In 1946, Argentina introduced twenty beavers (Castor canadensis) to Tierra del Fuego (TdF) to promote the fur industry in a land deemed empty and sterile.
Beavers were brought from Canada by Tom Lamb, [...] known as Mr. North for having expanded the national frontier [...]. In the 1980s, local scientists [...] found that beavers were the main disturbers of sub-Antarctic forests. The fur industry had never been implemented in TdF and [...] beavers had expanded, crossed to Chile, and occupied most of the river streams. The Beavercene resulted in apocalyptic landscapes [...]: modified rivers, flooded lands, and dead native trees that, unlike the Canadian ones, are not resilient to flooding. [...]
At the end of the nineteenth century the state donated lands to Europeans who, in building their farms, also displaced and assassinated the indigenous inhabitants of TdF. With the settlers, livestock and plants also invaded the region, an âecological imperialismâ that displaced native populations. In doing this, eugenic and racializing knowledges mediated the human and nonhuman population politics of TdF.
In the 1940s, the Argentinian State nationalized these settlersâ capitals by redistributing their lands. [...] In 1946, the president of the rural association in TdF opened the yearly livestock [conference]: We, settlers and farmers of TdF have lived the evolution of this territory from the times of an absent State. [...] [T]hey allied with their introduced animals, like the Patagonian sheep or the Fuegian beaver. At a time when, after the two world wars, the category of race had become [somewhat] scientifically delegitimized, the enhancement and industrialization of animals enabled the continuation of racializing politics.
In 1946, during the same livestock ceremony in TdF, the military government claimed:
This ceremony represents the patria; it spreads the purification of our races ⊠It is our desire to produce an even more purified and refined race to, directly, achieve the aggrandizement of Argentina.
The increasing entanglement between animal breeding and the nation helped to continue the underlying Darwinist logic embedded in population politics. Previous explicit desires to whiten the Argentinian race started to be actualized in other terms. [...]
Settlers had not only legitimated their belonging to TdF by othering the indigenous [people], [...] but also through the idea that indigenous communities had gone extinct after genocide and disease. At that time, the âmyth of extinctionâ helped in the construction of a uniform nation based on erasing difference, as a geography textbook for school students, Historia y GeografĂa Argentinas, explained in 1952: If in 1852 there were 900,000 inhabitants divided in 90,000 whites, 585,000 mestizos, 90,000 [Indigenous people] and 135,000 [...] Black, a century later there was a 90% of white population out of 18,000,000 inhabitants. (357) [...] [S]tate statistics contributed to the erasure of non-white peoples through the magic of numbers: it is not that they had disappeared, but that they had been statistically exceeded [...]. However, repressed communities never fully disappear.
Text by: Mara Dicenta. "The Beavercene: Eradication and Settler-Colonialism in Tierra del Fuego". Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2020), no. 1. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. [Image by Mara Dicenta, included in original article. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]
