Puelche people

The Gününa küna, widely known as the Puelche, are an Indigenous people of the Pampas and northern Patagonia in Argentina. Their own name is usually rendered "the excellent people", and their homeland is Günün a atük. "Puelche" is an outsider's name: it comes from the Mapuche language, where it means "people of the east", and was applied to several groups living east of the Andes. Several classifications treat the Gününa küna as the northern branch of the wider Tehuelche peoples, and they are sometimes called the Northern Tehuelche.

Sorting out the peoples of the Pampas and Patagonia has long troubled historians, because Spanish, Jesuit and later travellers used overlapping labels. In 1774 the English Jesuit Thomas Falkner described the "Puelches, or Eastern Peoples" as a family of nations, among them the Taluhets, Diuihets, Chechehets and Tehuelhets. Twentieth-century scholars such as Federico Escalada and Rodolfo Casamiquela refined this picture. In Casamiquela's scheme, the Günün a künna lived in central and eastern Chubut and Río Negro, between the Chubut and Negro rivers, and were related to groups further north on the Pampas, such as the Puelche of northern Neuquén and the people the Guaraní called Querandí.

Before colonisation the Gününa küna lived in small, mobile bands led by an elder, settling near rivers and estuaries. They hunted guanaco, rhea and Andean deer with bows and arrows, and later with spears, and gathered wild foods: groups in the Andes collected araucaria seeds, while those in Cuyo, known as the Puelches of the algarroba, gathered carob pods. They wore fur cloaks called quillangos, built shelters of branches and hides, and cooked by dropping hot stones into bark containers. Some made canoes of planks that could be taken apart and carried over Andean passes, which let them keep in contact with peoples of southern Chile such as the Huilliche and Chono.

In the eighteenth century the peoples of the Pampas and northern Patagonia traded livestock, goods and ponchos at large fairs, and in 1740 Pampas groups joined the Mapuche in attacks on the Buenos Aires frontier. Epidemics in the late eighteenth century hit the Gününa küna very hard, and many survivors merged with Mapuche, Het and Tehuelche communities. In the nineteenth century, Puelche bands were drawn into Argentina's frontier wars: during the 1833 Desert Campaign, a Puelche chief, Vicente Goico, fought alongside the forces of José Félix Aldao against other Indigenous leaders.

The Gününa küna language, also called Gününa yajüch or Puelche, is usually treated as an isolate, though some linguists have proposed a link with the Chonan languages of Patagonia. Travellers and scholars recorded it from the nineteenth century onwards. According to Casamiquela, the last known speaker, José María Cual, died in 1960, though other accounts place the language's end around the 1970s. There are now efforts to revive it.

Descendants continue to identify as Gününa küna. Argentina's 2022 census, as reported in published summaries, counted about 2,260 people identifying with the group, and their community uses its own flag. Two Argentine lizard species, Liolaemus gununakuna and Liolaemus puelche, are named after them.

Our 1492 map labels their territory Günün a atük (Günün a küna), a broad and approximate outline across the Pampas and northern Patagonia, with the Tehuelche to the south and the Mapuche to the west.