Ramón Lista was an Argentinian soldier and explorer. He was the second governor of the Territorio Nacional de Santa Cruz, precursor of Santa Cruz Province, Argentina. He played a key role in the Selk'nam genocide in Tierra del Fuego. Later he identified with the indigenous people of Patagonia, and went to live with them until he was recalled to Buenos Aires. Lista wrote a number of books on the people and places he had found.

The Selk'nam genocide was the systematic extermination of the Selk'nam people, one of the four indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Historians estimate that the genocide spanned a period of between ten and twenty years, and resulted in the decline of the Selk'nam population from approximately 4,000 people during the 1880s to a few hundred by the early 1900s.