Bajo tuición. Infancia y extinción en la historia de la colonización fueguina. (Sentidos coloniales II)**

Abstract

The concept of “extinction”—or no survivors—was adopted early in the writing of the history of Tierra del Fuego. During the same period, when certain animal species—such as sea lions or whales— faced the risk of extinction due to fishing, and the guanaco or coruros by ranches, the “Indian” expanded as a threat to livestock and was therefore threatened with extinction. In late 1895, an expedient called Sumario por vejámenes inferidos a indíjenas de Tierra del Fuego was initiated due to the capture and deportation of 165 people. From the Summary, we will discuss the figure of extinction showing how colonization did not end Indian existence, but rather built it as an object, either of hunting, civilization, mission and later of anthropology. The text provides evidence of the abduction and forced adoption of fueguinos children as a mass practice due to the lack of servitude, that involved not only missionaries, but officials and businessmen, among other agents. We argue that the presence of the Indian serving the domestic colonial space caused his original registration both as living prehistory and as history childhood. Finally, we will see how the stronghold of purity— of “culture”—inherited by anthropology from the Mission, was not a cunning rhetoric but an actual practice of infantilization. Threatened with death, the Mission prepared the text of extinction, excluding native life that served domestically as an outsider, that being impure, was also missed by the ethnological text.

Keywords

• extinction
• Salesians
• Tierra del Fuego
• Indian
• colonization