Tehuelche people

Ethnic group

The Tehuelche people, also called the Aónikenk, are an Indigenous people from eastern Patagonia in South America. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Tehuelche were influenced by Mapuche people, and many adopted a horseriding lifestyle. Once a nomadic people, the lands of the Tehuelche were colonized in the 19th century by Argentina and Chile, gradually disrupting their traditional economies. The establishment of large sheep farming estates in Patagonia was particularly detrimental to the Tehuelche. Contact with outsiders also brought in infectious diseases ushering deadly epidemics among Tehuelche tribes. Most existing members of the group currently reside in cities and towns of Argentine Patagonia. The name "Tehuelche complex" has been used by researchers in a broad sense to group together indigenous peoples from Patagonia and the Pampas. Several specialists, missionaries and travelers have proposed grouping them together on account of the similarities in their cultural traits, geographic vicinity and languages, even though the languages they spoke amongst themselves were not related to each other and their geographic distributions were extensive.

According to the historian Antonio Pigafetta from Ferdinand Magellan's expedition in 1520, he referred to the indigenous people he came across in the San Julian Bay as the "Patagoni". According to the most widespread view, the word Tehuelche comes from the Mapuche term chewel che, which would mean "brave people", "rugged people", or "barren land people". Another version suggests that it could be derived from one of their factions, the Tueshens, plus the Mapuche word "che" meaning 'people' or 'peoples'.

The classification of indigenous groups that lived in the Pampas and Patagonia is confusing due to the different terms that were used to refer to the native population groups from these regions. There are various causes that have prevented the establishment of one unique and complete classification. Among these circumstances, the extinction of some of these groups, coupled with the vast amount of land on which these groups were distributed, which inhibited Spanish explorers who first identified certain Tehuelche peoples from making contact with all the groups. In other cases, the seasonal migrations that they practiced which involved traveling long distances made Europeans that observed them overestimate the number of people from a group or the distribution range of a language. In conjunction with all of these factors, the intrusion of the Mapuches, or Araucans, from the west deeply transformed their cultural reality, intermixing and absorbing ethnic groups from the Pampas and central and North of Patagonia, producing the Araucanization of a large part of the ancient inhabitants. Finally, the subsequent Conquest of the Desert carried out by the Argentine Army led to the near extinction of these indigenous communities. This historic overview has led to the disagreement among researchers. In the 19th century, explorers such as Ramón Lista and George Chaworth Musters named them "tsóneka", "tsónik" or "chonik". The majority of experts agree that the Chubut river separated the two largest subdivisions: the "Southern Tehuelche" and "Northern Tehuelche". The first subdivision stretched towards the south to the Strait of Magellan, whereas the second group extended towards the north to the Colorado River (Argentina) and Rio Negro (Argentina). The presence, or lack thereof, Tehuelche people in the Pampas has led to disagreements among researchers, who have not agreed on the existence of a separate subdivision called the "Pampas", nor what their relationship and borders were with the Mapuches.

In 1936 Milcíades Vignati published Las culturas indígenas de la Pampa y Las culturas indígenas de la Patagonia (The Indigenous Cultures of the Pampas and the Indigenous Cultures of Patagonia) in which he proposed that between the 16th and 19th centuries the "Gününa küne" or "Tuelches" lived from the southern half of the province of Rio Negro to the boundary between the present Chubut and Santa Cruz provinces. The "Serranos" were to the North of them and the "Aônükün'k" or "Patagones" were located to the South. These peoples were divided between three groups: the "Peénken" (people of the North), the "Háunikenk" (people of the South), and the "Aónikenk" (the people of the West).

In 1864, Hunziker recorded a vocabulary and a collection of phrases from a language called Genakenn in the Viedma region. In 1865, the explorer Jorge Claraz traveled from south of Buenos Aires to Chubut being guided by individuals who spoke Gününa iajëch, collecting the names of places, words and sentences in his Diario de viaje de exploración al Chubut (Chubut exploration travel diary) (1865–1866). In 1913, Lehmann Nitsche used the data collected by Hunziker and Claraz to create a comparative vocabulary of Tehuelche languages: El grupo lingüístico tschon de los territorios magallánicos (The Chonan Linguistic Groups of the Magellanic Territories). In 1925, Harrington gathered words from bilingual Tehuelche speakers which he published in 1946 in Contribución al estudio del indio gününa küne (A Contribution to the Study of the Gününa küne Indian), claiming that they called their language Gününa yájitch or Pampa. During the 1950s, Casamiquela collected vocabulary, songs and prayers from various elders, outlining a morphosyntactic analysis. In 1960, Ana Gerzenstein made a phonetic and phonological classification in her Fonología de la lengua gününa këna (Phonology of the Gününa këna Language). In 1991, José Pedro Viegas Barros outlined a morphosyntactic projection in Clarificación lingüística de las relaciones interculturales e interétnicas en la región pampeano patagónica (Linguistic Clarification of Intercultural and Inter ethnic Relations in the Pampas Patagonian Region), and in 2005 he developed a phonological description in Voces en el viento (Voices in the Wind). Puelche is a dead language. Casamiquela released the first and last name of the last Puelche speaker: José María Cual, who died in 1960 at the age of 90.

Although mobile, Tehuelche groups tended to move in specific circuits, predominantly from west to east and vice versa. During each season, the groups had places where they would set up camps, known as aik or aiken among themselves, and referred to as tolderías by the Spanish and Creoles. Each Tehuelche group was composed of various kinship and they had specific territories for hunting and gathering. The boundaries of these territories were defined through ancestry by markers with unknown significance: a hill, a trough, a hollow, or important tree. In cases where a group could not satisfy their needs in their own territory, they had to ask for the permission of neighboring people from the same ethnic group to use the resources from their territories; a violation of this rule led to war. The Tehuelche had a very organized family unit, in which men were the authoritative figures and women were subordinate. In most family contexts, the father would offer his daughter for marriage in exchange for various goods. Six thousand years ago the Toldense industry emerged, consisting primarily of goods such as two sided sub triangular projectile points, lateral and terminal scrapers, bifacial knives and tools made from bone. Later, between 7000 and 4000 B. C., the Casapedrense industry appeared, characterized by a greater proportion of stone tools made in sheets, which was most likely a demonstration of a specialization in guanaco hunting, which is also present in the subsequent cultural developments of the Tehuelche people. From this time and until the European arrival (early 16th century) the Tehuelche people were hunter gatherers who utilized seasonal mobility, moving towards guanaco herds. During the winter they were in the low areas (meadows, wetlands, shores, lake shores, etc. ), and during the summer they moved up to the central plateaus of Patagonia or to the Andes mountains where they had, among other sacred sites, Mount Fitz Roy.

On 31 March 1520 the Spanish expedition, under the command of Fernando de Magallanes, landed in San Julián Bay to spend the winter there. Here, they made contact with Tehuelche indigenous groups, who they referred to as "Patagones", as told by the scribe, Antonio Pigafetta. Pigaffetta described these people as a mythical tribe of Patagonian giants. Prior to meeting the Tehuelche groups in person, the explorers had been amazed by the size of their footprints. Enlarged by the animal furs they used as footwear, their feet appeared much larger than those of the Europeans at the time. During the 16th century, the average male height of Europeans at around would have been shorter than the Patagonian men whose height reportedly averaged above by some accounts Thus the Europeans may have considered them to be "Patones" ('large footed') or the Patagonians may have reminded the explorers of the giant Pathoagón from the knighthood novel Primaleón. Both municipalities, or partidos, are located in the interior of the current Buenos Aires Province. The movements of people to participate in the exchanging of products generated certain cultural exchanges between different groups living anywhere from the humid Pampas, the northern Patagonia, the immediate area near the Andes (both on its western and eastern edges), to the coast of the Pacific Ocean. This was the start of cultural exchanges and migratory movements, between distinct groups such as the Tehuelche, Ranquel and Mapuche people. Although Mapuche trade started as a means of fostering commerce and alliances, it was completed by generating a large cultural influence on the Tehuelche and other groups, to the point that it is referred to as the "Mapuchization" or "Araucanization of Patagonia". A large portion of the Tehuelche and Ranquel peoples adopted many of the Mapuche customs and their language, while the Mapuches adopted parts of the Tehuelche way of life (such as living in tolderías) and thereby, the differences between the two groups were blurred to the point that their descendants refer to themselves as Mapuche Tehuelche people. During the first half of the 18th century, Chief Cacapol and his son, Chief Cangapol, were the most important chiefs in the regions extending from the Andes Mountains to the Atlantic Oceans, and from the Río Negro to the Salado River. Cangapol had a seat in the government in the Sierra de la Ventana region, and their people were known as the "Mountain Pampas". The Pampas knew how to align themselves with the Mapuches from the west, to attack the Buenos Aires Campaign in 1740. In this process there were also inter ethnic struggles and by 1820 heavy combat erupted between the Patagones and Pehuenches on the banks of the Senguerr River; other combat occurred at Barrancas Blancas and Shótel Káike. (Human Zoos). Anthropologist Robert Lehmann Nitsche was also criticized for having studied members of the Tehuelche people who had been abducted and were exhibited in circuses.

By decree of President José Evaristo Uriburu on 11 January 1898, the Camusu Aike reservation was created for the "gathering of Tehuelche tribes". The reservation is located in the Santa Cruz Province of Argentina. In 1922, President Hipólito Yrigoyen created the following reserves by decree: Lago Viedma (Lots 119–117) between , Lago Cardiel (Lot 6) and Lago Cardiel (Lot 28 bis). The first two were stripped of their status in 1966 and the third in 1990.

The Tehuelche group is nearly extinct in Chile. In 1905 they suffered a smallpox epidemic that killed Chief Mulato and other members of his settled tribe in the río Zurdo valley, near Punta Arenas. The survivors took refuge in Argentinian territory, possibly on the Cumusu Aike reserve. Their memory is present in the name Villa Tehuelches, a Chilean town in the Laguna Blanca commune.