[12] While the Selk'nam are closely associated with living in the northeastern area of Tierra del Fuego archipelago,[13] they are believed to have originated as a people on the mainland.

[15] Traditionally, the Selk'nam were nomadic people who relied on hunting for survival,[16][17] though they were also recorded as engaging in occasional fishing during low tides.

They shared Tierra del Fuego with the Haush (Manek'enk), another related nomadic culture who lived in the south-eastern part of the island, and the Yahgan (Yámana), an unrelated group who could be found along the southern coast.

Cook believed the glass had been a gift from the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville, indicating potentially several early contacts.

These newcomers developed a great part of the land of Tierra del Fuego as large estancias (ranches), depriving the natives of their ancestral hunting areas.

Father José María Beauvoir [es] explored the region and studied the native Patagonian cultures and languages between 1881 and 1924.

Lucas Bridges' book, Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948), provides sympathetic insight into the lives of the Selk'nam and Yahgan.

In recording the stories of a multitude of Europeans living in Tierra del Fuego, the journalist John Randolph Spears wrote that:

[30] In 1879, the presence of significant gold deposits in the sands of the main rivers of Tierra del Fuego were reported.

The colonial authorities were aware of the indigenous group's plight, but sided with the ranchers' cause over the Selk'nam, who were excluded from their worldview based on "progress" and "civilization."

Considerable numbers of foreign men were hired, and quantities of arms were imported for these campaigns, with the goal of eliminating the Selk'nam, who were perceived as a major obstacle to the success of colonists' investments.

Special attention was paid to these events after the intervention of the Salesian missionaries, who condemned the actions of the ranchers while themselves unintentionally contributing to the extermination of native cultures.

As the territories of the north began to be largely occupied by farms and ranches, many indigenous people, beset by hunger and persecuted by colonists, started to flee towards the extreme south of the island.

The large ranchers tried to drive out the Selk'nam, then began a campaign of extermination against them, with the complicity of the Argentine and Chilean governments.

[36][37] Large companies paid sheep farmers or militia a bounty for each Selk'nam dead, which was confirmed by the presentation of a pair of hands or ears or, later, a complete skull.

The predicament of the Selk'nam worsened with the establishment of religious missions, which disrupted their livelihood through forcible relocation,[37][38] and inadvertently brought with them deadly epidemics.

Later conflicts between governor Manuel Señoret [es] and the head of the Salesian mission José Fagnano[42] only served to worsen, rather than improve, conditions for the Selk'nam.

Martín Gusinde, an Austrian priest and ethnologist who studied them in the early 20th century, wrote in 1919 that only 279 Selk'nam remained.

[44] Comunidad Rafaela Ishton was formed in the 1980s to fight for recognition and the rights of Selk'nam in Argentina, and in 1994 were recognised as an indigenous people by the government.

[11] In 1998, the provincial Legislature of Tierra del Fuego recognised a treaty signed in 1925 between the president of Argentina, Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear, and the Selk'nam people.

[47][48] The 2010 National Population Census in Argentina revealed the existence of 2,761 people who recognised themselves as Selk'nam throughout the country, 294 of them in the province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and South Atlantic Islands.

Members of parliament issued a statement declaring their regret over the role the Chilean and Argentinean states played in the massacres of Indigenous people.

A large part of the traditional diet of Selk'nam according to early accounts, was made of the guanaco which they hunted using bows and arrows as well as with bolas.

Usually Hains were started when there was enough food (for example a whale was washed onto the coast), a time when all the Selk'nam from all the groups would gather at one place, in male and female camps.

Gusinde's The Lost Tribes of Tierra Del Fuego (2015) was published in English by Thames & Hudson, and in French and Spanish by Éditions Xavier Barral.

[70] Photographs of Selk'nam people taken by the missionaries are displayed at the Martin Gusinde Anthropological Museum in Puerto Williams.

[72] Ángela Loij (1900–1974) is considered to have been the last Selk'nam of non-mixed ancestry,[44][73] a school was named in her honour in Río Grande, Tierra del Fuego.

[76] The daughter of a Selk'nam mother and a Basque father, she won awards for her artistic works detailing life in Tierra del Fuego.