Abstract

Since the 1880’s Tierra del Fuego’s main island, Selknam territory, was cattle-colonized. In 20 years its population was almost entirely exterminated. In the last few decades, with the global development of ethno-tourism, has flourished a patrimonial rescue in Patagonia that made possible the emergence of a “Selknam imaginary” in public spaces. This article argues that the proliferation of those images is reinforcing a notion of ‘extinction’ separating what is indivisible: regional culture and genocide. At the same time, it does argue that invisibilizing the extermination must be understood in relation with the historiographic construction of a particular notion of identity. Examining spaces of memory on Chilean Tierra del Fuego, and key concepts in the works of Mateo Martinic, the main researcher on Patagonian history, the article analyzes the separation of local History in the non-connectedness of past and present. This dissociation is expressed in the selection of symbols and ephemeris that reproduce the legitimating precepts of genocide and stimulate the dissociation between “Patagonian identity”, on the one hand, and “indigeneity” and chiloteness, on the other