“[Martin] Gusinde’s haunting photographs of the Selk’nam,...

“[Martin] Gusinde’s haunting photographs of the Selk’nam, Yamana, and Kawésqar peoples—now collected and published in The Lost Tribes of Tierra del Fuego—present a way of life that was already on the brink of extinction when he visited the region in 1918–1924 and that has since ceased to exist…

“Gusinde was one of the first twentieth-century ethnographers to break with the tradition of detached observation and identify personally with the societies he studied: he himself was initiated into the secretive Selk’nam and Yamana rites of manhood. In 1923 he photographed the last Hain ritual before the Selk’nam were decimated by a final wave of measles and forced to assimilate.”

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