CHAPTER XVI
NATIVE RACES OF CHILE
Inca Control.—Racial Divisions.—The Southern Tribes.—Araucanians.—Race Mixture.—Archæology.
Before the coming of the Spaniards to Chile, an important line of division already lay between the native folk who accepted the domination of the Inca and those who successfully resisted his rule. The physical sign of that division was the Maule River.
But both north and south of the Maule the various tribes differed widely in blood, in speech and habits and in capacity for the adoption of alien culture. Divergence of a marked character must have existed for a long time between the primitive, fish-eating coast dwellers and the people living in the great longitudinal valley, who, although they were in all probability originally hunters, had taken to the cultivation of such food staples as maize and potatoes. The coast dwellers were not all of the same race, although necessity induced somewhat similar living habits: T. A. Joyce shows that upon the strip between Arica and the Atacama desert were a colony of the Uros, whose real home was on the Desaguadero River leading south from Lake Titicaca, but who were planted on the Pacific littoral in accordance with the Inca system of transferring tribes. South of these groups were the wood and skin huts of another colony brought from Bolivia, the mitimaes of the Charca tribe, who buried their dead in a contracted position. South of Tarapacá were groups known collectively as Changos, living the same simple life but practising extended burial. The practical, industrious system of the Incas could do little with such folk except, probably, to levy a tribute of fish, and chief attention was turned to the fertile country of the central valley. Here agricultural life seems to have been forced upon certain regions through scarcity of game, for although guanacos, birds and a few small edible animals are found all the way from Coquimbo to Cape Horn, such creatures as the pudu and the huemul (small and larger deer) are found only in forestal belts. South America has never possessed any great quantity of large game animals, and Chile in particular has a surprisingly short list of indigenous quadrupeds, although she has always been well stocked with both land and sea-birds.
Today the “Indian” has practically disappeared from the major part of the coast and from the beautiful central valley of Chile. The 50,000 Araucanians who survive in the Temuco region (Province of Cautín) do not retain more than dwindling traces of their former customs; in the deep forestal area of Valdivia and Llanquihue, as for instance upon the island in Lake Ranco with its group of “Huilliches,” a few people are found under conditions still approximating to their pre-Spanish state. But in the extreme south where the freezing water-mazes of the stormswept archipelagos have tempted few newcomers, the native groups of Yahgans and Onas and Alakalufs are living in much the same manner as that described by observers three or four hundred years ago. Here and there, as near the newly developed farms of Tierra del Fuego, where the native folk have learnt herding, habits have been definitely changed, but in the main the folk of the Magellanic regions have been left in undisputed possession. The natural conditions under which they exist are not conducive to cultural development. The daily struggle for food absorbs all effort, and it is only when an outside civilisation armed with tools and machinery and modern economic knowledge has imposed its will that the effects of the inclement climate have been conquered. Despite missionary effort, the southerly native people, among the most primitive and most miserable tribes in the world, sharing the common fate of their happier kin of the pleasant lands to the north, have almost disappeared. Today the traveller traversing by local steamer the wonderful Smyth’s Channel and nearby inlets and fjords may see, as the earliest travellers saw, the open canoe of the “Indians” with a wood fire burning continually upon a tiny hearth of clay, paddled through the chilly waterways by folk whose dark skins are practically unprotected from the wind and rain. The Fuegians meet any passing vessel to beg for clothes and food as they begged from the Beagle, but contact with newcomers has taught them nothing but a new list of small demands. In the developing life of Chile they seem to have no place.
To discover the true racial differences between the native inhabitants of Chile before the Spanish conquest is a task requiring more evidence than lies as yet before us. It is rendered more difficult by the absence of temples or permanent dwellings and by the comparatively small witness yielded by graves. Only in the north, in the dry belt, are cemeteries offering a considerable bulk of remains; here are such sites as Calama and Pucara, near Chiu-Chiu, where Inca influence is plain although the residents had certainly attained to no more than a modest cultural status. The pottery found in the cemeteries of Arica and the Antofagasta sites is rough and simple; the weaving coarse. The houses were mere quadrangles of cemented rubble where, as at Pucara, ruins survive in the rainless country. These are, however, beyond ancient Chile. Nothing so advanced as this proof of settled communities is found south of Copiapó, and seekers must fain rely upon the evidence of shell-heaps and arrowheads, plus the records of early visitors and such help as is afforded by the life of indigenous folk surviving today.
The names of tribes as recorded or in use are not racial. The cloud of these appellations confuses the enquirer until he realises that Araucana is a Spanish derivative of the Quechua “Auca” or rebel; that Picunche means simply “People of the North” as Huilliche means “People of the South”; Puelche, “People of the East,” and Moluche, “of the West,” while the name Mapoche or Mapuche indifferently exchanged for Araucanian today is a local term indicating inhabitants of a certain territory. Joyce considers that the evidence proves existence of an agricultural folk in Central Chile before the Inca conquest, speakers of the Araucanian tongue prevailing from Atacama to Chiloé. Upon these people of sedentary habits had descended a wave of nomads from over the Andes, Pampa-bred hunters who as in many allied cases adopted the speech of the invaded land. The speech of the rebels or Aucaes survived Inca control following the invasion from Peru about the middle of the fifteenth century. Of the tribes found by the Spaniards a century later, the most northerly Araucanian speakers were the Picunche, a mixture of Pampa immigrants with remnants of the old “rebel” stock, the latter predominating; the Moluches, farther south, showed signs of descending in the main from the Pampa invaders, although among them were found agricultural groups where older habits had prevailed. In the Andean foothills were the Puelches, closely allied to tribes of the Argentine plains, who had crossed the lower mountain passes between Villarica and Corcovado.
Far south, three racial divisions are admitted. Two of these are commonly known as Fuegians, and these scant tribes, Alakalufs of the southwest and Yahgans dwelling in the most southerly part of Tierra del Fuego, are a much more primitive folk than the few and diminishing Onas, a taller, round-headed race allied to the big Patagonians, and inheriting from their kin a fair degree of hunting skill. A number of the Onas have taken kindly to a shepherd’s life since the creation of scientific Fuegian farms, but the Yahgans remain as they have always been known to history, a fish-eating, practically amphibious race, unreconciled to civilisation. The long-headed Alakalufs of the Chonos Archipelago have been forced, whatever their origin, into a mode of life much like that of the Yahgans, depending chiefly upon the sea for livelihood, using arrows and harpoons for killing fish, constructing canoes and showing skill as watermen.
Very finely worked arrowheads have been and are still being made by these southerly folk: Chilean specimens are among the best weapons of the kind found in the Americas. But neither the Onas nor Fuegians have ever constructed pottery, or know anything of the loom; shell-fish, seal-meat and fungus, forming their chief food, is frequently eaten raw. Alakaluf homes are huts of sticks, covered with skins, and carried by canoe from place to place. They have no chiefs, dwell in family groups, and we know nothing of their gods. They have as a whole resisted efforts to Christianise them.