It hadn’t sounded that long when he said it in Tehuelche.
‘The Tehuelche language is very concise, every word can have a lot of different meanings. We don’t have a mass of verbs, there aren’t that many words in our language, but it is the more direct for it. The Mapuche language can be more wordy, more flowery even.’
And I get another burst of language. I can’t make out a word of this, either, but I can tell that it sounds different from the first. Smoother somehow, liquid almost, less guttural; it flows. As far as I can tell, Payaguala doesn’t speak either of those languages with a Spanish accent. They sounded, both of them, like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
Before I leave, Payaguala guides me through the two rooms of his museum.
There are photos which show a group of people and horses out in the countryside. Flags are fluttering in the usual Patagonian breeze. The people carry instruments which I can now identify: a kultrung, various pipes and flutes, and the long alpenhorn-like trutruka.
‘These,’ says Payaguala, ‘are our rituals, you can see how they are carried out, following the old rules. Nothing has changed.’
Another glass case contains a flag, the same as the one in the photos: it has three horizontal stripes, blue, white and yellow, and in the centre a stylised blue arrowhead, similar in shape to the Stone Age arrowheads in the next room.
‘This is the flag of the Tehuelche and Mapuche of Chubut,’ explains Payaguala. ‘The blue represents the sky, the yellow the sun and the white the harmony of the universe. The arrow is a symbol of our on-going struggle for our rights.’
There are assorted textiles woven with elaborate geometric patterns – some, if I understand him right, signifying joy, others sadness. Mourning, perhaps? Payaguala casually sends a whole stream of information my way, in which I flounder. There are all the unknown words in the Aoniken-Tehuelche and Mapuche languages, place names, dates fired off in too-rapid Spanish.
A map. ‘There’ – he points – ‘you can see the distribution of our various communities, the places where Tehuelche communities live although it is said that the Tehuelche are extinct.’ Again that short bark of a laugh. ‘And the Mapuche communities. You can see that they are much more numerous than we are. But we’re still here. We’re still here.’
We arrive back at the case with the photographs. They are arranged chronologically, sepia to black-and-white to colour.
‘That’s my family, back in the 1800s,’ says Oscar Payaguala, pointing. Another, somewhat blurred, picture seems to show a group of men running after something. ‘And there we are, playing football. The English will tell you that they invented the game of football, but there we are, years and years ago, playing football. We also played hockey, way back; we played all sorts of things. They didn’t invent anything!’
Payaguala is not fond of the English. Earlier in his office, when he pointed out all the places in Europe where he has played his music, Germany and France, Spain and Scandinavia, I asked him why he didn’t go to London. I was sure he’d find an interested audience there, too. At that, his face closed.
‘I will never go to England,’ he said, biting off the words. ‘My brother died in the war.’
It took me a moment to get that.
The Falklands War. La Guerra de Malvinas. I was fifteen at the time it happened, a German teenager. It wasn’t my war. It meant nothing to me.
But of course, in Argentina (and in Britain) it means a great deal. People died. Were killed. Not faceless soldiers, statistics, numbers.
People like Payaguala’s brother.
27
AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH century, only a few small communities of European immigrants existed in Patagonian frontier country on the eastern side of the Andes. With the exception of Y Wladfa, none survived. They were attacked by Pampas Indians and Mapuche who stole cattle and abducted women and children. It was thought that over a thousand white people were held in captivity by Patagonian tribes. Some tribes believed that a cachet was attached to having a Cristiana, a white woman, in their tents.
Then again, from the seventeenth century onwards there had been regular incursions by the Spanish military on both sides of the Andes, with the express aim to capture Indians to be used as slaves. ‘I had great luck,’ reported one Sergeant Major Juan Fernández in 1627, ‘in capturing 130 pieces [sic] and with them 30 horses; and hanged the surplus Indians from the trees, all this with the loss of one single soldier.’36
The Mapuche were behaving no worse than the Cristianos themselves. Not that it was seen like that at the time. In the 1880s, hysterical stories appeared in European papers, warning people not to settle in Argentina.37 The stream of immigrants arriving in Buenos Aires dried up.
The Argentine government was not amused. Argentina laid claim to all territories south of the Río Negro and east of the Andes mountain range: all of Patagonia. (Or, to be precise, eastern Patagonia.) This included not only the inhospitable south, but also large swathes of fertile pampas.
The problem was, so did Chile. In 1830, the improbably-named Chilean republican and liberator Bernardo O’Higgins wrote: ‘I consider the Pehuenche, Puelche [Mapuche] tribes and Patagonians [i.e. Tehuelche] as our compatriots... who will like nothing so much as to represent the civilisation of all the sons of Chile on both sides of the Cordillera, united in one big family.’38
When the Welsh decided that they wanted to settle in the infertile wastes of the deep south, the Argentine government probably thought they were mad. But then there was the success of Y Wladfa, only a few years later, in growing wheat in what had until then been regarded as desert. At around the same time, the Argentine explorer Francisco ‘Perito’ Moreno spent several weeks in the tents of one of the most famous Patagonian caciques: Sayhueke, who reigned over a large area of land in the foothills of the Andes, several hundred miles to the west and north of Y Wladfa. An immense and immensely fruitful territory, undreamed-of beyond the inhospitable desert: bursting with rich grasslands and fruit trees and crystal mountain streams.
‘A new Switzerland,’ an enchanted Moreno reported back upon his return to Buenos Aires. It would be, he thought, ‘the richest province of Argentina.’39 Suddenly, there was land worth having in Patagonia.
Successive Argentine governments had negotiated over land and made treaties with the leaders of several indigenous tribes – among them Sayhueke. In exchange for ceding land in the valley of the River Chubut for the Welsh settlers, he received a bi-annual payment from the government that consisted of ‘1000 head of cattle, 20 kilos of sugar, 16 kilos of yerba maté (tea), 12 kilos of tobacco, 2 reams of paper, 10 kilos flour, 8 demijohns of gin.’40
But these contracts were only feasible with individual tribes – and only with those that were willing. Not all Indians were inclined to make treaties with the government and allow strangers to settle their lands. And even if they had been, paying them rent indefinitely would have been an expensive business for the government.
So when the European papers were full of bloodcurdling tales about the Indian menace and immigrants began to stay away, the Argentine government decided to clear the suddenly desirable south of its indigenous inhabitants to make way for what it was pleased to call ‘progress’.
It sent a rag-tag army south, composed to a large extent not of regular, trained soldiers, but of adventurers and mercenaries who joined in the hope for spoils.
The express aim of the so-called Conquista or Campaña del Desierto – the Desert Conquest, or Desert Campaign – was to open up frontier country for settlement by removing the people who so inconveniently already lived on the land. Over a period of nearly eighty years, altogether thirty ‘desert campaigns’ were carried out, the most notorious ones in the last two decades of the nineteenth century under General Roca, later twice president of Argentina.
‘The wave of barbarians,’ wrote Roca in 1883 in a breath-taking reversal of the facts, ‘who for centuries swamped the wide and fertile plains of the pampas and forcibly k
ept us cooped up in limited spaces, who made us pay them shameful tributes, has finally been destroyed or at least pushed back into their primitive camps beyond the mountains.’41
Nobody knows for sure how many people lived in Patagonia before the arrival of the white settlers. In 1881, while the ‘Desert Campaign’ was still well underway, an Argentine government report estimated that an area of the northern Patagonian province of Neuquen must have been inhabited by at ‘least some 15,000 souls, because over the course of the Campaign, more than 14,000 have been killed or taken prisoner.’42 Estimates vary wildly, but it was certainly a very sparsely populated territory, with probably no more than 100,000 people living there before 1900. (That’s rather less than the population of Newport, Gwent, spread out over some 300,000 square miles. The entire U.K. is 95,000 square miles.)
In the years between 1850 and 1930, three million European immigrants streamed into Argentina. Around half of them left again after a few years because they couldn’t make it in the New World. One and a half million stayed, settled and started families.
In order to make space for them, Tehuelche, Pampas and Mapuche men were killed, pressed into the navy or taken to work as forced labour on farms to the subtropical far north of Argentina, two thousand miles away (about the distance between London and Moscow). Women and girls were distributed as prizes amongst the soldiers or given as servants to upper-class families in Buenos Aires.43 A few hundred were herded together in reservations, as in North America, on pockets of the poorest land in places which the whites didn’t want. Many were baptised en masse upon capture, by Catholic clerics who travelled with the military.44 The Indígenas weren’t even allowed to keep their own souls.
And this was happening to people who prized their individual freedom to the point that one of them had rejoiced on his deathbed that he had taken orders from no one.
28
THE WELSH COLONISTS knew about the ‘Desert Campaign’. They heard it directly from the Indians themselves, some of whom were their friends. In 1881, Sayhueke sent a heartrending letter to Lewis Jones.
And now my friend, I have to tell you about the terrible attack made on me on 19 March, when 3 armies set upon my bands, killing without warning a large number of my people. They came armed and stealing into our tents, as if I were an enemy and a murderer. I have serious agreement with the government for many years, and therefore cannot fight nor contend with the armies, for which reason I retreated with my band and tents, thereby attempting to avoid sacrifice and wretchedness... I now find myself ruined and sacrificed – my lands, which my father and God left me, stolen from me, as well as all my animals to the extent of 50,000 heads which include cattle, stallions and sheep and herds of useful horses... I am not a criminal – but a noble Criollo i.e. a Creole, [a term whites born in Argentina used for themselves] and by obligation the owner of these things – not a stranger from another land, but born and raised on the land and an Argentinian faithful to the government. For this reason I cannot comprehend the tragedy that has descended upon us. ... I never undertook any attacks, my friend, nor killed any one, nor took any prisoners – and I therefore beg you to intercede on my behalf with the authorities, to protect the peace and tranquility for my people, to return to us our animals and all our silver possessions, but mainly my lands.45
At the time, the colony, dependent though it was on the goodwill of the Argentine government, was shocked by what happened. The settlers sent a petition to Buenos Aires. Of which the government took no notice whatsoever.
Without interfering in any way in the measures which you saw wise to adopt, we hope that, as ones who were long acquainted with the native people, we can express our hope that you can show them every compassion and assistance that are consistent with your obligations. We have received much kindness by the hands of these natives; in reality, the Indians have been a source of protection and assistance to us. We hope that you will see possible, while understanding your military obligations in accordance with your wisdom, to leave our old native neighbours in their homes while they remain as peaceful and harmless as has been their custom. (Signed by all the colonists 20 July 1883.)46
As a German, when I read Sayhueke’s letter, I cannot help but be reminded of the reaction (the lack of it) of German middle-class Jews to the oppression and persecution they faced in 1930s and ’40s Germany. They were middle-class Germans. Just as Sayhueke referred to himself as ‘a noble Criollo, an Argentinian faithful to the government’. Neither could believe that their own government, their own country, would set out to destroy them, mercilessly.
There are only a handful of Patagonian Indians about whose life we know a little. One of them is Sayhueke. His full name was Valentín Sayhueke, although I’m not sure whether Valentín was his first and Sayhueke his last name in the European fashion, or whether the one was his Spanish and the other his Tehuelche name. Or indeed his Mapuche name. Nobody seems quite sure exactly which tribe he belonged to. Some accounts state that his mother was Tehuelche and his father Mapuche.47 (He certainly spoke both languages.) Others claim that he was part Pampas, part Araucano – Mapuche.48 He personifies perfectly the multicultural, multi-ethnic indigenous society of Patagonia in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Mapuche, Pampas and Tehuelche cultures were oral. His name was written down by Spanish speakers, and there are about a dozen different versions of it: Sayhueque, Sayhweke, Saihueque, Shai-Hweké, Saibúeque, Sayeweke, Saygüeque and even Cheoeque.
The ‘standard’ version which is commonly used these days is Sayhueque. I’ve chosen to spell him Sayhueke after the manner of some modern Tehuelche-Mapuche activists who use instead of ‘qu’ the letter ‘k’ which is unknown to Spanish spelling; in order to lessen, symbolically at least, the impact Spanish culture has had on their culture, their ancestors, and their own lives.
According to a much-repeated story first told by the explorer Francisco ‘Perito’ Moreno, Sayhueke’s Mapuche father had exhorted him early on to make his peace with the white people.
‘His father Chocorí,’ the scientist reported, ‘upon his death counselled Sayhueke that he should never fight against the Christians, because the very first clothes he wore upon his birth were Christian; and he added that, but for the Christians, they would still go about naked as in previous times.’49
Perhaps chief Chocorí saw the signs of the times and hoped that his people would have a better chance of survival through an alliance with the whites than by fighting them. In Chocorí’s own lifetime, in the 1840s and 1850s, there had been one ‘Desert Campaign’, led by the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. (Indeed, according to some records Chocorí himself had been killed during that campaign when Sayhueke was in his infancy. Nobody seems to know for sure.)
Chocorí’s – later Sayhueke’s – tribe were ideally placed in the foothills of the Andes, in an area called País de las Manzanas – Apple Country – after the fruit trees that grew there in profusion. It was abundantly fertile land, well protected by the mountains and inaccessible from anywhere that was settled by Cristianos. At the same time, it was near enough to both Chile and Carmen de Patagones to allow for trade in both directions. The Manzaneros, as his immediate tribe were known – the Apple Tree People – must have thought of themselves as pretty much unassailable. The white people lived far, far away. So they believed themselves safe.
During the 1860s and 1870s, Valentín Sayhueke rose to unequalled heights of power as Lord of the Apple Country. He became the most influential and powerful chief in all of Patagonia, a kind of overlord or high king to whom most lesser chiefs answered.
Sayhueke firmly thought of himself as Argentinian. In 1872, the Chilean government sent an envoy who presented him with a Chilean flag, but the chief politely refused the gift, pointing out that he was an Argentine citizen.50 Hadn’t the Argentine government sent him communications like this one?
‘The Government wishes to show chief Saibúeque that he is highly esteemed and considered as a true and
loyal friend, wherefore it is undertaking to pay him a monthly salary of 600 pesos from the first day of this month May 1859.’51
Why on Earth wouldn’t he think of himself as a noble Criollo?
29
AFTER THE ATTACK on his tribe in 1881 – the one about which he told Lewis Jones in his letter – Sayhueke decided to fight back. His men, armed mostly with lances and faced by regiments with Remington rifles, were formidable warriors. Even with those odds they won several battles. But the end was inevitable. In 1884, all the (surviving) Patagonian chiefs held a final big gathering: Inakayal, Foyel, Chagallo, Salvutia, Chikichan, Rayel, Nahuel, Pichi Curuhuinca, Cumilao, Huichaimilla, Huenchunecul, Huicaleo and Sayhueke.52 They were Tehuelche, Mapuche and Pampas, united in the face of the biggest threat their people had ever faced. They swore to resist to the last. Within the year, all of them had been killed or captured. Altogether, General Roca – later twice president of Argentina – claimed that 1313 indigenous fighters had been killed and 1271 captured in the campaign, along with a further 11,500 Indian captives: men, women and children.53
Sayhueke was among the last to surrender, on 1 January 1885. He was taken to Buenos Aires, where he was regarded as something of a curiosity, a sort of ‘native’ king. He was well treated and became a celebrity, much reported in the newspapers and gaped at in public. There are photos of him at this time: his hair cut off at about ear height; he wears European clothes, a military uniform, boots, a hat. His face is shut down, unreadable. He went to visit his friend, the explorer and scientist ‘Perito’ Moreno, in the latter’s elegant flat overlooking calle Florida, today the main pedestrianised shopping street of Buenos Aires.
Moreno helped him to arrange a visit to the Casa Rosada – the presidential residence – and an interview with General Roca, who was not only the instigator and sometime leader of the ethnic cleansing campaign, but also now the president of Argentina. And there Sayhueke went, to talk to the man who had set out to destroy the indigenous nations of Patagonia.
Beyond the Pampas Page 11