Homage to the Yaghans was filmed with 16mm cameras in Tierra del Fuego and the Cape Horn area (Chile and Argentina) during the summer of 1987 and the winter of 1988. It was first presented in the United States at the New York Academy of Sciences in early 1990.
The video's purpose is twofold. The first is to achieve an understanding of certain episodes of western expansion, beginning in the early seventeenth century, which finally led to the extinction of the Yaghan people. The second is to gain an appreciation of the courage and fortitude of a people who had survived for thousands of years in one of the most inhospitable regions of the planet, but who had been judged by many Europeans as the most degraded human beings in the entire world.
Homage focuses on the personality and life of a Yaghan called "Jemmy Button" who was taken to England in 1831 by Captain Fitz-Roy and returned to his homeland two years later during Fitz-Roy's second expedition, in the company of Charles Darwin. Jemmy Button died in 1864, a victim of the first in a series of epidemics which decimated his people. The video ends with scenes of the four women who still speak Yaghan (as well as Spanish) and who live on Navarino Island, on the south shore of Beagle Channel in Chile. One of the four Yaghan-speaking women vividly remembers witnessing the last enactment of the great initiation ceremony, the Chiexaus, held on Navarino Island circa 1932.