal Urruticoechea (PREP). Former Deputees Jaime Bellolio, Gabriel Boric, Amaro Labra and Gabriel Silber later joined the movement.
Justice for the Selk’nam people
The debate and original motion were presented by three of the authors: Claudia Mix, Cristóbal Urruticoechea and Emilia Nuyado; as well as independent speakers Hernan Palma and Carlos Bianchi.
The Deputee unanimously supported the proposition and marked the importance of justice and providing those who survived the near extermination of the Ethnic group with rights.
In this context, many turned their speech and their looks towards the benches to recognize the work of Selk’nam community leaders who had long fought to make this legal recognition happen.
The specificity of the Selk’nam people and their unique lifestyle at the Southernmost areas of our country were also highlighted. At the same time, the Chilean State’s role in the relentless hunt of Indigenous people in the 19th and 20th century was reminded. This genocide was motivated by land ownership and livestock farming.
Javiera Toro, Minister of Social Development, declared that this announcement helped repay the debt that the Chilean State owed the Selk’nam people. She also highlighted that the State now recognize them as ‘people’ and not just as an ethnic group.
Supporting Antarctic scientific investigation is the job of the national Antarctic programmes, the government entities charged with delivering their countries’ Antarctic research strategies. This requires sustained investment in people, innovative technologies, Antarctic infrastructures, and vessels with icebreaking capabilities. The recent endorsement of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) Polar Code (2015) means that countries must address challenges related to an ageing icebreaking vessel fleet. Many countries have recently invested in and begun, or completed, builds on new icebreaking Polar research vessels. These vessels incorporate innovative technologies to increase fuel efficiency, to reduce noise output, and to address ways to protect the Antarctic environment in their design. This paper is a result of a Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs (COMNAP) project on new vessel builds which began in 2018. It considers the recent vessel builds of Australia’s RSV Nuyina, China’s MV Xue Long 2, France’s L’Astrolabe, Norway’s RV Kronprins Haakon, Peru’s BAP Carrasco, and the United Kingdom’s RRS Sir David Attenborough. The paper provides examples of purposeful consideration of science support requirements and environmental sustainability in vessel designs and operations.
Read more : https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/polar-record/article/icebreaking-polar-class-research-vessels-new-antarctic-fleet-capabilities/9177AFA1FDFAD8B9E5AE5DC68A5C8F80
Ethno-acoustician Lauriane Lemasson is passionate about the relationships that peoples weave with their sonic environment. Her profession drives her, microphone in hand, to brave the harsh expanses of Patagonia. Her goal: to better understand the settlement dynamics and cultural sources of inspiration of the Indigenous peoples who once inhabited these remote regions before being decimated.
A land of silence and infinite spaces. In this Argentine Patagonian pampa, stretching out as if it would never end, people are few and not very talkative. There is no point in asking for directions. Apart from a few shaggy sheep who themselves seem to wonder what they’re doing there, there is no one left to answer in these places.
In any case, south of 53° South, once past the bustling Strait of Magellan (or Magellan Strait), there is hardly more than a single real road on this gigantic archipelago that is Tierra del Fuego: Ruta No. 3, a licorice-colored ribbon winding from north to south, linking the town of Rio Grande to the port of Ushuaia. Otherwise, this antipode—one of the least populated in the southern cone of South America—consists of vast steppes speckled with dark lakes, unassailable mountains, and forests thrown to the margins of the ocean.
All on Foot
And to make matters worse, everywhere there are gnarled, half-bent shrubs twisted by the gusts, impenetrable thickets, lines of rusty barbed wire, and endless fences that seem to conspire to block access to the vast private estancias that still checker most of this land. That’s the setting: a void as staggering as it is hostile. And no welcoming committee.
Yet it is in this complicated land that Lauriane Lemasson, 30 years old, has chosen to lose herself, alone, for months on end, traveling only on foot and always off the main marked road. This strong-willed young Breton woman has stepped over obstacles and ignored prohibitions in order to go “where no one goes anymore,” except for the gauchos. In short, a true wandering adventure. And in complete autonomy, burdened with a 25-kilo backpack in which Lauriane packed her gasoline stove, enough provisions to last between seven and nineteen days without resupply depending on the journey, her tent, her sleeping bag, her trusty Leica camera, her notebooks, and above all a host of microphones and recording equipment.
A Compass and a Map
She often forgot to look for shelter for the night—“in any case, most of the time there wasn’t any,” she recalls—and on her first escape, our tireless walker didn’t even have a GPS, just a compass and a good old 1:750,000 scale map. The goal of these rough outings? “To capture the sounds of the Patagonian landscapes,” she answers quite seriously. A strange quest, an unusual plan.
Because here, apart from the gusts that sometimes whistle so loudly they can make you deaf, silence and contemplation reign. “Very quickly, you realize that this space is inhabited by a thousand little sounds that truly sketch out the soundscapes I’m chasing,” Lauriane admits. The timid cries of birds, the plaintive creaking of trees in the storm, the grunting of sea lions, the distant cracking of glaciers… The slightest echo becomes, for our explorer, a kind of company.
The Violence of the Elements
“During my first journey across Tierra del Fuego,” she recalls, “over three and a half months of wandering, I met, outside urban areas, only three people: two estancieros, ranch workers who couldn’t believe they were seeing a Frenchwoman walking alone in the area, and an old Argentinian, a retiree who became my friend. He has since passed away, but he lived in isolation and welcomed me into his home without hesitation one day when the weather was very bad…”
Rain, snow, storms, blazing sun, sweltering heat, or chills rising from Antarctica… This region has always faced the violence and magic of the elements. Before it was discovered by the West during Magellan’s expedition in 1512, medieval portolan charts summed up the area with a few uncertain notes: “fogs,” “end of the world,” “anti-land.” But it takes more than that to throw off our adventurer. Because Lauriane is not just an explorer. And she’s certainly not a female Don Quixote chasing impossible windmills.
A doctoral student at the Sorbonne, she conducts her sonic explorations as part of a rigorous, multidisciplinary thesis in ethnomusicology and acoustics. This unprecedented research project, which she began in 2011, is based on an initial intuition that she continues to test during her expeditions in Tierra del Fuego: “My explorations between Rio Grande and Ushuaia, in the Corazón de la Isla provincial reserve near Lake Fagnano, on the Beagle Channel, and through the Cape Horn biosphere reserve are all founded on a conviction. The sounds of these places (soundscapes) can still teach us things about the Amerindian peoples who once inhabited them—provided we listen carefully to what they have to say,” she explains. Just as every corner of the planet has its particular smell, colors, and temperatures, an ambiance is also shaped by its acoustics.
“Everyone has experienced this,” the scientist points out. “Whether you are in front of a mountain, in a forest, in a desert, or at the center of an ancient theater, the soundscape influences how we occupy and perceive a place. This is what I try to understand, adding the filters of history, geography, and anthropology.”
From this perspective, analyzing the acoustic dimension of an archaeological site, an ancient Amerindian camp, or a sanctuary where shamanic rituals once took place makes it possible to better explain the past, or even to reconstruct part of the environment and culture of those who lived there.
Microphone in Hand, Ears on Alert
The researcher has traveled more than 2,000 kilometers on foot, driven by a single goal: to once again hear the echoes of the first Fuegian peoples, these Patagonian natives who are now virtually unknown to the general public. “Most books and articles on the subject claim that these Amerindians, who arrived in Tierra del Fuego more than 10,000 years ago, disappeared long ago,” Lauriane protests. “But from my very first trip, I realized the reality was quite different: descendants of these Indigenous peoples—exterminated by European colonists or forcibly assimilated into Hispanic culture—are still very much alive, whether in Argentina or Chile. Nor have their cultures and languages, though certainly threatened with imminent disappearance after years of being disregarded, been erased from memory.”
Based on this realization, the young researcher’s quest took on an even greater sense of urgency. Supported in her work by the ethnologist and Arctic explorer Jean Malaurie—a legendary figure in the world of extreme adventure—Lauriane multiplied her sound recordings and acoustic tests. On this land now emptied of its first inhabitants, she uncovered forgotten campsites, as well as 2,500 hut locations. She even managed to reconstruct the original Amerindian place names of these sites, which had been replaced by the names given by the Spanish. All this painstaking work now allows Lauriane to suggest that in these ancestral societies, which were entirely oriented toward nature, shamanic chants and rituals were mainly inspired by the sounds made by animals, trees, waves, and winds.
Meeting the Yagans
The ethno-acoustician also set out to meet the last speakers of the Yagan, Haush, and Selknam languages in Argentina and Chile. This brought to life the accounts left by the few anthropologists who, at the start of the last century, took an interest in these Indigenous peoples—such as the missionary Martin Gusinde, who, in the 1920s, quickly set aside his evangelizing mission to immerse himself passionately in the daily life of the tribes. In 2018, during a new journey, Lauriane decided to focus her research precisely on the Yagans studied by Gusinde. This time, her destination was the Beagle Channel (Onashaga in the Yagan language). Unlike the Selknams and Haushs, who were hunter-gatherers, the Yagans lived on the water. They were nomads of the channels, traveling in long canoes and subsisting mainly on shellfish, which, according to old accounts, were harvested from icy depths by nearly naked women divers. The atmosphere changed entirely. This expedition took place in a maritime Tierra del Fuego, livelier and even windier than before, where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet head-on, often creating dramatic weather conditions.
A little further south of the Beagle Channel lies Cape Horn, renowned as the “official homeland of seasickness.” Then there are the famous caletas—fjords with spongy shores and trees draped in long strands of lichen, inlets carved out by glaciers thousands of years ago. These labyrinths wind westward, beyond Ushuaia, then along the Pacific coast of Chilean fjords and all the way to the Chiloé Archipelago. “Sailing is the only way if you want to land on the islets and coves scattered everywhere,” Lauriane notes. “My initial idea was to wander by canoe like the Yagans, but technically the expedition was too complex and very risky.” So, she joined a French family as a crew member on a sailboat for a three-month expedition. They stocked up and set sail from Ushuaia, then crossed the closely monitored border waters patrolled by the Chilean navy for a first stop in the world’s southernmost port: Puerto Williams, on Chile’s Navarino Island, a major center of Yagan culture. From there, they headed west, zigzagging through the two arms of the Beagle and exploring the shores on foot to catalog the campsites.
For this journey, the acoustician improved her sound investigation tools: microphones capable of recording in all directions, the latest recorders, meticulous protocols, and… a simple wooden box! Bought at a hardware store in Ushuaia, the object is the size of a shoebox. By tapping on its lid, like a drum, it produces a sharp, loud noise that resonates in the emptiness—perfect for testing the echo of a place and analyzing how sound travels through a given site. Inspired by the protocol developed in 1967 by François Canac (a French scientist who worked notably on the acoustics of Roman amphitheaters), this kind of box test helps better understand sites once occupied by the first inhabitants.
A Crucial Discovery
After leaving the boat, Lauriane returned to the steppes for two more months of solitary research. Then, last April, during her latest expedition, she made her most important discovery in the center of Tierra del Fuego. She headed to the Ewan I site, once used by the Selknam for the Hain initiation ritual for young adults. Studied by the anthropology and archaeology laboratory of Cadic (the Southern Center for Scientific Research in Ushuaia), the site still has a ceremonial hut standing, dated to 1905. “There,” Lauriane recounts, “I was able to carry out acoustic tests to understand the placement of this hut. Located on the edge of an old clearing, Ewan I actually functions like an amphitheater, where sounds (songs, words, cries) are absorbed, conducted, or deflected by the terrain. It is likely that these effects were not accidental but were considered in the choice of the ritual site to ensure the ceremony went smoothly.” This sheds new light on the acoustician’s university thesis. “Tomorrow, we’ll be able to explain other sacred sites by analyzing how they resonate,” she says enthusiastically, already thinking about her next trip. It will be soon, and perhaps aboard her own little sailboat. “I dream of crossing the Atlantic,” confides our Breton. Before once again setting course south, toward that Fuegian land that still has so many sonic nuances to whisper to her.
Archaeological Research in Patagonia: Tolhuin, in Argentine Tierra del Fuego
On the road leading to Cerro Michi, a team of archaeologists from GIATMA (affiliated with CADIC-CONICET) made a significant discovery: during fieldwork, the archaeologists found materials and a new archaeological site, which they then began to study.
This discovery is part of the ImpaCT.AR project, Challenge 2, “Archaeological Cultural Heritage in Tolhuin,” supported by the municipality and accompanied since the first term of Daniel Harrington. The main objective is the identification and protection of the region’s archaeological cultural heritage.
The research team carried out fieldwork, including surveys and excavations within the urban area of Tolhuin, with the aim of creating an archaeological risk map to zone sensitive areas. This provides municipal authorities with crucial information for the preservation of heritage during infrastructure projects.
The ImpaCT.AR project is not limited to identifying archaeological sites; it also includes training for personnel directly or indirectly involved in changes to the urban landscape. Workers are made aware of the importance of archaeological heritage and the need to be vigilant during activities involving ground movement.
The discovery on the road to Cerro Michi adds to other finds in Tolhuin, such as on the road to the pier, at Laguna Varela, the descent to Lake Fagnano, and in the residential neighborhood of Las Laderas del Kamuk. The central strategy of this collaboration between CADIC-CONICET and the Municipality of Tolhuin is prevention, ensuring that infrastructure works are carried out carefully and with respect for the heritage shared by the community.
What is an archaeological discovery?
According to the Guide for the Formulation of the Protocol for Chance Discoveries of Archaeological Heritage and Public Archaeology, an archaeological discovery is the unexpected encounter with archaeological materials such as vessels or fragments, lithic objects (stones or rocks), animal or human bones, figurines, wooden or metal utensils, or any other ancient element. In this regard, the municipality of Tolhuin was expected to specify the nature of the materials found to provide context for the news; however, the community will have to wait for a forthcoming report to learn more.
