(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-11 12:11
PUERTO EDEN, Chile — Hawking sea lion skin souvenir canoes at one of South America’s most remote outposts, Francisco Arroyo is among the last members of a Patagonian tribe staring down the barrel of extinction.
The elderly Arroyo recalls wending the icy channels and fjords of southern Chile’s Patagonia region with his father as a boy, tending a fire lit on dried earth on the bottom of their canoe and diving naked for giant mussels to survive.
With only an estimated 12-20 pure-blooded members of his nomadic Kawesqar tribe surviving, most of them elderly, another of the far-flung region’s tribes will soon disappear.
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