This section introduces, firstly, an historiographical account of the early settlers’ colonization of the Upushwea (Puerto Williams) and the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve and, secondly, it builds the case of Upushwea as a deeply contested space where Yaghan indigenous rights, environmental sustainability, and capitalist expansion coexist in unsolved tension colliding with the pleas from descendants and legal efforts to preserve ancestral biocultural heritage. The research objective is to call for epistemic reparation and highlight post-colonial dispossession through a case study, comparing the colonialism of early settlers in Puerto Williams and Cape Horn, and demonstrating the continuity of indigenous subjugation in post-colonial times, through the capitalist expansion driven by neoliberal precepts and institutions created in modern Chile.

Therefore, we ask ourselves: What is the causal link between the evident epistemic erasure among the Yaghan population and their continued subjugation to the imperatives of the capitalist order ever since colonial times? This article seeks to answer this question by exploring the accounts given by respondents from the Yaghan community themselves and by testing different theories in process-tracing to unpack the causative links between the Yaghan’s epistemic erasure from colonial times, their subjugation to capitalist precepts, and their ultimate resistance to (neoliberal) subjugation. This case study employs a qualitative methodological approach grounded in phenomenological epistemology and ontological frameworks, utilizing hermeneutic phenomenology to capture the lived experiences, memories, and ethical worldviews of the Yaghan descendants and the last Yaghan grandmother. We connect the inductive and deductive moments where phenomenology enables inductive insight and process tracing supports theoretical testing or deductions. In this article, colonial theories, political ecology, philosophical, ethical, and ontological commons governance theories are reviewed to examine how colonial entrenchment serves as a structural factor contributing to the epistemic erasure of indigenous culture.

There is a historical truth hidden in the various meanings constructed by four ancestral peoples who still coexist in Upushwea (now Puerto Williams), the southernmost territory in the world, located on Navarino Island in Chile. Upushwea is a land originally inhabited by four ancestral peoples: the Yaghan, the Kawésqar, the Selk’nam, and the Mapuche-Williche peoples. The people who had historically inhabited the Onashaga Channel (now known as the Beagle Channel) and Navarino Island were the Yaghans, whose presence there, and still today, dates back approximately 7,000 years. The last people to arrive on Navarino Island were the Huilliche Mapuche, who mainly came from Chiloé. The last ancestral people to arrive on the island were the Mapuche-Williches, considered the first indigenous settlers. By the time of the European settlements, the name of Upushwea was changed in 1953 to Puerto Luisa Port, and in 1956, it was definitively named Puerto Williams Port, to honor the life of an English sailor – John Williams - who was the captain of the schooner ‘Ancud’ and took possession of the Strait of Magellan on the 21^st of September of 1843, with the creation of Fort Bulnes as one of the settlers’ major milestone. Today, Puerto Williams Port, from an administrative point of view, is the capital of the commune of Cape Horn, dependent on the Region of Magallanes (the Mallegan Region) and the Chilean Antarctica. Its population is diverse, and the commune is mainly home to the Chilean Navy, civilians, and scientists who conduct multidisciplinary work at the Cape Horn Subantarctic Centre, inaugurated in 2022. Cape Horn is the southernmost point on Earth, located in the South Cone, near Antarctica, and is known for the tragic hardships that famous explorers had to endure during navigation. Even under conditions of ‘good weather,’ an eerie, sometimes sonorous silence surrounds the vast Southern Ocean that extends southwards, only to be disturbed by the waves lapping against the rocky shores, where seals and sea lions lie lazily, and petrels occasionally split the air with their screeching calls (Chapman, 2017; Figures 1, 2).¹

The research method employs a qualitative approach with a descriptive scope, guided by the reflective hermeneutic paradigm, to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomena under scrutiny. The design corresponds to a single case study in Upushwea, Puerto Williams Port, Chile, to study two waves of colonial subjugation of its ancestral peoples: the first during European settlement in southern Chile, and the second during the capitalist expansion under post-Pinochet democratic rule. Case studies do not aim to generalize the results as quantitative designs typically do, but rather, they allow for an in-depth examination of the phenomenon to provide prototypical background information on a given problem, facilitating the development of future research into the observable phenomena. This research employs the case study method, consequently, as an intensive and exhaustive descriptive approach, focusing on a single case (the Yaghan village of Upushwea) to understand the specific phenomenon of epistemic erasure and subjugation in Upushwea. The true objective of the case study is particularisation, not generalization. A specific case is examined in depth, not to see how it differs from others, but to understand what it is and how it functions and thus provide the ‘inductive moments’ of causal inference to understand why and how the phenomenon of epistemic erasure has been produced. In addition to the phenomenological approach, the study provides the technique of process tracing to observe causal links in the deductive moments of theory testing (Bril-Mascarenhas et al., 2017; Schulte-Mecklenbeck et al., 2011).

The participants are members of the Mapuche-Williche Association, an educator of Yagán indigenous language and culture [ELCI], an educator of Kawésqar indigenous language and culture [ELCI], two members of the Yagán community of Villa Ukika in Upushwea, the provincial presidential delegate for Chilean Antarctica, and a representative of the Chilean Navy in Puerto Williams, specifically the head of the Social Welfare Delegation. The selection criteria were based on the need to have accounts from different indigenous actors (interethnic logic) and civil society actors (intercultural logic). In total, there were seven key informants. The instrument used was a semi-structured interview conducted in person with each of them in Upushwea (Puerto Williams Port). To this end, participants provided written informed consent to participate in the study. The interviews lasted an average of 1 h. The interviews were validated through expert judgments. The interviews were then transcribed using Jefferson’s convention. In this first phase, the research was carried out using open coding, which attempts to express data and phenomena in the form of concepts, consisting of fragmenting the data and assigning each fragment a label that is the code, which is organized into categories in a sequential manner, whose criterion was not only the frequency of the term expressed, but also the illocutionary force of the language. In the second phase, axial coding was carried out, which involves a series of procedures that bring the data together in new forms of organization, establishing connections between these categories. Specifically, the methodology consists of purifying and differentiating, in analytical terms, the categories generated in the previous procedure. The codes are related to a main category. Between them, they constitute a complex process of inductive thinking, where the procedure is more focused and directed toward discovering hermeneutic codes.

A central category is displayed in this network: ‘Presence of the Yagan People in Upushwea, in the 21St century,’ which is made up of the following codes that were collected from the triangulation of information provided by the participants: (1) cultural value of canoes, (2) signs of settlement colonialism, (3) invisibility of the Yaghan Indigenous people, (4) absence of Yaghan names in streets/decolonization of knowledge, (5) relevance of language/discrimination, (6) difficulty working with the reeds or ‘junquillos,’ (7) reminiscences of family teaching, (8) intergenerational transmission of ancestral cultural knowledge, and (9) recognition of the ancestral value of grandmothers (Figure 6).

We know that the Kawésqar and Yaghan peoples used canoes. It is worth noting that the use of wooden canoes was abandoned early on among the Yaghan people of Cape Horn and Tierra del Fuego. In 1924, when Martín Gusinde traveled through the area, it seemed that they had stopped being made, although they were still used for short journeys. The installation of sawmills, primarily in Tierra del Fuego, led to the manufacture of European-style plank boats: short, wide, and shallow. By 1943, these boats had already become the predominant mode of transportation among Yaghan families. Likewise, the story depicts a progressive erosion of the ancestral and cultural significance of basketry, meticulously crafted by the grandmothers (Oyarzún, 1943; Figure 7).

Settler colonialism is particularly complex when indigenous peoples, who have always inhabited the land, encounter new settlers arriving to inhabit the place. Indigenous peoples are custodians of creation stories, not colonization stories; they are not ‘in a place, they are the place, the territory’, and that is the unification of epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies: ways of being and existing in the world. For settlers, indigenous peoples are an obstacle; arriving at a place that is ‘already inhabited by others’ is a problem, and they stand in their way⁶ (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). This idea will gradually trigger epistemic genocide, the destruction of the indigenous ethos, and over time, through sophisticated diagrams of control, power, languages, laws, and policies, the settlers will achieve the task of subjugation. Indigenous claims to land emerged under colonial regimes; however, the law redefined land as both property and a resource. Indigenous peoples suffer epistemic erasure, becoming ghosts in a world that is no longer theirs. In this account, it becomes clear that the name Beagle has no connection to the southern hemisphere; it is an imposed name.

The Indigenous voice navigates between subaltern speech and invisibility, as Indigenous speech about the history of their peoples holds value because it represents an exercise of the right to self-determination through the writing of their history; it can be confused with the value of research. This has contributed to a certain culturalist self-absorption of the research work, losing sight of the colonial situation of Indigenous peoples and the existence of a colonizer who seeks to maintain this situation through a strategy that mutates to achieve his objective.

In this context, we deem it reasonable to reflect on the following questions: How can a theoretical approach to the coloniality of knowledge help us understand the social phenomena of an eminently Western-European nature, such as the production and circulation of scientific knowledge? Moreover, how can we discuss the decoloniality of scientific knowledge if the very idea of science is a product of the modern project and rationality? In short, how do we understand the paradox of making our structures of validation of scientific knowledge precisely the most stable forms of the coloniality of knowledge? Colonialism was and continues to be a mechanism of dispossession of the occupation of a people’s territory under the cover of violence and racism. This colonial violence entails the material deployment of systematic and massive aggression, preceded by an occupation and territorial invasion that has also materialized using colonizing bodies, people, machines, and objects (Mansilla and Lima-Jardilino, 2020; Mansilla et al., 2022; Figures 8, 9).

From the point of view of linguistic anthropology, language is understood as a ‘set of symbolic strategies that form part of the social fabric and of the individual representation of possible or real worlds. Language acquisition involves learning specific words and grammatical structures, as well as a comprehensive, irreplaceable, and irrevocable way of perceiving the world. Once the so-called linguistic acquisition stage has passed, any knowledge the individual may acquire of reality will be mediated by elements obtained from the mother tongue (Luque, 2001).

The Yaghans had a strong connection with the sea, which is reflected in the craft traditions of their descendants, including weaving and basketry made from reeds. This practice is a cultural heritage that is increasingly at risk of disappearing due to the widespread adoption of more sophisticated techniques typical of the cultural agency introduced by contemporary colonizers (Ojeda et al., 2018).

The role of women has been an indispensable aspect of the canoe cultures of the southern seas, especially among the Yamana people.⁷ When it comes to economics, the Yámana woman’s responsibility as a breadwinner for her family’s livelihood is evident; her interactions in society were marked by the respect she received, which increased with age (Cárdenas et al., 2011).

The indigenous communities have deeply respected and valued the elders, particularly the grandmothers, among the materials of the southern indigenous peoples. In other words, they form the backbone of the intangible heritage of ancestral culture. Intangible cultural heritage corresponds to specific manifestations of culture that inspire human groups with a sense of identity and belonging. It is not limited to the material vestiges of the past but also encompasses what is known as ‘living heritage.’ That is, the knowledge stored in people’s memories, which connects us to the remote past, does not remain in a state of stasis; rather, we speak of living reality and, as such, make them feel part of a community. It links, defines, and identifies them in their place of origin (Merino, 2020).

Who is Cristina, the grandmother named in the story? Cristina Calderón Harban, mother of nine (9) children and grandmother of fourteen (14) grandchildren, did not teach any of her descendants to speak because the children refused to learn it due to discrimination, which led to the progressive loss of the Yaghan ethos. In 2009, Grandmother Cristina received the distinction of ‘Living Human Treasure’ for being, at that time, the most genuine and authentic depository and propagator of the languages and customs of the Yaghan people (Servicio Nacional del Patrimonio Cultural [National Cultural Heritage Service], 2022).

This fair recognition was granted by the National Council of Culture and the Arts of Chile within the framework of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (UNESCO, 2003). Cristina and her sister Úrsula were the last representatives who fully participated in their ancestral customs and language. Until her death at the age of 93 in February 2021, Cristina Calderón continued to lead the Yaghan community on Navarino Island (Figure 11).⁸

Fieldwork and interviews revealed that the Yaghan communities have been systematically excluded from decision-making processes that directly affect their ancestral territories since colonial times. The findings of the interviews reveal that settler colonialism in southern Chile is not an anomaly, but it reconfigures itself as a logic of domination and governance from colonial times to post-colonial modernity in Chile. From colonization and throughout postcolonial times, Yaghans continue to be subjected to the settlers’ imperatives, first the imperative of ‘good manners’ as with the deliberate epistemic erasure of indigenous practices, as in the case of Button in the early colonization stage, and then, with the imperative of ‘economic growth’ through the desecration of their marine reserves and the series of the ‘tragedies of the commons’ brought about by the unregulated salmonid industry in the Navarino Reserve and elsewhere around the Southern Seas (estuaries and fjords of the Southern Tierra del Fuego) (Barton and Arnt Fløysand, 2010). This pattern reinforces the theories of colonization posited by James Mahoney, which focus on colonial coercion and the structural reproduction of domination through the institutions of settlers in Spanish America (Mahoney, 2010). This is exemplified in the case of modern Chile, where technocratic institutions replicate colonial subjugation in capitalist settings, despite the absence of stringent political ecology institutions, as seen on Navarino Island. Political ecology through neo-Marxist approaches highlights the tension between growth and ecology, exposing the institutional mechanisms that facilitate the privatization of the Commons, silencing the voices of the Yaghans in the name of biocultural legacies (Mundó et al., 2022).

The sanitary and environmental crisis of the salmonid industry is not an isolated case of weak governance. These are symptoms of what Martinez-Alier describes as ecological distribution conflicts, where marginalized groups bear the brunt of environmental degradation imposed by capital-driven institutions (Martinez-Alier, 2014).

This article demonstrates that the struggle for the Yaghan’s survival is not merely cultural. It is also territorial, epistemic, and politically ecological. The stories of burned dwellings, navigation bans, and spiritual exile mark the emotional topography of a landscape still occupied by settler rationality and utilitarian views in contrast to indigenous cosmovision and ecological interconnectedness with Nature. Their narratives in the interviews are phenomenological data and historical documentation, affirming that colonial violence has not ended for the Yaghans, but it has only shifted in the form of subjugation. In the words of Patrick Wolfe, ‘settler colonialism’ is ‘a structure, not an event,’ i.e., the foreign and Chilean settling in Upushwea managed to establish a ‘colonial project, erecting a new colonial society on the expropriated land base’ and the ‘colonized population is eliminated from that land’ (Wolfe, 2006).

By employing a qualitative approach through phenomenology and process tracing, the findings help identify how the first stage of colonization and the second wave of dispossession in modern Chile are the result of a logic of institutionalized exclusion. To assess the first stage of colonization, the phenomenological lens provides accounts of distinct voices, leading to the inductive moment in causal inference, helping to identify the causative link between colonization and epistemic erasure, as well as the evident epistemic resistance, as seen in the last of the Yaghans’ accounts prompting the title of this article: ‘We still live among you’. To verify theories related to post-colonial trends of dispossession and subjugation, the salmonid account on Navarino Island points to James Mahoney’s theories of institutional violence embedded in institution-building, which emanates from colonial times and has long-lasting effects, often under the guise of legality and efficiency. Through process tracing, the deductive moments of causal inference in the 2^nd wave help to link the Yaghan suffering to post-colonial institutions, which highlight the tension in facilitating their cultural recognition (in the Constitution); this link also points to the need for establishing a new institutional paradigm, a biocultural order grounded in repair, and around an ecological wisdom or a commons-based governance, aligned to the protection of their Natural Reserves, which reaffirms the account given by Cristina Calderón, as their land and the seas are the peoples, and the peoples embody the land and the sea (Zárraga, 2022).

The Yaghan grandmother’s testimonies are not exclusively memory-based stories. In the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, these are ‘acts of resurgence’ (Betasmosake, 2017). These are small, powerful refusals to disappear, despite settlers’ laws that saw no land restitution or land governance devolved to Yaghans. Cristina Calderón’s interview helps frame the epistemic violence of marine zoning – not just territorial loss – as it is the erasure of pedagogy and ethics, with stories being lost and customs being erased. According to Simpson, the Chilean state, by recognizing the Yaghans’ heritage, conveniently ‘rescues the colonial settlement colonialism’ (Betasmosake, 2017).

The Yaghan grandmother’s testimony is about ‘presence,’ and her voice calls for new institutions rooted in reciprocity and memory, echoing her advocacy for governance built from the ground up. In the words of Wolfe, marine concessions erase Yaghan sovereignty, because through the settler’s colonial structure, rationalized through legality and development imperatives and growth institutions, reparation is obstructed, and the emergence of biocultural institutions is prevented from being rooted in indigenous ethics (Wolfe, 2006).

This view aligns with Mahoney’s idea of colonial coercion embedded in institutional legacies stemming from colonial times and maintained in the postcolonial era. Therefore, indigenous peoples are not only excluded: they are also erased structurally, devoid of political agency as political subjects, perpetuating the structural forces accounting for the Yaghan’s current ‘dispossession’, citing Harvey’s words. Just as with the difficulty of establishing political ecological institutions in the salmonid industry or adopting a commons-based stewardship, the State should not only pursue language policy, museums, or symbolic inclusion while simultaneously zoning the Yaghans out of their own marine Reserves in Navarino, because that contradiction precisely helps to continue to erase the indigenous spatiality through technocratic rationality (Harvey, 2012).

In that sense, the words of Saldaña-Portillo (2016) are adequately applied to the Yaghan’s subjugation to colonization, because current indigenous dispossession in marine areas is about rendering the Yaghan territories ‘empty’ by legitimizing their lands into resource zones.

In the words of Mahoney, colonial violence is institutionalized through the very structures that claim to civilize. Thus, echoing Cristina’s words, the last Yaghan grandmother, ‘our sea is our body,’ or the call from Yaghans is to continue their resistance to settler-colonial mappings that divide, abstract, and erase the memory of their ancestral land and culture. Cristina’s words are a cosmology where the sea and self are entangled. Cristina’s statement to the world is a moral claim to territorial governance or even a moral sovereignty based on affect, not ownership alone. Cristina’s words refer to a relational epistemology in which space is kin, not a resource to be exploited.

The struggle for Yaghans is a survival to live among their subjugators: us. By living still among us, Yaghans and Cristina’s words claim their heritage to breathe not only in the cultural, territorial, epistemic, or political arena, but in all aspects of life, and in the relational conversation with the land and the sea. The need for stringent environmental governance and the call for implementing biocultural prerogatives established under UNESCO and the Chilean law encompass the reparation call to fully expand the biocultural and epistemic justice within the Chilean (environmental) law, which, in the case of marine concessions, should see the establishment of stringent political ecology institutions. Justice, in this sense, also requires the recognition of epistemic genocide and the demand for legal redress. The Chilean State should fully implement the ILO Convention 169, which officials have already signed, to conduct comprehensive consultations on salmonid projects near or in proximity to their ancestral lands and marine areas (International Labour Organization, 1989).

The inclusion of indigenous voices in the planning, zoning, and marine conservation must be in place at all scales of societal life to ensure their political representation and agency. This applies to the protection of intangible heritage under the UNESCO frameworks. There must be a constitutional recognition of indigenous peoples as political subjects, and a clear acknowledgment that their presence predates the settler colonialism, with the subsequent subjugation and epistemic erasure. The epistemic genocide of the indigenous peoples of southern Chile constitutes a deviation from human rights anchored under UNESCO’s protection umbrella to this day. Reparations, acknowledgement, and protection granted at the constitutional level are a starting point, but biocultural heritage involves the active pursuit and implementation of actions that reverse their dispossession. Devolution is inextricably linked to their right to conserve their marine habitats as one of the Yaghans’ ultimate heritages.