I initially wrote this as an ask to @creatingblackcharacters while the topic of Argentinian racism was still on, but I took way too long writing this and the time for ask closed by the time I finished writing this thing. On second thought, maybe it was for the best that I didn't get to send it as an ask, because it was also technically out of topic because the focus of that entire blog is more towards antiblackness in particular and this is... kinda something else?
(Btw, sorry Ice, feel free to ignore this if you feel it is derailing the topic and/or you'd rather move on already from the conversation about Argentina and Latin American racism all together.)
But someone in the notes of that one other post already mentioned it, and a conversation about Argentina's cultural racism issue doesn't feel complete without mentioning that both the Argentinian and the Chilean governments once directly collaborated with European settlers in comitting a genocide in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in the 1880s, in which they put a bounty on the Selknam people and hunted them down as if they were animals.
Quoting from this page: "A pair of severed hands. That was the price a sheep company would pay, proof that one more Selk'nam had been killed. Ears would do, or later a whole skull. The bounty was higher for a woman than a man, because a woman could bear children, and children were the future the companies meant to end."
According to the Spanish page for the genocide on Wikipedia, the murderers also, and I quote, "enviaban los cráneos de los indios asesinados al Museo Antropológico de Londres, que pagaba cuatro libras por cabeza" (Translation: "(They) would send the skulls of the murdered Indians to the Anthropological Museum in London, which paid four pounds per head")
More info copy-and-pasted from Wikipedia:
Years later, justice for the conflict was sought through an inquiry (1895–1904) by Judge Waldo Seguel. This process confirmed that the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego had indeed been hunted. Indigenous people were captured and removed en masse, transferred to Punta Arenas, and distributed throughout the colony. It was judged that these acts were proposed by ranchers and carried out with the complicity of civil authorities, who regarded the genocide as a solution to the "indigenous issue".
However, the judicial process ruled that only a few farmworkers were at fault, and these were released just a few months after the trial. The perpetrators of the expeditions, such as owners and stakeholders of farms belonging to Mauricio Braun, José Menéndez, Rodolfo Stubenrauch, and Peter H. MacClelland, were never prosecuted. Even official figures and civil servants, like governor Señoret and José Contardi, who theoretically had the greatest responsibility to guard the sanctity of the law, were never investigated. The book "Harassment Inflicted on the Indigenous People of Tierra de la Fuego" ("Vejámenes inferidos a los indígenas de Tierra del Fuego") by author Carlos Vega Delgado shows that Judge Waldo Seguel covered for ranchers who committed acts of genocide. The judge falsely recorded that he could not obtain a statement from the Selkʼnam individuals who witnessed the genocide because there were no interpreters between the two languages. However, such translators did exist, including various priests of the Salesian mission and sisters of María Auxiliadora who had learned the native dialect in the missions, as well as Spanish-speaking Selkʼnam, like Tenenésk, Covadonga Ona, and even a deacon of the church.
The last full-blooded Selkʼnam, Ángela Loij, died in 1974.
According to the 2010 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, the Selkʼnam language, believed to be part of the Chonan language family, is extinct, as the last speakers died in the 1980s.
As a side-note, this is also how the Fuegian dog, the only known dog breed with the unique distinction of having been domesticated not from the wolf, but from another canine species called the culpeo (also called the South-American fox, though it is actually more closely related to coyotes than foxes), went extinct, as it was also exterminated. Of course, I'm not trying to imply these dogs were anywhere on the same level of importance as the literal human beings who were mass murdered, I'm only mentioning this for two reasons:
I have literally seen the Fuegian dog's extinction get mentioned far more than the actual Selk'nam genocide (Yes, it was a domesticated canine that was the only one of its kind in the entire world, and their extinction is also a part of the tragedy, but come on), with sometimes the people bringing them up as a 'cool fact' of sorts just saying that they were hunted to extinction because "the settlers thought they were dangerous to cattle", but not saying and/or not knowing that it was also a part of the genocide of the indigenous people who raised them. Like, that bit of context is important!
The people behind this genocide were so utterly cartonishly evil that not only was Selk'nam culture basically wiped out from the face of the planet, they also went out of their way to kill every single one of their dogs.
Anyways, may Julio Popper burn in hell.
