The confinement allowed the children and young people of the Yagán indigenous Chilean people to learn ancestral handicraft techniques from their grandparents and begin to recover their original language
On March 21, 2020, the first coronavirus infection was recorded in Puerto Williams, a small Chilean city known for being the southernmost urban center in the world and where the Yagán indigenous people have lived for 7,000 years. Two days later, authorities closed sea and air borders, reduced economic activity to essentials, and ordered strict lockdowns. The restrictions helped revitalize some long-endangered ancestral cultural practices, such as handicrafts and the native language. The quarantine also helped strengthen intergenerational ties so that children and young people could once again identify as indigenous. This has been revealed by research recently published in Maritime Studies, one of the most important scientific journals in the world in the field of social sciences and humanities.
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