Before the ships came, the Selk'nam owned the wind. They were among the last peoples on Earth to meet Europeans, and they lived as their ancestors had: hunting guanaco with bow and arrow, moving in family bands across the northern grasslands, gathering on the great island the Spanish had named for the fires of its inhabitants. Anthropologists later estimated their number at three to four thousand. They had their own cosmology, their own initiation rite called the Hain, in which men donned painted masks and conical hoods to enact the spirits. They were a complete world - language, law, kinship, and faith - sealed off at the southern edge of the continent. The German priest Martin Gusinde, who lived among the survivors, recorded what he could of that world before it was gone. He understood that he was writing an obituary for a civilization that had wronged no one.

In 1879 a Chilean expedition reported gold in the riverbeds, and fortune-seekers poured onto the island. But the real engine of destruction was wool. European and South American companies fenced the open plains into vast estancias, and the guanaco gave way to grazing sheep. To the Selk'nam, a sheep was simply meat that had wandered onto their hunting grounds; to the companies, every hunted sheep was theft - and every Selk'nam an obstacle to profit. Landowners financed armed parties to drive the people out, and when driving them out failed, to kill them. Mauricio Braun later admitted to funding such campaigns, calling them protection of his investments. His father-in-law, the wool baron Jose Menendez, held more than two hundred thousand hectares in the heart of Selk'nam country and pursued the people with particular severity. The colonial governments knew. They sided with the wool.

The men who did the killing have names. Julius Popper, a Romanian engineer and gold prospector, posed for photographs beside Selk'nam dead, rifle in hand. Alexander MacLennan, a Scotsman in Menendez's employ, was called Chancho Colorado - the Red Pig - for his cruelty; he took part in the massacre at Cabo Penas, where fourteen people were killed. When MacLennan retired after twelve years, Menendez rewarded him with a gold watch. Foreign men were hired by the dozen and arms imported in quantity for what farm employees later admitted were routine campaigns. The killers even hunted the Selk'nam's dogs to extinction, because the dogs helped the people hunt and survive. Disease finished what the rifles began: measles and tuberculosis swept the crowded missions where survivors were gathered, supposedly for their protection.

Some refused to look away. Salesian missionaries condemned the ranchers even as their own missions, riddled with sickness, hastened the dying. Between 1895 and 1904 Judge Waldo Seguel held an inquiry that confirmed the obvious: the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego had been hunted like animals. Then the law performed its final cruelty. A handful of farmhands were charged and released within months; the owners and shareholders - Braun, Menendez, and the rest - were never prosecuted. The judge claimed no Selk'nam witness could be questioned for want of an interpreter, though interpreters existed, including Spanish-speaking Selk'nam survivors who had watched their families die. By 1919 Gusinde counted 279 living. By 1930, just over a hundred. The last fluent speakers of the Selk'nam language died in the 1980s. Yet descendants survive in Chile and Argentina, and in recent years they have fought - successfully, in 2023 - for official recognition that they were never extinct at all.