Source: https://www.voyagevirage.com/all-posts/north-cape-to-cape-horn-an-artistic-and-indigenous-science-expedition
Over a decade ago, National Geographic Magazine reported that one language dies every 14 days. By the next century, nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear. More than a thousand are listed as critically or severely endangered. Currently, there are over 500 known extinct languages, but we can imagine Earth has already lost far many more. As we lose languages, we lose oral songs and stories, which are filled with regenerative wisdom, indigenous sciences and traditional ecological knowledge. Ultimately, we lose our connection to places as they become devoid of meaning and positive human presence.
The ongoing collapse of the world’s biodiversity is more than just an apt metaphor for the crisis of language extinction. The disappearance of a language deprives us of knowledge no less valuable than some future miracle drug that may be lost when a species goes extinct. Small languages, more than large ones, provide keys to unlock the secrets of nature, because their speakers tend to live in proximity to the animals and plants around them, and their talk reflects the distinctions they observe. When small communities abandon their languages and switch to English or Spanish, there is a massive disruption in the transfer of traditional knowledge across generations—about medicinal plants, food cultivation, irrigation techniques, navigation systems, seasonal calendars. – Russ Rymer, Vanishing Voices, National Geographic Magazine, July 2012.
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We are thrilled to introduce you to our dear friends, French ethnologist, adventurer and founder of the Karukinka Association Lauriane Lemasson and sailor Damien Treutenaere (Damien was previously our family’s sailing coach), who will soon embark on an important artistic and research expedition Cap Nord to Cap Horn, sailing to Norway’s North Cape then on to Cape Horn in Argentina to study with the Saami of northern Norway and the Yagan, Haush and Selk’nam peoples of the southern Strait of Magellan.
One of the objectives of the expedition is to understand the links between the ‘joik’ (song) and places, and to imagine with them a cartographic form that would place the human being at the center, as a giver of meaning to these now wild spaces. In lands where indigenous peoples have mostly been forced off their custodial lands or wiped out completely, the tireless work of Lauriane over the past decade, along with the help of local informants, exploration and archival work, is helping to give meaning to territories emptied of their primary meaning and of human presence.
This extraordinary expedition will start from Brittany and head north towards Norway. After passing through Scotland to prepare for the northern expedition with Tim Ingold (professor emeritus at the University of Aberdeen), the two-person Karukinka team will voyage up to North Cape, passing through Tromsö and the countless islands that make up the Norwegian coast, to meet the local inhabitants and the indigenous Saami during their fishing and reindeer herding season.
The team will then take a break to return to Arles in the the south, for the fourth edition of the Agir pour le Vivant festival for an exhibition and conference program, before setting sail towards Patagonia with their compass set to an arrival in Ushuaia where they will study with the Yagan, Haush and Selk’nam territories for the first time.
This two-year expedition will take place aboard a steel cutter designed 50 years ago by Louis Van de Wiele, renovated explicitly for the expedition by Lauriane and Damien.
The entire expedition will take the team to the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Finally, the expedition will be followed by an exhibition and conferences during the fifth edition of the Agir pour le Vivant festival in August 2024, but also by the writing of a book covering the entire project and with the background of the genesis of Lauriane’s research and expeditions carried out in Patagonia since 2011.
About Karukina Association
Karukina means ‘the last land of men’ in the Selk’nam language. The Selk’nam have been inhabiting the far south of the American continent for about 12,000 years, having passed through the Bering Strait during the great migrations. They traveled thousands of kilometers to reach the ultimate territory of the Great Island of Tierra del Fuego, crossing the icy Hatitelen, later renamed the Strait of Magellan.
After a first scientific expedition carried out in 2013, in total autonomy for several months in the selk’nam, haush and yagan ancestral territories of Tierra del Fuego, which are now deserted, Lauriane Lemasson founded the Karukina association. Aware of the many challenges that lie ahead in order to better understand the links between indigenous peoples and their territories, the association is dedicated to promoting a team spirit made up of exchanges, cooperation and mutual aid with indigenous peoples, often victims of the worst effects of colonization in the north and south of our planet.
