The Teushen or Tehues were an Indigenous

hunter-gatherer A hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived Lifestyle, lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, esp ...

people of

Patagonia Patagonia () is a geographical region that includes parts of Argentina and Chile at the southern end of South America. The region includes the southern section of the Andes mountain chain with lakes, fjords, temperate rainforests, and glaciers ...

Argentina Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...

. 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 (Guennakin), or sometimes Puelche (Mapudungun: ''pwelche'', "people of the east") were Indigenous peoples living east of the Andes Mountains in Chile and Southwest Argentina. They were annihilated by Plague (disease), plagues ...

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 violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people. Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term, defined genocide as "the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" by ...

s of Patagonia, known as the Conquest of the Desert. By 1925, only ten to twelve Teushen survived. They are considered extinct as a tribe. The Teushen language 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.

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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 Indigenous peoples of the Americas

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