Frequently Asked Questions

           The Kawésqar are an indigenous people (human group/culture) with more than 7,000 years of history, living in the extreme south of what is now known as Southern Patagonia, in the Magallanes region and the Chilean Antarctic. Recognition as such came in 1993 with the promulgation of Chilean Indigenous Law 19,253, which also created the National Corporation for Indigenous Development (Conadi). At that time, Chilean society sought to give a name to this indigenous ethnic group, which became officially known in Chile as Kawashkar or Alcalufe.

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These names are undoubtedly the result of two colonisation processes that reached the southern region, one mainly European and the other Chilean. In 1520, the Spanish fleet, under the command of the Portuguese Fernando de Magallanes, circumnavigated the globe for the first time, passing through the region and the strait that now bear its name, linking two oceans through this southern sea route, where they were warmly welcomed by the Kawésqar, as described in the travelogues written by the Venetian Antonio Pigafetta. From that moment on, the Kawésqar began to live a stage of constant exchange with European sailors, explorers, scientists and settlers, who called them by different names in their own languages: Fueguinos or Firelanders, Pescheräh, Patagonians, etc., but it was not until the first half of the 19th century and aboard the HMS Beagle and HMS Adventure, which explored the area on behalf of the British Crown and which had the famous naturalist Charles Darwin as an explorer on one of its voyages, that the name Alakaluf began to be recorded. A century later, when they were still living as nomadic canoeists among the fjords and channels, the Chilean president Pedro Aguirre Cerda decreed in 1940 that the Chilean Navy would be the protector of the "Kawashkar", thus initiating an institutional project of sedentarisation that, in a few years, led to the total transformation of the ancestral culture of the nomadic canoeists and, consequently, to the loss of a large part of the material and immaterial heritage of its inhabitants: Territories, traditions, language, philosophy, etc.

In the year 2000, the members of the indigenous communities recognised and belonging to this indigenous people at that time, recognised themselves as "Kawésqar", went on to write the term correctly and even registered it with the National Institute of Industrial Property - Inapi. The term comes from their own language and means person or human being and is composed of two words "Káwes: skin" and "Qar: bone". From that moment on, the correct and respectful way to refer to them, their language, their culture and everything related to this people is Kawésqar.