Trayectorias de Dora Manchado: “Memorias de mi gente tehuelche”
Abstract
Dora Manchado (1934-2019) was born in Camusu Aike (Santa Cruz, Argentina) when it was an indigenous reservation. In her last years, she shared his memories orally for an autobiographical book on which this article is based, remembering his family history, the guanaco hunts in childhood, the scientific studies supported by racial typologies that classified his family among the “last pure Indians”, the work on the ranches and the experiences of discrimination that violated their subjectivity. In the sixties, linguistic competence was taken as a criterion of aboriginality and, in the eighties, when there were a handful of older people who could communicate in aonekko 'a' ien, state mechanisms, evangelizers and scientists concluded that the tehuelce people had become extinct. In the context of indigenous re-emergence and community organization in 2008, she became aware of the value of her knowledge and expressed her desire to transmit the language, which activated teaching-learning meetings and workshops.
