Kiepja and Truganini: The last voices

Abstract

"Where are the women who sang like cana? ries? There were so many women. Where are they?" asked Kiepja, one of the last surviving Ona Indians, shortly before her death in Tierra del Fuego in 1966 [ 1 ]. Ninety years earlier, Truganini, the last Tasmanian aborigine, had died. She might have asked a question similar to Kiepja's, but in 1876 there were no docu? mentary filmmakers, and Truganini's voice has been lost to us. Nonetheless, the lives and deaths of these survivors from opposite ends of the globe have become the themes of two recent ethnographic films. The story of Kiepja's people is told in The Ona People: Life and Death in Tierra del Fuego, a film by French ethnologist Anne Chapman and Argentinian filmmakers Ana Montes de Gonzales and Jorge Preloran. In 1964, Chapman first visited the islands of Tierra del Fuego off the southern tip of the South American mainland and there began to record the chants of Kiepja, a ninety-year old Ona shaman. In the years that followed she worked with the few other remaining Ona, drawing upon their memories of the past and their reflections on the present. Ona society and culture, however, had long since been destroyed, and the film relies on early 20th century archival photographs to reconstruct pre-contact life and its tragic demise. Kiepja herself had died before the shooting, and by the time of the film's release in 1977, all the other Ona in the film had also died. Before the decimation of the Fuegian Indians began in the 1880s, there were about 4,000 Ona (or Selk'nam), living in small bands and hunting guanaco (a species of American camel), fishing, and gathering. From the 16th until the late 19th century, shipwrecked sailors and occasional ex? plorers and scientists were the only Europeans with whom the Indians had to deal. These early encounters were generally peaceful. Cap? tain Cook visited the islands in 1769, as did Charles Darwin, voyaging on the Beagle in 1832. Darwin was quite stunned by what he saw: "These were the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld," he wrote of the native population, "one can hardly make one? self believe that they are fellow creatures, in? habitants of the same world." These "degraded savages," he noted, speak a language that "scarcely deserves to be called articulate" [2]. Gold was discovered in the late 1870s in Tierra del Fuego, and a further search was fol? lowed by an invasion of prospective settlers and sheep-farmers from Europe. Pushed from their hunting grounds by white men with re? peating rifles and increasing numbers of sheep, the Ona were hunted down and massacred. Their refuges were the Christian missions and Toby Alice Volkman is Staff Anthropologist with Docu? mentary Educational Resources in Watertown, Massa? chusetts, U.S.A.