The Wounaan Story

This is a piece that I wrote (borrowing heavily from sources listed at the end) about the Wounaan, an indigenous people that live in Panama and Columbia. I lived in a small Wounaan village for about a year (2002), during part of my service with the Peace Corps, and at present I'm a board member for a non-profit organization called Native Future, which works with a few of the indigenous groups in Panama. This piece was written for our website, and you can read it or download a short movie about the Wounaan, at www.nativefuture.org .

Who are the Wounaan?
The Wounaan are one of seven indigenous peoples (Bribri, Bugle, Embera, Kuna, Ngobe, Teribe and Wounaan) who live within the Republic of Panama. One of the smallest indigenous groups in Panama, the majority of the 6,800 Wounaan live in the Darien, Panama's largest and wildest province. In the Darien province most Wounaan live in small communities, located within and outside the two Embera-Wounaan comarcas, which are indigenous provinces with special indigenous, democratic administrations. They also live in and around Panama City and other increasingly urban neighborhoods along the Pan American Highway, and in three villages in the East Panama Province along the Pacific Ocean coast foothills of the Maje Mountain Range.

Traditionally, the Wounaan were semi-nomadic forest dwellers who lived in elevated thatch houses in small clearings close to meandering forest rivers. They lived in small groups of extended families, and carved special trees into river canoes they used to navigate green mazes of rainforest rivers and mangroves channels. Their villages were often located at the edge of the tidal reach between estuarine mangrove forests and semi-deciduous tropical moist forests, and they would catch fresh fish and shrimps and collect mangrove crabs and clams. They used traps, bows and arrows, spears, and blowguns with frog poison-tipped darts to hunt rainforest animals and birds. They maintained diverse gardens around their houses, gathered wild fruits and medicines, and planted bananas, plantains, corn and root crops in small forest clearings. They wore little clothing but painted themselves with intricate designs using inks derived from jungle fruits. They used various palm and other plant fibers to fabricate baskets of many kinds, for many varied purposes. They carved animal forms out of balsa wood (Ochroma lagopus) and gave them ritual significance. They maintained extensive knowledge of the forests and their inhabitants, learning their natural patterns and rhythms and incorporating them into their stories, dances and cosmological beliefs. They practiced several kinds of shamanism and ritually beat a sacred canoe to resolve local problems and maintain a state of peace and harmony in the world. The Wounaan keep many of these traditions alive today.

Presently the Wounaan are one of the least known and most marginalized indigenous groups in Panama, yet internationally, they are beginning to gain recognition as some of the finest basket makers and carvers in the world. During the past few decades, the Wounaan have transformed their traditions of weaving practical baskets and carving wood figurines into veritable art forms. Nowadays, most of the Wounaan women (and some men) spend days tediously sewing thousands of stitches using naturally harvested, dried and colored palm fibers (Carludovica palmata or naguala for foundation fibers and Astrocaryum standleyanum or chunga for outer design) to make tight rainforest baskets which depict colorful local designs derived from bodypainting or local rainforest animals. Many of the men use the hard, dark wood of cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa Helms or rosewood) or the more easily carved white meat of the tagua nut (from the Phytelephas seemannii palm) to create extremely lifelike rainforest animal sculptures. Several of the most accomplished weavers and carvers live close to Panama City where most of the local markets and buyers of their masterpieces are located, but the palm fibers and natural dyes, the cocobolo wood and tagua nuts (vegetable ivory) still come from the forest.
In the rainforest villages of Panama, the great majority of the Wounaan also weave baskets or carve cocobolo and tagua in addition to hunting, gathering, farming and fishing, because oftentimes their artwork is the best source of economic revenue they have. The Wounaan are one of the poorest ethnic groups in Panama, and many families in the rainforest villages live in conditions classified by the government as abject poverty. Most of the villages lack potable water or sufficient sanitation, and even the few villages that have health centers cannot count on a consistent supply of medicine or the presence of someone to administer it. Most of the villages have elementary schools, but many of the children do poorly because the classes are almost entirely conducted in Spanish, and the subject matter never includes Wounaan culture. For the kids who graduate from elementary school, the financial and cultural difficulties of continuing on to secondary school or college are usually insurmountable, and as a result there are very few Wounaan with the college training or experience necessary to help their own people.

Where do the Wounaan live?
Historically the Wounaan have inhabited the forests and traveled the streams and rivers of the Choco-Darien, a biogeographic region or ecoregion1 that includes Eastern Panama, Northwestern Columbia, and Northwestern Ecuador. Because of the formation of the Panama land bridge approximately 3 million years ago, new habitats were created and a great interchange and diversification of North and South American organisms occurred. As a result, the Choco-Darien is considered to have one of the highest levels of biodiversity on the planet.

The Choco-Darien is primarily a lowland ecoregion characterized by very high rainfall (4-9 meters per year) and large rivers with associated riverine forests that lie within great basins of famously formidable lowland forests. The basins are bordered by isolated mountain ranges up to 1,800 meters high, which are home to mixtures of Central American and Andean montane plants and animals. The rivers flow out into the ocean through large, complex estuaries and extensive mangroves. The mountains are covered in a mosaic of wet forests cloaked in fog and draped with dense layers of moss and tangles of lianas, vines and orchids. The lowland and montane forests both have high beta diversity and endemism, meaning that the biological species composition differs at just about every locale and many forest locations are home to organisms that don't live anywhere else in the world. Luckily, relatively large areas of the ecoregion are still blanketed with forest and there are still many forested corridors connecting lowland and montane forests, which allows for the long-range movements of some larger animal species and altitudinal migration of others, like the jaguar and the Bare-necked Umbrella Bird respectively. Many scientists consider it to be the last place and best opportunity to conserve representative lowland tropical ecosystems of Northwestern South America.

Biologically, the Choco-Darien is outstanding and distinctive. Although the whole region remains relatively poorly studied, it is thought to contain at least 8-9,000 species of plants, with about 20% of them occurring only in this region (Gentry, 1982). The list of recorded animals in the region is also impressive, including 127 species of amphibians (Roa and Ruiz, 1993), 97 species of reptiles (Sanchez and Castano, 1994), and 577 species of birds, 60 of which are restricted range species (Roda and Styles, 1993). In addition to being a major center for unique birds, it is also home to many vulnerable and endangered animal species, including the Choco tamarin, the tapir, the giant anteater, the spider monkey, the puma, the ocelot, the jaguar and the Harpy Eagle. Approximately 30% of the ecoregion in Panama lies within Darien National Park (a Biosphere Reserve and UNESCO World Heritage Site) and the Kuna and Embera-Wounaan comarcas, while ~30% is devoted to agriculture. The Choco-Darien is also culturally rich, as numerous indigenous forest peoples still persist here and maintain strong traditional ties to their land.

Where do the Wounaan come from?
The creation story of the Wounaan of Panama tells that in the beginning the creator was carving a Woun (a Wounaan person) out of cocobolo, but his hand slipped and he cut himself, so he molded the first Woun out of clay instead. Interestingly, Panama is the southernmost extent of cocobolo's range, and in the Columbian Wounaan stories, cocobolo is not mentioned. Traditionally, the Wounaan shamans in Panama made their curing staffs out of cocobolo, but apparently the use of cocobolo for making their well-known, lifelike animal carvings didn't start until a few decades ago.

The earliest reports from Spanish missionaries and explorers make very little mention of Wounaan settlements outside of Columbia. In part this could be because many Wounaan (traditional enemies of the Kuna) reportedly moved into areas of the Darien previously inhabited by Kuna people forced out by a Spanish edict. At that time the Wounaan were living in very small, remote settlements along rivers not likely to be visited by early chroniclers, and apparently the Kuna lived in organized villages where the Spanish could interact with them, while the Wounaan were more nomadic and likely to terrify outsiders with their body painting and poisonous blow darts. Good archaeological evidence of habitation in the Darien is scant, telling us only that there was substantial human habitation (but not by whom) in the region at least 3,000 years ago. In any case, the Wounaan seem to have increased their numbers in the Darien during the 18th and 19th centuries respectively, and by the 1960s, their population stretched as far as Panama Province, just east of the Panama Canal (Herlihy 1986).

A Short History of Wounaan Villages in Panama
Throughout most of their history, the Wounaan have lived in temporary dispersed settlements along river courses just above the tidal zone, but they began to reside in more permanent villages in order to improve educational opportunities in the 1950s. The villages formed because a generation of parents who could hardly speak Spanish wanted their kids to be able to communicate with the outsiders with whom they were increasing in contact. These new villages attracted the attention of General Omar Torrijos, who empathized with Panama's rural poor, and initiated a formal effort to improve the plight of indigenous people in Panama. In 1972 a new national constitution in Panama gave its indigenous peoples a right to participate in the political system and considered reserving lands for the economic well being of indigenous peoples. An office for indigenous affairs was created, and it worked with Wounaan and Embera leaders to draft a bill that declared the Embera-Wounaan Comarca. This included 31 of 53 villages inside the comarca, and gave them legal rights to their lands and resources. Apparently, many villages were too scattered to lump into reservations, and presently at least 37 Wounaan and Embera villages are located outside of the legally protected comarcas.

Meanwhile, beginning in the 1970s, Panama began using U.S. funds to extend the Pan American highway, which up until that point had reached a gap of undeveloped forest land between Panama City and the Panama-Columbia border. The highway not only altered the transportation system (previously dependent entirely on fluvial and maritime transportation) of goods in and out of the Darien, it facilitated the creation of additional roads and opened a new colonization frontier. Landless peasants from Panama's western provinces began arriving with hopes of "improving" forested land (by deforesting forty percent) in order to title it and create new farms and/or raise cattle. These peasants often unknowingly or knowingly crossed indigenous trochas (cut land demarcation boundaries), which has resulted in increased numbers of land disputes, mistrust and even violence between the historical populace and the newcomers. At the same time, forested land not protected in national parks and/or belonging to whole indigenous communities, cannot be titled according to current Panamanian law. Hence, nearly all of the Wounaan communities located outside of comarcas find themselves struggling with some kind of land dispute, which they are trying to resolve peacefully and legally by presenting historical evidence of land tenure to the appropriate Panamanian government agencies and authorities. If they do not have success there, they hope to bring their case before an international human rights court.


1 An ecoregion, as defined by the World Wildlife Fund is a "large unit of land or water containing a geographically distinct assemblage of species, natural communities and environmental conditions." "Biodiversity is not spread evenly across the Earth but follows complex patterns determined by climate, geology and the evolutionary history of the planet. These patterns are called ecoregions."

References:
Choco-Darien ecoregion classification - www.worldwildlife.org - Terrestrial ecoregions Ð Choco-Darien moist forests.
Gentry, A.H., 1982. Phytogeographic patterns as evidence for a Choco refuge. In G. T. Prance, editor, Biological diversification in the tropics. Columbia University Press, New York, USA.
Herlihy, P.H. (1986). A cultural geography of the Embera and Wounaan (Choco) Indians of Darien, Panama, with emphasis on recent village formation and economic diversification. The Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University: 306 pp.
Roa S. and R. Ruiz. 1993. Anfibios. In J.O. Rangel-Ch., editor, Informe Proyecto Estudio de la Biodiversidad de Columbia. Convenio INDERENA-Universidad Nacional De Columbia, Bogota. Internal Document.
Roda, J. and G. Styles. 1993. Aves. In J.O. Rangel-Ch., editor, Informe Proyecto Estudio de la Biodiversidad de Columbia. Convenio INDERENA-Universidad Nacional de Columbia. Bogota. Internal Document.
Sanchez, H. y O. Castano. 1994. La biodiversidad de los reptiles en Columbia. In J. O. Rangel-Ch., editor, Informe Proyecto Estudio de la Biodiversidad de Columbia. Convenio INDERENA-Universidad Nacional de Columbia, Bogota. Internal Document.
Velasquez Runk, Julie (2002). "And the creator began to carve us of cocobolo":historical ecology of the wounaan forest use in eastern panama. School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New York Botanical Garden