The Teushen or Tehues were an indigenous hunter-gatherer people of

Patagonia Patagonia () refers to a geographical region that encompasses the southern end of South America, governed by Argentina and Chile. The region comprises the southern section of the Andes Mountains with lakes, fjords, temperate rainforests, and g ...

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

. They were considered "foot nomads", whose culture relied on hunting and gathering.Adelaar and Muysken 550 Their territory was between the

Tehuelche people The Tehuelche people, also called the Aónikenk, are an indigenous people from eastern Patagonia in South America. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Tehuelche were influenced by Mapuche people, and many adopted a horseriding lifestyle. Once a ...

to the south and the

Puelche people The Gününa küna, or sometimes, Puelche ( Mapudungun: ''pwelche'', "people of the east") are indigenous peoples living east of the Andes Mountains in Chile and Southwest Argentina. They spoke the Puelche language. The name "Puelche" was not nati ...

to their north. Before 1850, estimates claimed that there were 500 to 600 Teushen people.Adelaar and Muysken 554-5 They were slaughtered in the Argentinian

genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Lat ...

s of Patagonia, known as the

Conquest of the Desert The Conquest of the Desert ( es, Conquista del desierto) was an Argentine military campaign directed mainly by General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s with the intention of establishing dominance over the Patagonian Desert, inhabited primar ...

. By 1925, only ten to twelve Teushen survived. They are considered extinct as a tribe. The

Teushen language The Teushen language is an indigenous language of Argentina, which may be extinct. It was spoken by the Teushen people, a nomadic hunter-gatherer people of Patagonia, who lived between the Puelche people to their north and the Tehuelche people ...

is almost entirely unknown. Linguists believe, from the limited data available, that it was closest to Tehuelche, the language of the people to the south of the Teushen.

Notes

References

*Adelaar, Willen F. H. and Pieter Muysken
''The languages of the Andes''
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. . Indigenous peoples of the Southern Cone Indigenous peoples in Argentina Ethnic groups in Argentina Hunter-gatherers of South America {{anthropology-stub Extinct ethnic groups

See also

Notes

References