The documentation of indigenous languages of the Americas has often gone hand in hand with the very colonial processes which robbed their speakers of lands, traditions and even the languages themselves. This is particularly true for Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, where European missionaries, explorers and anthropologists squirrelled away, along with baskets, beads and bones, a wealth of wordlists, songs and stories, all the while clearing the way for the infectious diseases, armies and the general ‘progress’ which would dismantle native people’s traditional lifestyles. Our project team, collaborating with indigenous communities, is embarking on a quest to recover these materials, making them available to researchers and the general public as a large digital resource.