Cristina Calderón
Cristina Calderón is the last living full-blooded Yaghan person after the death of her 84 year-old sister Úrsula in 2005. By 2004, Calderón and her sister-in-law Emelinda Acuña were the only two remaining native speakers of the Yaghan language. With her granddaughter Cristina Zárraga and her sister Úrsula Calderón she published a book of Yaghan stories called Hai Kur Mamashu Shis in 2005. Zárraga, along with her husband Oliver Vogel, published Yagankuta, a dictionary and storybook of the Yaghan language, in 2010, based on interviews with Calderón.
As of May 2017, she was still alive and residing in her hometown of Puerto Williams. She is the mother of ten children and grandmother to 19 as of 2017.
Cristina Calderón has been officially declared Illustrious Daughter of the Magallanes Region and Chilean Antarctica. She also has been recognized by the National Council of Culture and the Arts as a Living Human Treasure in the framework of the Convention for the Safeguard of Immaterial Heritage, adopted by UNESCO in 2003. Likewise, she was nominated to be one of the fifty heroines in the celebration of the Bicentennial of Chile.
