document | Cristina Calderón: Memories of My Yagan Grandmother | Langscape Magazine

From the wind-swept reaches of Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile, Cristina Zárraga introduces us to the moving life and words of her beloved grandmother, Cristina Calderón, known around the world as the last fluent speaker of the Yagan language. But granddaughter Cristina refuses to accept the self-fulfilling prophecy that when Grandma goes, the language (and much of the place-based Yagan culture) will go with her. Together, the two women are hard at work to document Yagan and the cultural knowledge the language conveys  —  bearing in mind, the granddaughter says, that “if a language can die, many times it can also be re-born in generations down the line.” This story was published in Terralingua's Langscape Magazine, Vol 5(1), 2016.