‘This book is precisely a puzzle’: an interview with Carlos Reyes on Nosotros los Selk’nam

This article presents an interview with Carlos Reyes, a Chilean comics writer, editor, and educator, conducted as part of a research project on the representation of Indigenous peoples in Chilean comics published between 1998 and 2023. The conversation centres on Nosotros los Selk’nam [We the Selk’nam] (2020), written by Reyes and illustrated by Rodrigo Elgueta, one of the first Chilean graphic novels to adopt an explicitly documentary approach to the Selk’nam ethnocide in Tierra del Fuego. Reyes discusses the difficulty of classifying the book, which combines historical research, recorded interviews, mythology, and fiction, and which he describes as a modular structure – a puzzle whose chapters could be reassembled without altering the whole. A central concern of the discussion is the reliability of the sources on which knowledge of Selk’nam culture rests: most early accounts were produced by non-Selk’nam observers, raising the question of how much of what is known reflects the culture itself and how much reflects a Western gaze. Reyes addresses the book’s shifting graphic styles, which distinguish narrative levels and signal degrees of documentary reality; the self-aware, metadiegetic devices through which the work reflects on the comics medium; and the choice of a title spoken in the first person, understood as a Selk’nam voice asserting a living, present existence. The interview also considers the recent turn in Chilean comics towards Indigenous histories and mythology, the transnational resonance of these regional traumas, and the expansion of the work’s treatment of the European ‘human zoos’ for its French edition. The conversation took place in October 2024.