CHILEAN PATAGONIA

“The sea was our home. We were water nomads, wandering canoeists. We would travel naked, through canals and fjords, with the heat of the fires on our boats. They say there were thousands of us. Now there are only nine of us left. The kaweskars are dying out. It is the end of our story”. The closed eyes of old Gabriela Pateriki are more eloquent than her words, spoken in Alacalufe. She was a child when her parents settled in Puerto Eden, in search of food and clothes. The village, an isolated fishing community of 260 inhabitants, lying in front of the Southern Ice Field in Chilean Patagonia was, in 1936, a military seaplane base. This was where a few kaweskar indigenous arrived, those who still sailed from the south of Golfo de Penas to the Strait of Magellan. It is also where the luxury cruise ship Skorpios III docks, with its tourists drunk on white landscapes which they toast with champagne...