The southernmost people on Earth, the Yahgan (Yámana) paddled bark canoes near-naked through the frozen waters of the Beagle Channel and the Cape Horn archipelago, subsisting on shellfish, sea mammals, and fish, distinct in language and territory from the guanaco-hunting Selk'nam of the main island of Tierra del Fuego.
Devastated by disease, missionary displacement, and settler encroachment from the 1880s; population collapsed from an estimated 3,000 in the 1850s to a handful of survivors. Cristina Calderón, the last fully native speaker of the Yaghan language, died in 2022; mixed descendants at Villa Ukika on Navarino Island, Chile, persist to 2026.
First-hand account by a settler raised among the Yámana and Selk'nam, the definitive historical record of the Fuegian peoples.
The definitive modern study of the Yahgan (Yamana) canoe people of the Fuegian archipelago, in print from Cambridge University Press.