Casa Robino

Homage to The Yaghans : The Last Indians of Tierra del Fuego & Cape Horn
The Yaghans were born wanderers though they rarely wandered far.  The ethnographer Father Martin Gusinde wrote, ‘They resemble fidgety birds of passage, who feel happy and inwardly calm only when they are on the move’; and their language reveals a mariner’s obsession with time and space. For, although they did not count to five, they defined the cardinal points with minute distinctions and read seasonal changes as an accurate.IuanSeason of the young crabs (when the parents carry their youngCuiuaSeason when the young let go (from a verb ‘to stop biting’)HakureumBark loose and sap risingCekanaCanoe building season and time of the snipe-calls. (The ‘cek-cek’ sound imitates the snipe and the noise as the canoe-builder rips sheets of beech-bark from the trunk).Used as a verb yamana means ‘to live, breathe, be happy, recover from sickness or be sane’.Their word for depression was the same word that described the vulnerable phase in a crab’s seasonal cycle, when it has sloughed off its old shell and waits for another to grow.
-From In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin