Country: Uruguay
Group: Charrua
Date: 4/12/2020
Team: Thomas Chia (lead), Gabriel Cardenas, Ray Gerard Regorgo
The Charrua are a unique case as they were once said to have gone extinct over 200 years ago due to warfare and disease during colonization. Since then, descendents of Charrua have made a resurgence and now say a “cultural genocide” discretely occurred, whereby their identity and land rights had been ignored (Nolen, 2018). The culture and language of the group barely survives today, with only one living speaker of a closely related language (Nolen, 2018). The Association of the Descendants of the Charrúa Nation was created in 1989 to preserve knowledge of indigenous groups in Uruguay. Given the lack of official resources, this is given a data quality of 1.
Sources
- Albarenga, Pablo (2017). Where did Uruguay’s indigenous population go. El Pais. https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2017/11/06/inenglish/1509969553_044435.html.
- Sans, M., Figueiro, G., & Hidalgo, P. C. (2012). A new mitochondrial C1 lineage from the prehistory of Uruguay: population genocide, ethnocide, and continuity. Human biology, 84(3), 287-305.
- Nolen, S. (2018). ‘We are still here’: The fight to be recognized as Indigenous in Uruguay. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-in-uruguay-indigenous-people-are-fighting-to-prove-they-exist/