The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar)

THE PEARL BUTTON

"we are all streams from one water"

This block of quartz was found

in the Atacama desert, in Chile.

It is 3,000 years old

and contains a drop of water.

The Chilean desert

is the driest place on Earth.

From here,

astronomers discovered water

in almost the entire cosmos.

There's water in the planets.

There's water vapor in some nebula.

There's ice in other celestial bodies.

On earth, and elsewhere,

water is essential for life to exist.

Each night

a new planet is discovered,

that might have water.

As I watched the stars,

I was drawn to the importance of water.

It seems that water came from outer space,

and life was brought to earth by the comets,

that shaped the seas.

Water,

Chile's longest border,

forms an estuary known as Western Patagonia.

Here,

the CordilIera of the Andes sinks into the water

and re-emerges as thousands of islands.

It's a timeless place.

An archipelago of rain.

Some distant relatives of mine lived here.

We had a zinc roof

and the raindrops made a noise

that reassured and protected me.

That sound has folIowed me all my life.

When water moves,

the cosmos intervenes.

Water receives the force of the planets,

transmits it to the earth,

and to all living creatures.

Water is an intermediary force

between the stars and us.

Before the white man arrived,

the first inhabitants of Patagonia,

lived in communion with the cosmos.

They carved stones to ensure their future.

They traveled by water.

They lived submerged in water.

They ate what the water supplied.

They arrived ten thousand years ago.

They were water nomads.

They lived in clans

that moved about through the fjords.

They traveled from island to island.

Each family kept a fire burning

in the middle of their canoe.

There were five groups:

the Kawésqar,

the Selk'nam,

the Aoniken,

the Hausch,

and the Yamana.

They all traveled by sea.

The sea...

The sea is one of the pIaces that I...

As I grew up close to the sea,

I really love it.

I'd like to be able to travel by boat

as we used to.

But now there are too many restrictions,

we are barely allowed in the sea.

Why?

The Navy demands too much for us to be able to use the sea.

I have a boat I made myself.

Such a small boat scares them.

They're not familiar with boats that travel in this way.

That's why...

They claim they're protecting us,

but I don't think so.

I was told

that you crossed Cape Horn with your dad.

The first time we crossed Cape Horn,

the weather was bad.

The wind was strong.

The sea is very dangerous,

but we got across fine.

How oId were you?

TweIve years old.

We went from Punta Arenas

to Cape Horn and back again.

The paddles were short, like this

because we paddled downwards.

That's how you paddled?

The paddle isn't fixed to the boat?

No, we hold it in our hands.

The current doesn't drag the boat away?

No, it doesn't.

In Cape Horn?

The current holds it back a bit,

but it still moves forward.

We still don't know

how they were able to predict the weather.

It is estimated that in the 1 9th century,

there were 8,000 people with 300 canoes,

travelling around this vast archipelago.

GabrieIa, do you feel Chilean?

Not at all.

What do you feel?

Kawésqar.

I didn't tell you...

Once, with my mother,

we were on an island, near...

near Natales.

I don't know exactly where.

I'd been sent there as we didn't have water.

There was no well, no river, nothing.

We had gone to fetch water.

Opposite, there was a river.

I already knew how to paddle a little.

You need strength to paddle.

It's not easy.

It's not easy when it's windy.

The wind got up

and we couldn't reach our camp on the island.

So we had to know how to paddle,

in case we needed to get out of trouble.

We couldn't say:

"l can't paddle", that wasn't possible.

We had to be able to do it.

I learnt how to dive,

I had to learn.

I must have been 7 or 8 years old.

I got a musseI on my first dive.

That's when I was told

that I could catch shellfish to eat.

This was our food.

Back then, we ate only shellfish.

For Gabriela,

water is part of her family.

She accepts both the dangers

and the food that the sea offers her.

But I, as a Chilean,

I don't feel close to the sea.

For the ocean I feel admiration

and at the same time, fear.

This is because of a chiIdhood memory.

One summer,

one of my friends was swept away by the sea.

He was jumping from rock to rock,

amongst the waves,

that rushed in, claw-like, between the reefs.

His body was never recovered.

He was my first disappeared person.

The indigenous people of Patagonia

were Chile's first and only maritime peoples.

We Chileans today

have lost this intimacy with the sea.

I asked Emma Malig,

my painter friend,

to show me something I've never seen.

Since l was a child,

I've never been able to see

a complete picture of my country.

In the schools,

there were no walls big enough,

for such a long country.

Chile had to be divided into three parts:

the north, the center and the south,

as if it were three countries.

I think this country got its mission wrong.

We have 4,200 kilometers of coastline.

ProbabIy the most coastlines in the world.

With a large mountain range that isoIates it from the continent.

The desert in the north isolates us

from Western civilization and a frozen continent in the South.

We are an island,

in the geographical sense,

in terms of human geography, etc.

We don't have a maritime tradition,

and we've built up inland.

But our vaIley is too narrow for agriculture,

so we built our future

on a very slim economic possibility,

which, over time, has shrunk to almost nothing.

This country has not made proper use of its sea,

the vast ocean that lies before it.

Few people have given the ocean due honor,

have turned to the sea to admire it.

Not just to admire it, but to acknowledge it

as part of our identity.

My country denies the Pacific ocean,

the biggest of aIl the oceans.

It mistrusts its vastness,

equivaIent to half the surface of planet Earth.

However, for the indigenous and the astronomers,

the ocean is an idea,

a concept that's inseparable from life.

How long was the journey of the comet