This is not an anthropological or ethnographic film in style or construction, but it is built around some very interesting ethno-historical material and confronts the issues of ethnocide and genocide as part of the Chilean national make-up. So, as anthropological viewers, I think we need to look at this film at two quite different levels.

The first is the actual ethno-history. I am not an expert in this area (I did my fieldwork on the Brazilian Amazon) but I worked with and studied mobile hunter-gatherers, as were the indigenous peoples of coastal Chile. In my case my Maku friends were incredibly highly adapted to their forest world – they actually call themselves ‘Forest People’. Guzmán finds that the original people of Tierra del Fuego and the Chilean islands were equally immersed in their environment, in essence water – they could well have called themselves ‘Water People’. (Guzmán notes in passing that the incoming European colonists, including his own family, were hopelessly poorly adapted to this watery world).

Using brilliant still photos Guzmán retraces the lifestyles of these people, who I believed were completely extinct, then introduces us to a few surviving individuals – a great surprise for me.  However, although individuals and small groups have survived, their way of life – we might call it their ‘culture’ – has been pretty comprehensively destroyed by the dominant Chilean national society.

This is of course a pretty radical departure from the ‘official’ versions of national history but is unquestionably true. We should remember that a little over 500 years ago the WHOLE of the Americas –North, Central and South – were in indigenous hands.

In the interim the colonising incomers, mostly Europeans, have utterly decimated the indigenous people, stealing their land, massacring them, infecting them with diseases they had no resistance to and crushing their societies and cultures. When Darwin sailed round Southern Chile two centuries ago the land was known as Tierra del Fuego – the land of fires – after the burning hearths of the Indigenous people. Now the hearths are no more.

Guzmán’s argument is that the cruelty of the destruction of the indigenous people made a mark on the colonial Chileans’ psyches that replayed itself in the Pinochet regime’s brutality in suppressing Allende’s socialist Chile, and there is a particularly bitter symbolic irony in the military’s chosen form of assassination – hurling victims from helicopters into the sea.

Though this point is perhaps more psychological than anthropological, it does point directly to the incredible callousness of colonial regimes all over the Americas, and it is not something to dismiss as simply part of a dark past.

When I was doing fieldwork in the 1970s there was a verb in common currency on the plains of Colombia. This was ‘Cuivar’. It meant to go out and hunt and kill the Cuiva Indians who lived in the gallery forest along the rivers of the Colombian Llanos, then being overrun by cattle men.

I also attended a trial in Colombia of five settlers who had killed several newly contacted Nukak Maku Indians with axes. The massacre took place on Christmas Day and the settlers protested their innocence because their victims were not ‘rationales’.

Though anthropology has come a long way since the times when indigenous people were seen as ‘cultures in a vacuum’ and we now understand much more about ethno-history and interethnic conflict, it seems to me that this film takes a bold step in confronting the moral issues all anthropologists face when trying to make sense of the roles (past and present) that indigenous people play in national consciousness and vice versa.

Howard Reid is an anthropologist and award-winning Documentary film maker. He lived with nomadic forest people in the Brazilian Amazon from 1974-76 and on completing his PhD in 1979 he joined BBC Bristol as a researcher for an anthropological film series. He received EMMY honors for his work on the BBC/PBS TV Series The Story of English and a Golden Gate Award for his film about the Tuareg of the Sahara. In all he has made more than 30 documentary films and written 6 best-selling non-fiction books. He is currently Chair of the RAI Film Committee.