On April 11th, 1831, the fledgling government of Uruguay declared the indigenous people
most closely associated with their territory extinct.
According to national historical records, they rounded up all of the remaining Charrúa people
and exterminated every single one.
They invited them on the pretense that they needed help.
They needed to defend against invaders, and their friends came.
But once they arrived and had a bit to drink, the hosts turned on them
and slaughtered them to the man.
A red wedding of an entire peoples.
This event is remembered as Salispuedes, which translates to get out if you can.
The women, children and remaining men of the tribe would be killed
in two lesser known massacres following in its place.
And with as much blood spilled as could be spilled, the son of one of Uruguay’s founding fathers
would make that famous decree.
They’re all gone, dad.
Every. Last. One.
And because of that, to this day Uruguay hasn’t signed any of the major international rights accords
for indigenous people.
It’s not that they consider themselves above it.
They’re not trying to be aloof.
They just don’t think they have a reason to take part.
Sure, it was a horrible tragedy what happened, they’ll say.
But what can they about it now?
They killed them all.
Only, they didn’t.
Rivera didn’t kill all the Charrúa.
And I’m not just saying that because he took prisoners, either.
Although that’s a pretty good place to start.
Two years after they were declared extinct, four adults and a child were sold to France
for their human zoos.
Which I'd say is a fairly good indication that there were still people alive.
However, they were pitched as the last.
That’s what the draw was supposed to be for the zoo, anyway.
But, it was so late into colonization, they never even actually turned a profit as animals.
They were strange beings, no doubt, but it just wasn't enough of a draw for the spoiled Parisians.
The French elite had seen it all, what were a few more Charrúa on the pile?
And on the pile they would go and within a few years all five would be dead.
The last.
The memory.
Yet, in their death, they would go on to represent the entire massacre.
The symbolic last people.
A death so recent and so planned that we know all of their names.
Names I could tell you, but I don’t think it really matters.
Who they were is no longer what they are.
The life of that baby is not the important thing to remember about its existence.
The important thing to know is that it was not the last Charrúa.
This is likely the point where most of my Uruguayan viewers are going to start
shifting uncomfortably in their chairs.
At least, if my interviews on this topic were any indication when I was in the country.
Because be they left or right, virtually every Uruguayan knows for certain
that there are no Charrúa.
They don’t exist.
Those that claim otherwise do so with an agenda.
And I’m not going to say that’s wrong.
Because in many ways it isn’t.
There are no people who genuinely fit that description today.
There is no language.
No culture.
Nothing to work from.
No Charrúa.
And yet, that doesn’t mean that they're extinct.
They’re not.
In fact, they’re all over Uruguay.
It just depends on how you define that.
Salispuedes means get out if you can.
And yes, that’s a big if.
But some did.
Not everyone was caught.
I don’t know that because I was there, obviously.
I don’t know that because I’ve read some historical record of someone who was there.
I don’t know that because I’ve pored through the archives in Montevideo.
After all, anyone who watched my last episode knows that I suck at history.
And you should always double check what I say.
But luckily, I don’t need to know history to know this.
You don’t have to trust me on this at all.
I know that the Charrúa didn’t go extinct that day because of the work of a biologist
named Monica Sans.
The fight to revive the Charrúa started in the 1980s after the dictatorship collapsed.
Freedom to speak their mind led to a group of people publicly stating that they were the remaining Charrúa.
Hidden among the Europeans for generations, they were finally admitting their existence.
Here they were after all this time.
And within a decade, a full percent of the population would claim the same.
Today, that number is around 5%.
But to many Uruguayans with a non-indigenous identity, this is seen as, well to speak very plainly,
a land grab.
Some even present it as a form of mental health illness.
Similar to how many people in opposition to transgenderness frame that.
To many, this is a confused leftist identity response.
It's coming out of an era of a rightist dictator knee jerking in reaction.
It's people who want a bit of attention for something they didn’t have to do anything to achieve.
A manifestation of some, I don't know, unspoken desire to join the social convulsions
that are common throughout the Americas.
To most, the question it bring to mind is, well, how could they possibly be real if they’re extinct?
You can’t make five percent from nothing.
Uruguayans have long since accepted that the Charrúa are an extinct people.
Nearly two hundred straight years of acceptance of that fact.
So these identitarians simply can't be that.
They aren't taken seriously.
When they demanded that the government recognize their existence and sign UN accords
for indigenous rights, it wasn’t exactly politically complicated to bat them away.
Without a stick to hit back with, they were fighting something that is basically impossibly uphill.
So for the last decade, they’ve turned towards DNA.
At least some of them.
Those, I think, who actually believe they have the ancestry and truly wanted to prove it.
More specifically, they’ve turned to the work of Professor Sans.
She is one of the only people who is actively looking among the Uruguayan population for its real roots.
The real way.
The scientific way.
And what she found was nothing short of amazing.
It seems, at least at the outset, to wildly back the claims of the identitarians.
Her results, which are completely accurate I need to note, repeatable peer science, not my opinion,
found indigenous mitochondrial DNA in 34% of the population.
In Northern regions, it reached into the sixties.
Which sounds incredible, right?
One in three people is Charrúan, presumably? No?
Well, no.
Unfortunately.
Even if these results which were incredible in their own way, said that everyone belonged to that tribe,
they also muddied the waters in those searching for a unique identity.
Because while a great many people here contained AmerIndian DNA, very little of it was Charrúan.
What they found in the bloodlines here lines up with the few historical documents
that we do have about native people settling down in Uruguay.
The indigenous genetics in this nation’s blood come predominantly from the neighbouring tribes
far more associated with Paraguay and Brazil.
They’re called the Guarani, and for the most part they arrived during the horrific
events of the Paraguayan war and the other convulsions of those collapsing European empires.
With their culture essentially destroyed their missions collapsed and with war all around them,
many of them found themselves refugees in the European cities and towns of the Banda Oriental.
And their blood shows it today.
Yet, despite their dominance in that world of genetics, that isn't to say
that they were the only ones who survived.
Within Dr Sans’ data sets, hiding small and devastated, is a tiny sliver of Charrúan DNA.
It does exist, not in everyone, and in small amounts in most, but it does exist in some.
Therefore, some Charrúa must have survived.
It would be impossible for this to be true otherwise.
And given the gender demographics and history of those early Spanish colonies,
I wouldn’t imagine that it exactly entered on its own terms.
But no matter how the children came to be, the genetics shows that they did come to be.
And in turn, they've mixed into that sea of European blood, and died.
So what does that mean for the local indigenous identity?
It would be wrong to say that nobody here has Charrúa ancestry.
A very small percentage, granted, but the blood never went extinct.
What about those who are predominately Guarani?
They spoke a different language and had a different culture from the Charrúa.
But obviously far closer than that of the Europeans.
So how does that affect things?
Are they more Charrúan?
To me, the past is the past.
The deeper question is what does that mean for actual living people here today?
Because knowing you have blood doesn’t make you a thing, right?
Or does it?
Since nobody is purely Charrúan, or for that matter purely indigenous period,
what does that mean for people who are claiming that as their identity?
The underlying issue here is what defines a race.
Are you purely defined by genetics?
What role does your opinion play in this?
After all, race is a construct.
It is invented as a way of stratifying society and keeping things simple.
But the reality is that race does not exist.
And stories like this make that incredibly clear.
Because what race is a mixed Uruguayan?
What is a local with ten percent Guarani and ninety percent Italian?
What if they only speak Spanish and were born in Montevideo?
Doesn’t that make them just Uruguayan?
Does it make them indigenous?
American slaveholders said that a single drop of black blood was enough to turn you black.
But what does that mean with more than just a black and white dichotomy?
Is there a hierarchy of blood?
Of identity?
Or do we get to pick and choose whatever piece we find most appealing?
Surely, if all it takes is ancestry, of any type, of any percentage, then many of us could be nearly anything.
If all it takes is mitochondrial DNA to form an identity, then what stops me from saying
my .2% makes me a Neanderthal?
From my point of view, the Charrúa are gone for good.
They won’t come back, no matter how many people put that mark on the census.
Calling yourself Charrúan doesn’t make it real.
Any more than me calling myself a German.
I’m not. I’m Canadian.
And what Uruguay needs to learn, at least in my opinion, is that the Charrúa still exist.
Inside them.
That reality is an important part of truly being Uruguayan.
The era of Spanish conquest is over.
We are no longer simply colonizers, now we are also the colonized.
And in my eyes the only future worth fighting for is one that understands that balance.
Modern Uruguay already imagines themselves as Charrúa.
Granted, they do it in a parochial, demeaning sort of way, but the underlying beliefs are there.
In Uruguayan Spanish, to be Charrúa is to be strong.
To stand up in the face of the enemy and fight back.
It’s even what they call their national football team, which if you know the country is a pretty big deal.
So despite the fact that I don’t really believe their claims to the Charrúan identity,
I do think that it’s a good thing that people are starting to claim it.
Not because I think it will bring back their way of life, or their language, or honestly,
any real aspect of their identity.
But because it changes the country around it.
It gives Uruguay a reason to inspect itself and grow.
To remember the history for what it really was.
What they really did.
To become more than just a colony that exterminated its people.
But instead to become that free nation that incorporates them.
The Charrúa are not extinct.
They walk among Uruguay just as the Italians, the Swiss, the Spanish and the Portuguese.
The question is not if they’re still there.
It's only if the people feel it.
This is Rare Earth.