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History Of Use

Harpoons like this were made for sale to visitors. It is twice the size of the harpoons used in hunting.

Description

Long grey-brown bone harpoon that tapers to a pointed tip. Wider end is incised at an angle.

Cultural Context

The Yamana (Yaghan) people are often referred to as extinct today. Throughout the Americas, many indigenous groups were exterminated following European contact. Most commonly, people succumbed to introduced diseases against which they had no immunity. However, numerous groups also “disappeared” through devious sleight of hand. They were recorded as being extinct, enabling governments to ignore them and colonizers to take over their lands with relative impunity. In some cases, the loss of their language was enough for government to present a people as being extinct. For other groups, it was something as simple as the adoption of European clothing. Frequently, the marker used by government was the death of the last apocryphal “full-blooded Indian,” a practice that posited an equivalent between blood quantum and existence of a culture. Most of these situations applied to the Yamana people. However, small communities of people continue to self-identify as Yaghan in both Chile and Argentina.