Dawson Island

After i watched the asigned video, i want to express my opinion in three different subjects.

First of all, we see footage talking about the chilean natives the “selknams” and how they were exterminated one by one as soon as they were discovered. We can’t deny that this is a brutal and innecesary apply of force by the Chilean goverment back in the nineteenth century, and that erradicating a culture is always awful, but we have to remember what was happening in the world back then. We are talking about an uneducated and ignorant global culture were war and death were more accepted than today, so killing native americans was just a way to conquest territory. So as terrible as it sounds, it was normal for them to kill what they used to call “animals”.  But that doesn’t mean i agree with it, of course not, i’m just expressing my opinion by a logical point of view from my perspective.

The second subject to discuss is the use of Dawson island as a prison for political prisioners.

 After the 1973 coup, Chile became a military state, and as far as i am concerned, military forces all over the world abuse human rights when they are ruled by a dictatorship, at least that is what i’ve learned from all the dictatorships that we read about. Liberty is one of the most important rights that we have, and is one of the first ones to be violated by a dictatorship. Dawson island is an example of this, just one of the thousands that happened four decades ago.

At last, the video talks about the actual Dawson Island and how its access is prohibited for most ofchilean people. As we can see on the video, after the dictatorship was over, the prison was removed and the island was cleaned so there was no evidence of its existance. Today Dawson Island is part of our country as well as it is torres del paine, the quiet bays of Chiloe, the sand dunes of atacama desert or easter island and it should not be seen just as the piece of dirt that used to have a prison. Is our country, is our land, part of the patagonia and is beautiful.

Despite the extermination of the selknam natives, selknam culture is not dead. Chileans are connected to their roots in one way or another, and today you can learn and explore selknam culture more than you could think. Chile is beautiful and rich in culture, we need to remember and apreciate it.