The Tehuelche people, also called the Aónikenk, are an indigenous people from eastern Patagonia in South America. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Tehuelche were influenced by Mapuche people, and many adopted a horseriding lifestyle. Once a nomadic people, the lands of the Tehuelche were colonized in the 19th century by Argentina and Chile, gradually disrupting their traditional economies. The establishment of large sheep farming estates in Patagonia was particularly detrimental to the Tehuelche. Contact with outsiders also brought in infectious diseases ushering deadly epidemics among Tehuelche tribes. Most existing members of the group currently reside in cities and towns of Argentine Patagonia.
The name "Tehuelche complex" has been used by researchers in a broad sense to group together indigenous peoples from Patagonia and the Pampas. Several specialists, missionaries and travelers have proposed grouping them together on account of the similarities in their cultural traits, geographic vicinity and languages, even though the languages they spoke amongst themselves were not related to each other and their geographic distributions were extensive.
Name
According to the historian Antonio Pigafetta from Ferdinand Magellan's expedition in 1520, he referred to the indigenous people he came across in the San Julian Bay as the "Patagoni". In 1535 the historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés explained in his (General and Natural History of the Indies), that "We Spaniards call them the Patagones for their big feet", which the historian Francisco López de Gómara agreed with in 1552. Based on these accounts, the first name the Spanish used to refer to the Tehuelche people was the Patagones. However, some researchers speculate, without verifiable bases, that Magellan could have been inspired by the dog-headed monster from the 1512 novel Primaleón known as "Pathogan."
According to the most widespread view, the word Tehuelche comes from the Mapuche term chewel che, which would mean "brave people", "rugged people", or "barren land people". Another version suggests that it could be derived from one of their factions, the Tueshens, plus the Mapuche word "che" meaning 'people' or 'peoples'.
Classifications
The classification of indigenous groups that lived in the Pampas and Patagonia is confusing due to the different terms that were used to refer to the native population groups from these regions. There are various causes that have prevented the establishment of one unique and complete classification. Among these circumstances, the extinction of some of these groups, coupled with the vast amount of land on which these groups were distributed, which inhibited Spanish explorers who first identified certain Tehuelche peoples from making contact with all the groups. In other cases, the seasonal migrations that they practiced which involved traveling long distances made Europeans that observed them overestimate the number of people from a group or the distribution range of a language. In conjunction with all of these factors, the intrusion of the Mapuches, or Araucans, from the west deeply transformed their cultural reality, intermixing and absorbing ethnic groups from the Pampas and central and North of Patagonia, producing the Araucanization of a large part of the ancient inhabitants. Finally, the subsequent Conquest of the Desert carried out by the Argentine Army led to the near extinction of these indigenous communities. This historic overview has led to the disagreement among researchers.
In the 19th century, explorers such as Ramón Lista and George Chaworth Musters named them "tsóneka", "tsónik" or "chonik". The majority of experts agree that the Chubut river separated the two largest subdivisions: the "Southern Tehuelche" and "Northern Tehuelche". The first subdivision stretched towards the south to the Strait of Magellan, whereas the second group extended towards the north to the Colorado River (Argentina) and Rio Negro (Argentina). The presence, or lack thereof, Tehuelche people in the Pampas has led to disagreements among researchers, who have not agreed on the existence of a separate subdivision called the "Pampas", nor what their relationship and borders were with the Mapuches.
According to Thomas Falkner
One of the primary classifications was from English Jesuit Thomas Falkner in his 1774 work A description of Patagonia and the adjoining parts of South America, which introduced the ethnic name 'Het peoples' for the Puelche people, which included the Tehuelche:
or Falkner the "Tehuelhets" or "Patagones" were the Tehuelche people who lived from the banks of the Rio Negro to the Strait of Magellan: