The story of the Kawésqar

This is the story of an indigenous people that managed to adapt to one of the most inhospitable places in the world. Meet the Kawésqar.

Transcript

00:00This is a very special place, you have a chain of mountains that stop all the

00:29currents that come from the Pacific and the Antarctic and that stop them all at once.

00:33It means that all of a sudden you have all the rain and the wind that fall in the same

00:36place.

00:37So you are in a very complex environment in terms of landscape, you have thousands

00:41of kilometers of canals that are embedded with each other, it's a real labyrinth,

00:44with unimaginable climatic conditions.

00:47It's quite incredible because we have a hard time understanding how humans have managed

01:15to adapt to such an environment.

01:17The most amazing thing about all of this is that they lived completely naked.

01:20And some photos that exist, we see them naked in their canoes with a fire inside the canoe

01:27that kept them permanently.

01:28And we say to ourselves, but wait, but in these conditions, what does it take to live

01:31completely naked?

01:32And you may have sailed a kayak a few days ago to understand it.

01:37Exactly for this notion of humidity, you are always wet in Patagonia, your clothes

01:42are always wet, you will not be able to dry them.

01:44Whereas the skin, you dry it.

01:46So in the end, somehow their adaptability to these conditions was to find a solution

01:51not to get dressed, to make a fire to keep warm and to be naked all the time to dry

01:57very quickly.

01:58And obviously it worked, since we know that they lived about 10,000 years in these canals,

02:02that they explored, I think, most of the thousands of kilometers of labyrinth of canals.

02:07In these canals, you can see all the nuances, the color of the water which is slightly

02:10different, a little lighter, a little darker.

02:13The way the wind moves, the power.

02:16And they had developed a sensitivity to their environment that was extraordinary and that

02:22shows that to adapt to an environment as extreme as this one, you have to develop

02:28a sensitivity, a compassion, an empathy, a wonder compared to the environment that

02:33allows you to adapt and resist it.

02:35They were able to adapt to something that very often seems impossible to us.