What ritual is more ubiquitous than dancing? Cultures dance to attract the rain gods, ensure an abundant harvest, celebrate the arrival of puberty, sanctify a union between two people, enhance fertility, bless a birth, honor the dead, mark passages of seasons or acts of bravery, and appease or thank the All That Is.

During dances, Darién peoples ceremonially play the flute, chant, and drum. But objects made of wood and animal skins, such as drums, don’t survive the jungle to become archeological material. Plastic is virtually forever, and empty jugs used as drums are a sardonic surrogate for the real thing.

Like royal princesses adorned in hibiscus wreaths, pre-pubescent girls perform a dance to welcome the photographer. Dances often mimic the movements and characteristic behaviors of important animals, such as pelicans, which skillfully and suddenly dive-bomb fish inches below the ocean’s dark surface.

Angling on a right wing, then on a left, dancers scope out their meal, watching for rivals. Their fish proxy—often a banana at the center of their tightening circle—is about to be prey.

Like all navigable rivers in Panamá’s Darién Rainforest, the inland Rio Tuquesa is a glistening liquid highway—shared with occasional crocs and fleeting silvery meals with fins—on which people and supplies have poled and drifted for centuries.

From Canglón to the Alto Darién deep inside the boundaries of the Comarca Emberá Wounaan, the Tuquesa snakes between luxuriant overgrowth teasing and stroking its sometimes glassy surface and foot-worn, muddy clay banks sprinkled with young Emberá boys and old men in dugout canoes and washer women pummeling their families’ pantelones and parumas.

During winter—the Darién’s dry season (December through May)—the shallowness and clarity magnify stones, tiny creatures, sunlight on sunken leaves. The crystalline laughter of children splashing in the water travels not far beyond the shore. Dugouts too heavy for the shallows are dragged to anchorage.

In the wet, or rainy, season, rivers swell with inpourings from watersheds draining a sodden rainforest. Voracious, the Rio Tuira bites off and devours chunks of this Wounaan village’s steep embankment, spits out trees, hurling them into seemingly brawny log bridges until they, too, give up the fray, releasing their hold on once-solid land to crash and roll for miles downstream. The time for spearing fish is not now.

Often, the air is still and thick. The river is quiet and lazy. It cools and soothes when heat oppresses. It lulls a sleepy midday song. Glitterings that are freshly scraped fish scales—suspended beneath its surface for an endlessness moment—abandon themselves to drift. Feeding souls whose lives depend on it, the river is understood and given thanks.ritual

Not by fish alone do Darién villagers live. Fowl water, or chicken stew, is the hamburger and fries of the rainforest. A mother plucks one life to fortify another. No butterball, this chicken moments earlier, as if a portent of coming events, had gawkily fluttered into an empty aluminum stew pot resting beside a trio of half-burned logs. White rice, locally grown or bought at the Yaviza marketplace—one of the closest centers of civilization—no herbs, no salt, a shake or two of black pepper, strengthen the stew. Garden-fresh garlic, pounded into smithereens with a wooden mortar, swims in the pot with the naked, intact bird. Chicken innards fry in blackened skillets, crisping in hot oil bought from entrepreneurial villagers turned grocers.

Boiled yucca root, called manioc, or cassava, frequently appears alongside deep-fried plantain on the limited menu. Mother Nature played a cruel joke with manioc. The appearance of its fibrous, starchy interior resembles sweet potatoes. But the likeness ends there. There is nothing sweet about it. Meals ready to eat are served up in carved wooden bowls, tin plates, or melamine MelaMac brought in by dugout canoes from the city or townships that are hours, sometimes a half day away.

This exhibition recognizes and celebrates their uniqueness and cultural similarities. Still, a closer look reveals two peoples with ties that bind more tightly than loosely. As distinctly different as are the two cultures from their Kuna neighbors, the Wounaan and Emberá are oftentimes beautifully, sometimes cautiously intertwined with each other. Unlike the paint ceremonially adorning their bodies, both cultures have been indelibly colored by the Western world-view to which they’ve been exposed, sometimes with sweeping strokes.

Like Noah’s Ark, a dugout bursting with budding Emberá girls, wreaths of plaited hibiscus flowers crowning their heads, is not a put-on for tourists. There are no tourists headed for Villa Caleta. Though one or two villages have become “sacrificed” to tourism in the name of economic development, this village works to hold on to what remains of its culture. Two women designated as coaches teach young and pre-teen girls “traditional” circle dances. When “skin” drums are not available, plastic water jugs usually are.

In the Wounaan village of Capeti, girls of marrying age take turns stirring a boil-down of amber cane syrup. Sucré canes, which can be sucked or chewed like candy, are fed through heavy presses (some villages have two)—reminiscent of those still seen in the Deep South—turned by people or horses. Extracted juice runs into large, oval wooden bowls that can be carried by two people, each at one of the handle-like ends.

Early-stage syrup that’s cooled and poured into plastic jugs is traded or sold for extra income. Boiled down further, it is used to make mielchö, a sweet drink. Still, if they can afford to sweeten their strong coffee with it, families will buy bagged granulated sugar from the village grocer or haul it home in their dugouts from a supply-gathering foray to the city or the nearest town. Cane fields near the village mean a ready supply of tooth-decaying sweetener. But natural cane isn’t the only dentin destroyer. With the first case of introduced bottled Coca-Cola, villagers began to notice increasing incidence of cavities and gum disease.

Today, in a few villages, gas-fueled generators run charming ’50s-era red chillers emblazoned with the fabled Coca-Cola logo. A store owner or village leader offers the photographer an icy-cold thirst quencher jarringly out of place in this hot, sticky, remote location.

At a time long ago when people had no backbone, the Creator, Hêwandam, looked favorably on the spineless Wounaan and gave them a skeletal structure. They emerged from the dark underworld to gather light as chunga trees.

Fearsome-looking Astrocaryum standleyanum is a tree to be taken seriously. Six-inch-long spikes from this sacred black palm, which is called chunga in the Wounaan’s language, Wounmeu, can inflict nasty puncture wounds that require attention. The palm-frond harvester’s greatest fear is losing an eye to a chunga spine.

Seemingly oblivious to the danger, barefoot children anxiously prance around a fallen tree in anticipation of the tasty palm-nut reward. Only the coveted, long new spear leaf—and less often the secondary newly opened leaf—is taken to create basket-making fibers. Stripped trunks of felled trees raise huts from four to five feet off the ground.

The symbology is not lost on the harvesters and builders. When wedges are chiseled out of the smooth trunk, the resulting notched-log ladder solves the problem of entering shoulder-high huts. At night, the heavy ladder is raised into the hut or simply rolled over to slow four-legged ground night stalkers from investigating sleeping quarters.

Increasingly, caciques, aware that depleting this natural resource would spell economic disaster to the Wounaan, encourage spear-leaf harvesting by leaning long, makeshift ladders against the perilous trunk.

Gathering basket-weaving materials is a communal activity. It is no longer safe to enter the jungle a handful of women at a time. The person with the sharpest machete or axe and strongest arm whacks at the chunga palm’s base until the spiny trunk crashes to the ground.

An army of black stinging ants soldier forth from the treetop, instantly making a frond-cutting operation near impossible until they scatter. Another harvester severs the fruiting body of a nearby bush-like naguala palm from beneath its outreaching fronds. As one weaver explains, the fruit’s acidic action helps to whiten chunga fibers. A second weaver quickly interjects her preference for the whitening process. “It’s better to add lemon juice to the soaking water,” she insists. All weavers agree on one thing. The long, stiff fibers of naguala (the plant responsible for the fabled Panamá hat that’s actually woven in Ecuador), make the ideal foundational coil for chunga-palm baskets.

Master basket maker and weaving coach Alina Itucama reveals that chunga for baskets is harvested “during the week following the dark moon.”

Only slightly less vicious than the tree’s trunk, the coveted spear-leaf frond threatens with spines that are a bit shorter, fewer, and farther between. Like razors, the long edges of the fronds can easily and deeply slice skin. Banana leaves package the bundle as much to help prevent frond injury as to keep the cut fronds moist and supple during the return trip to the village.

This five-year-old is learning not only how to make herself toys but also how to help support a future family with substantial income through weaving baskets. As mother can’t drive to the local fabric store to purchase standby packs of stainless steel sewing needles, putting them into the hands of little ones is an exercise in trust. If this budding artist loses or breaks one, the consequences will be inconvenient. No needles, no basketmaking.

Lost time is lost income. So vital to Wounaan economy are baskets that when asked, “What do you need?” weavers have consistently requested industrial-strength propane-fueled, mantle-lanterns on tall stands to work through the early-onset nightfall.

Protectiveness is in our genes. It is often the driving emotion behind the question, “What does the weaver get out of it?” Referring to the retail price of baskets, the seemingly innocent question misses a basketful of truths yet to be revealed.

When people ask this question, their tone is often one of suspicion, intimating or overly implying that weavers are being taken to the cleaners and are not paid fairly. Unknown to askers, weavers actually set their own prices.

Furthermore, virtually every basket of any size and all museum-quality baskets are specially commissioned by those who fund their construction. That means before a weaver begins a basket, she receives a deposit. Specially commissioning pieces means that weavers are paid income in installments on work that won’t be completed for six months, a year, or even up to four years.

The second erroneous implication is that weavers aren’t worldly enough or haven’t sufficient education to ask for prices commensurate with their work. Hardly! Weavers are largely better educated than many of us might have suspected. Education—yes, even in the Darién—was made mandatory by the Panamanian government, at least through grade school.

As a result, weavers are literate and can “do the math.” The Wounaan and Emberá have been creating this increasingly extraordinary art form for several generations. And experience has been a good teacher. That’s particularly true for the Wounaan, who have perfected their skills to bring craft into the realm of world-class art form. That giant leap occurred when American linguists who for many years lived in a remote village with the Wounaan encouraged those who could weave to sharpen their skills and bring small baskets to market. Such began the process of pulling these two Darién cultures out of abject poverty.

Souvenir-quality and smaller baskets—crafted over a few days or months—are still sold to tourists in Panamá City’s artesania centers, at the Panamá Canal, or to other outlets where quick-decision, inexpensive purchases are made.

Before beginning a museum-quality work, master weavers calculate their prices based on their earned reputation, anticipated size and complexity of the finished work, and estimated months and years of construction time.

To say that baskets are “fairly traded” is an understatement. Skilled weavers, such as Selina Teucama—creator of the three-plus-year masterpiece in this exhibition that its collector has dubbed “Rainforest Menagerie”—make significant contributions to the financial well-being of their families.

In fact, proceeds from a single fine basket (remember, commissioned before it was even begun) might purchase a shiny Yamaha or Evinrude outboard motor, replace a decayed tooth with gold, or buy school books, supplies, and uniforms for a family’s four children. Or, for women such as Selina, basket money might be used to finance an entrepreneurial venture, which, in turn, can generate additional family income. In her case, her first major basket paid for lumber, merchandise and labor to build and open a small village store run by Selina and her sister.

Another weaver purchased the materials her husband needed to make a “still” to brew and sell chicha. Others have chosen to replace the family’s thatched-roof hut with a plank-board, walled-in home that offers the protection of a locked door and a sense of security from an increasingly dangerous rainforest life.

A weaver may be happy to lend a few hundred dollars to a sister to upgrade her “kitchen.” Her husband may have his sights set on a generator to run a new TV set and VCR.

Forays to the city to visit family, friends, or shop and TV increasingly expose villagers to highly desirable consumer conveniences and luxuries. Linoleum, roll vinyl, even concrete replace dirt floors. PVC pipes bring clear stream water to hut cooking areas. Cell phones replace solar-powered “emergency-use-only” tarjeta-operated versions that the phone company felt obligated to install in areas that are last-on-the-repair-list when technology breaks down.

The more Westernized the Wounaan and Emberá become, the more expenses they assume that were never dreamed of in their earlier, more self-sufficient, rainforest lives. With increasing family incomes, men can replace badly worn chisels and knives to carve cocobolo-wood or tagua-nut sculptures. Parents can replace outgrown, frayed, high-top sneakers for Western-conscious teen sons. Suddenly, funding grandfather’s surgery in a city hospital becomes a priority when the village curandero’s healing ceremony hasn’t healed.

Over the past decade, collectors have seen a dramatic rise in Hösig Di basket prices as weavers begin to recognize themselves as artists rather than production workers. Theirs is a successful cottage industry in that among the society of weavers the goal is to set aside unconstructive competitiveness and work together for the common good by sharing ideas and techniques, not stealing them.

Whether they have made the transition from craft to art can be hotly debated. Many have. Some have not. Usually, weavers in the most remote parts of the Darién struggle to get valuable coaching from master weavers.

What the weavers know is that they have found a niche that honors their talents and earns them a more lucrative living—and with greater dignity—than cleaning toilets and changing beds in city hotels.

Their rise to international stardom as master weavers whose creations rival the finest Native American and Alaska native masterworks not been without its challenges. But no cultural development is painless. The Wounaan are, perhaps, meeting the challenges of new world—that has been knocking on their door since the arrival of the Spaniards centuries ago—better prepared than many indigenous peoples before them.

As they thank their newly adopted Christian God and their ancestral Creator for their good fortune, they are coming to understand that this fortune could be short-lived if they forget their humble, earthly ties to the sacred chunga palm.

For the Wounaan and Emberá of the Darién, there is duality in all things. They have seen the presence and absence of the sacred manifested in the raping by foreign and domestic interests of their once-bountiful Darién rainforest. It is becoming clear. Life comes full circle.

In union with the tribal leaders, non-native peoples can help support indigenous efforts to protect the fragile, shrinking world that long ago shaped their culture and traditions. As their empowerment becomes increasingly self-evident, we can—together—celebrate their not-so-small victories over resources mismanagement and under-representation in government policy-making. But the need doesn’t end there. We can collaboratively help the Wounaan and Emberá take their intellectual- and property-rights battles to the international stage and increase pressure on governments to end drug and human trafficking.

To hold one of these world-class baskets is to join hands with its creator. In so doing, we grow in understanding of and appreciation for the people Panamanian author Stuart Warner calls “Spirit Weavers” of the Darién.

From “Native Design: Darién Rainforest Exhibition," Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Copyright © 2005 Charlotte Meares

Carving tools—some still hand-made, some imported—gouge and whittle away the unpredictable, hard cocobolo wood in their artists’ grasp. Sometimes, the men will anchor an emerging carving between bare feet. One slip of sharp tools on such dense wood could cause serious injury.

Dense cocobolo—Dalbergia retusa, the rosewood of the rainforest—is traditionally used to create ceremonial objects, as well as around-the-hut functional items. Sanded and polished to a buttery, dark red patina, cocobolo carved into birds, mammals and amphibians is destined for the tourist trade. The most meticulous carvers pay careful attention to nuances and realistic details that have made their creatures so salable in Panamá City artesania centers.

The nearly anatomically correct work of crocodile carver Obidio Mejia is a good example. Recognizing the appeal and financial benefits of carving works as near life size as practicable, Mejia completed a specially commissioned, three-foot-long crocodile destined for a client in the US. It was said to be the first carved crocodile to have realistic teeth—implants carved from the creamy tagua nut.

While contemporary cocobolo carvings tend toward increasing realism and larger sizes, several Wounaan collectors mourn the loss of primitive stylizations—the purity of an earlier cultural forma virtually lost or forgotten.

The “Guardian Series” of cocobolo carvings by Wounaan sculptor Selerino Cheucarama are reminiscent of that primitivism. They also hint of a global aesthetic and influence. Highly sought after by US collectors, Cheucarama’s stylized male and female couples seem ancient, yet contemporary interpretations of his culture. His sculptures—in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Panamá City and in the private collections of Hollywood celebrities and business tycoons—also incorporate carvings made from another once-plentiful resource—the tagua nut.

Tagua (Phytelephas seemannii), known as vegetable ivory, is a palm nut that can be carved most intricately when at just the right phase of dryness, or ripeness. Historically, haute couture clothing sported tagua buttons. Found in a number of rainforests globally, tagua carvings from earlier Wounaan period were simple, elegant stylizations of creatures. As with cocobolo carvings, the tourist trade predicated more realistic representations as well as the addition of bright color. Today, tagua beads and small rainforest-animal “beads” and statues are sold in Panamá City and the US. Elaborate carvings that combine several nuts can fetch good money.

Darién artistry is not limited to carving and weaving. Body painting is an artful expression born out of tradition and spiritual beliefs. The “paint” is derived from a fruit the Wounaan call by its Spanish name, jagua.

Panamá botanist and Wounaan basket collector Elizabeth Leigh describes Genipa americana as having a consistency that is “a cross between the jicama and potato.”

To prepare a dye (for skin or chunga fibers), starchy grated jagua pulp is squeezed through cloth to extract its clear juice, which is then mixed with wood ash in order to be visible.

Looking like squid ink, the thin, dark liquid is painted with miniature corncobs or forked sticks onto clean skin, which is often dusted lightly with talcum powder, appearing as a white board ready for lettering. Within hours, the chemicals in the plant extract react with the body and begin to stain the skin deep bluish brown. Darkening hour by hour, the stain reveals the painter’s geometric design—motifs “ordered in the beginning-time by the Creator, Hêwandam,” according to creation stories gathered by former Panamá Canal School Zone teacher, Margo Callaghan, PhD, University of California, Berkeley.

In this image, in preparation for a ceremonial dance, a young woman is adorned with jagua-juice painted boa constrictor “necklace,” a reminder to the Wounaan of their origins. In the beginning, Boa Constrictor brought the people in its mouth up from the underworld.

But perhaps the Creator had a practical side. It has been said that the body painting also helps to keep mosquitoes away. Despite body painting, cases of malaria still occur in Darién villages. For the first few days the stain intensifies. Some women contend that the darkened painted areas of the skin are less prone to sunburn. Weeks of bathing, swimming, and skin sloughing subdue and fade the spiritual healing, protection, or ceremonial designs, unless they are refreshed and over-painted, perhaps for another ceremony, or simply for adornment.

Notice that the geometric motifs on many baskets draw their inspiration from body paintings and the patterns on spiritual paraphernalia used by village jaibanas, or shaman.

It’s difficult to reject some requests and happily fill others, but the cart blanche introduction of propane lanterns would change family life dramatically. An obvious health impact is that nighttime weaving can cause considerable eyestrain. But more important societal ramifications are to be considered here.

Basket weaving huddled close to harsh lantern light may undermine the benefits of socializing and sisterhood bonding that take place during daytime weaving “klatches.” Further, families who have already purchased these high-candlepower lanterns unwittingly pollute jungle darkness over great distances. Their glare makes sky-watching impossible. Perhaps the most unconscionable effect is the potential for hastening disintegration of quality family time and community networking. Yet, to weavers and their mates, who work longer and harder to finance their ever-increasing appetite for modern commodities and newly discovered luxuries, these are inconceivable consequences.

For many families, the basketry art form and a handful of crafts fund a non-negotiable expense: more-frequent travel to visit families who have left villages for cities. Boat passage to a faraway village or town then requires transportation by bus and pickup truck. Costs mount.

Because Wounaan basket artistry is a fairly recent phenomenon—evolving to its current level of complexity only over the last two generations—younger women who initially learned to weave from mothers or aunts have likely surpassed their mentors’ creativity, skill and income.

Several weavers have emerged as mentors, teachers and master artists. Dalia Negria is one such person. Many of her “sister” weavers and several knowledgeable basket collectors credit Dalia as the first weaver more than two decades ago to stitch a crude bird design into her basket.

Dalia laughs, only slightly embarrassed at her earliest work. Today, she commands a premium for her extraordinarily complex, multi-year masterpieces, which set a benchmark for coiled basketry worldwide. In workshops throughout the Darién, Dalia and a handful of other master artists coached women with less experience in techniques to improve the quality of their work and, in so doing, increased all of their incomes. Each artist developed her own style, favorite stitches, motifs, and colors. The demands of collectors for museum-quality baskets in geometric patterns have driven weavers to fashion works with the same precision and élan as those of rainforest designs.

Over the last two-dozen years that Darién basketry has evolved from crude tourist souvenirs to world-class collection pieces, two types of stitch variations on the coil construction have emerged. Most prevalent is the technique now called “silk stitch.”

Silk stitch equates easily to satin–stitch embroidery, well-known to those who do needlework. In silk stitch, the design-making loop that wraps the coil foundation of the basket partially enters the preceding row and encircles the new row in progress. The wrap for the next row will reach down to catch the lower coil and bind them together in alternating stitches.

A coil-and-wrap “rib-stitch” encases the coil with deliberate emphasis, as the wrap catches both the lower and new coil, creating a distinctive, handsome corduroy exterior. The technique is highly effective with geometrics and can achieve a look similar to beading.

Rib stitch (dubbed medio doblado by former Panamá gallery owner Llori Gibson) is surprisingly dramatic in floral and faunal motifs, and several superb weavers use the effect to best advantage, as examples in this exhibition demonstrate.

Gibson has categorized a third type of stitch, which she calls diente pienado (after the teeth in a comb). She describes this method as a less-fine version of the silk stitch. For simplicity in identification, however, silk- and ribbed-stitch categories are sufficient.

One of the finest constructions in this exhibition boasts as many as 102 stitches per inch. Not surprisingly, the size of the basket (the size of the coil, to be precise) makes minute stitches self-limiting. The larger the basket, the larger, or thicker, must be the foundational coil to support it. The thicker the coil, the larger must be the stitches that wrap it.

It is a rare weaver who can achieve the combination of a larger basket with coincidental thick coil and thin, tight stitches. Think of putting a thong on an elephant. It should be understood, however, that the fine stitch in this case refers to the thickness of the strand only, not its length. This fine strand must still be long enough to bridge the gap. An example of this meticulous craftsmanship can be seen in the large, thickly coiled macaw basket by Anita Chocho.

Motifs have similarly fallen into two categories. Geometrics are the timeless designs of all cultures over the ages. These patterns have come to be called cultural, or cultura in Spanish, the second language in the Darién and official language of Panamá.

Basket designs that are not geometric are pictorial. These are the rainforest motifs that include flowers, trees, birds (especially scarlet and blue and gold macaw, toucans, and hummingbirds), sea creatures (octopus, dolphins, marlin, orca), butterflies, monkeys, ocelots, jaguars, and even whimsical iguanas.

Within the last three years, the number of men weaving—and achieving museum-quality results—has likely tripled to twenty-five throughout the Darién. Often, but not always, a new male weaver has his teacher under the same roof. Basketry has become a more lucrative livelihood than carving.

Before the labor-intensive dyeing process can begin, vegetal dyestuffs must be gathered from the surrounding rainforest or from weavers’ gardens. The learning process is fun for the children.

Berries, seeds, leaves, wood shavings, roots, flower, and tubers are picked, dug, crushed, pounded, grated, and squeezed to yield subtle and brilliant shades, depending on their processing.

Some organic materials yield unexpected results. An intense magenta-pink is extracted from the green “Teca” (Teak) leaf. Red emerges from the dried “P’ucham” (trumpet-flower) vine. Aubergine is coaxed from the previously dyed achiote-orange (Bixa orellana) or P’ucham-red dyed chunga steeped overnight in river mud. Add a third-stage charcoal and jagua-juice infusion to the tannin-rich river mud and the result is an intense, rich, glossy negro (black).

Over the several decades, almost two-dozen individual natural sources have yielded an array of first dye-batch colors. The incredible wealth of natural colors achieved through single- and cross-dyeing processes and the reactivity of ultra-fine river mud make for a palette that is pleasing and opulent, with no need for synthetic additions.

In the Emberá village Villa Caleta, weavers prefer to arrange bundles of orange-, red- or pink-dyed chunga in pails and overfill them with river mud rather than submerge the material in the silty shallows, where it could be washed away or dug up. Precious pails are set for safekeeping in piraguas (dugouts) overnight or longer.

Some weavers’ recipe for an ideal, deepest espresso-midnight negro includes adding to the mud blue-black intensifying jagua juice or cocobolo wood ash. The technique turns ordinary orange a lustrous, furniture-finish brown. Pink can shift to lavender or mauve. Red takes on rust hues if left for a short time. Longer steeping produces a burnt sienna, then mahogany and, finally, warm ebony.

Weavers with secret color combinations guard their recipes by working solo, dyeing small batches of chunga at a time—just enough for the basket each sees in her mind’s eye. Because it’s not always possible to estimate how much chunga of a single dye lot is needed for a basket that may grow over one, two, or three years, chunga from multiple dye lots end up stitched into the motif.

Subtle variations of hues within a color then occur, just as they do in prized oriental rugs and fine, hand-woven textiles. These variations are not blemishes, but are part of the charm of handmade objects created with vegetal dyes. Over time, baskets—as with rugs, and textiles made from natural dyes—mellow; and their subtleness becomes them.

Awareness of potential gradual mellowing helps a buyer new to basket or textile-art collecting decide whether or not to be proactive and slow the natural aging process. Curatorial technology has come light years since grandfather began his valuable basket collection.

Today, we know volumes more about the effects of UV, air pollution, and noxious chemicals in the home. Several collectors of both Native American and Wounaan baskets mitigate the potentially fugitive nature of some vegetal-dyed colors woven into their valuable baskets by showcasing a representative sampling safely protected from dust in glass or Plexiglass cases, lit with low-intensity, cool UV-filtered art lights. Curators offer the same advice. The remainder of the collection can be stored and look as pristine as the day the baskets were completed. As one might guess, reds, oranges, and yellows tend to be more fugitive than blues, blacks, browns, and some greens.

Weavers have experimented with aniline dyes, boiled crepe paper, Kool-Aid, and even mosquito coils to produce hot pinks, reflex blues, and psychedelic lime greens. Early in the art form’s development, two avid collectors, tribal advocates, and weaver coaches—Panamanian-born writer and photographer Stuart Warner, and former Panamá gallery owner Llori Gibson—discouraged “cruise-ship” colors in favor of pure vegetal dyes.

Like their Western counterparts, many Wounaan families now have two or more income-earners. As women weave baskets that are increasingly more complex and, therefore, more expensive for vendors to buy, men carve the ivory-like interior of two-inch to three-inch tagua nuts into hummingbirds, frogs, and other rainforest creatures.

Teenage boys sand their fathers’ cocobolo-wood sculptures to sell to tourists or export to merchants in the US and elsewhere. Field crops, plantains, and bananas yield additional income, although minor compared to the increasingly lucrative sales of finely executed baskets and carvings.

Fedencio interrupts carving his cocobolo-wood crocodiles and other animals to interpret dreams for villagers struggling to find meaning in the mysterious subconscious. Dream interpretation isn’t as lucrative as it is rewarding and voyeuristic. An adept carver, Fedencio can bring in a passel of dollars all at once for a nearly full-scale cocobolo caiman or harpy eagle. Here, a very young daughter assumes considerable responsibility as a built-in babysitter.

Most Wounaan families still prefer airy huts to boarded enclosures that are loosely called casas. In the hut, security means trusting your neighbor and not fearing invasion by militant marauders. As family incomes increase, so, too, do purchased possessions, which replace hand crafted goods.

Non-biodegradable plastic—invading the far corners of the earth—creates as many household problems as it solves. Yet it is here in the villages to stay, replacing handsome wooden tools and utensils and functional—if loosely woven—utility basketry.

Women find colorful Rubbermaid tubs a boon for washing dishes, clothes and babies; serving as emergency chamber pots when Gringos visit or someone is sick; soaking chunga filaments; catching rainwater; holding dozens of scaled fish about to be fried; and myriad of other inventive uses. A clutch of gas cans is worth its weight during eight-hour motorized boat trips by sea to anywhere supplies can be purchased and goods traded.

As with any indigenous culture, gatherers of nature’s foodstuffs and firewood over time must venture farther and farther from the village. The ten-plus-mile trek to the mountains to gather basket-making materials could mean a full day’s journey through snake (or drug-runner) infested jungle, but greater awareness of careful and selective harvesting is becoming the norm for a number of villages. A new catch phrase for village caciques, or leaders, is “replanting project.” Here, a woman returns to her village after gathering the necessities for sustaining her family for the day. She balances a “yoke” of firewood while shouldering a burden basket filled with bananas and chunga fronds for future baskets.

Pounding rice with a mazo to crack hard hulls in a pilón before winnowing goes faster when two people alternate strikes. The mazo must crash down on the rice grains with considerable force, or the motion doesn’t accomplish the desired result. Several families may share a large pilón. Rice, a staple either grown or purchased, constitutes a large percentage of the Wounaan’s diet. Pilóns also grind corn and non-native soybeans.

Darién Rainforest is outside the Maytag repairperson’s service area. For now. But it’s only a matter of time before one industrious Wounaan villager, brought out of poverty by the sales of high-end Hösig Di basketry and other entrepreneurial activities, introduces the first generator-powered washing machine and hooks it up to the PVC pipe that gravity-feeds mountain-stream water to someone’s hut.

In the meantime, the river is the communal wash tub where women can gossip and air their dirty laundry. Weathered gray wooden raft-like platforms for piling clothes (and chunga bundles) are tethered to the shoreline and enable women to work standing in buoyant waist-deep water rather than kneeling to scrub clothes at river’s edge. While laundering seems to be a task mainly for the hours between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., any daylight hour when the tidal river’s current is favorable. On the wood platforms and along the shoreline, pastel plastic laundry baskets and dishpans burst into bloom. Clothes drape hibiscus bushes, hang on hut railings, or get pinned to clotheslines. Laundering may become a daily chore as more children don clean shorts and T-shirts many morning. And, when school is in session, children wear uniforms that must be kept clean.the

Derivations of the traditional dugout, piragua or cayuco canoes, are now being made using shortcuts. Sawed timber espavé planks are fitted, then assembled with glue and mastics of various kinds to seal the joints.

Its builder works in an open space across the river from the village. His outdoor workshop accommodates the full twenty-foot expanse of the canoe. Building “on the spot” also reduces the distance trees and planks must be ported. He’s on this side of the river more for convenience, he says, than for the uninterrupted peace and relative quiet, though there is that advantage, too.

Poling is a traditional (and ubiquitous) means of navigating piraguas up and down rivers, especially when waters are shallow. But increasing numbers of expensive, shiny new Yamaha outboard motors are seen (and heard) on waterways. Outboards, many financed from the sale of coveted fine basketry called Hösig Di, are critical to safer sea passages that may take as long as eight motorized hours and navigation along tidal rivers with strong currents. Even young children become expert at boatmanship by playing in the waters below their village, often unwatched except by each other.

Under her mother’s watchful eye, the daughter of an elderly curandero squats in the dirt beside an aluminum stockpot and wields a knife as long as her forearm. A curious chicken wanders precariously close to and investigates the pot as if it’s resigned to its fate—if not now, soon.

The child is helping to prepare breakfast, practice for what will inevitably be an early marriage. A staple of the Wounaan diet, plantain cut into one-inch chunks, smashed into small cakes, is deep fried.

Small bony river fish, speared the day before, fry after the plantain is browned, a sequence quickly adopted after the first taste of plantain fried in fish oil. Cooking also takes place under the family’s thatched roof on a sand platform that protects the hut floor and which is surrounded by logs suitable for sitting.

This straying chicken’s destiny is a foregone conclusion.

Darién Province—more specifically Darién National Park and adjacent, non-park, unprotected “comarcas,” which we might associate with reservations—comprises the whole of eastern Panamá. It is home to almost half of Panamá’s tribal groups.

Filtering many hundreds of years ago through a tangle of dense lowlands and sheltering canopy, over spring-fed mountains, across an artificial border that separates Central from South America, came a people whom anthropologists had called Chocó. They hacked villages out of the jungle and thrived.

In time, many of the Chocó’s neighbors in the Darién, a people today called Kuna, resettled along the Caribbean coast and established themselves inland of and on the islands known as San Blas. While pockets of Kuna communities remained, the Chocó claimed much of the eastern and southern province to themselves.

At some point in unrecorded history, during or after their migration from what is today Colombia, the Chocó separated into two unequal groups. Within what seemed like a vast expanse of treed land richly veined with waterways, these two small populations bumped into each other so infrequently that their languages evolved uniquely.

The larger of the two groups—approximately fourteen thousand—call themselves Emberá. The smaller group, the Wounaan people, is estimated to number nearly eight thousand.

Many Wounaan leaders and villagers have expressed strong feelings about the continued use of the name Chocó, which was imposed on them. They feel it’s disparaging, and it’s promulgated only by those insensitive to the wishes of the Darién peoples to be respectfully called by their tribal names.

As their populations thrived apart from each other, the spaces between them began to shrink. The Darién became smaller and smaller. Bumping into one another sometimes resulted in uneventful skirmishes. But another outcome was intermarriage.

Languages that had diverged to such a degree that only about a quarter of their individual lexicons remained mutually intelligible now had to be learned by spouses and offspring.

In his book Tormenta En El Darién, Vida De Los Indios Chocoes En Panamá, José Manuel Reverte Coma, PhD, who extensively studied the Wounaan and Emberá, affirms that both groups have adopted many Spanish words that did not exist in the lexicon of either. Yet, despite their intermingling and intermarrying, each group proudly clung to traditions that they perceived to be uniquely Emberá or uniquely Wounaan.

Villa Caleta is situated near the end of the long road to Yaviza and downstream from Nuevo Vigia, about six hours by dugout from anywhere. With the exception of a half-dozen villages snuggled deep in the rainforest and cloaked by their remoteness, communities such as Villa Caleta are touched—some may call it slapped—by modernity.

Along with education, mandated by the Panamanian government, came the trappings of social and technological awareness: Nike sneakers, cell phones, propane stoves and lanterns, concrete for game courts, and Wilson basketballs.

Like many things brought into the rainforest, basketballs are short-lived, so precious in the sight of children—both sexes—and young men. So, too, are the less-long-lived pastel helium-strength balloons that withstand a lung full of air and volleying, but not sticks and stones, and rooster peckings. Intact only for a few hours of raucous play (some children miraculously make theirs last three days), one by one the bolsas that the photographer brought in by the bags-full pop, and the game-players’ themselves burst into squeals and laughter. Roundup for limp, kiss-me pink, pearly blue, and witch-brew green latex carcasses continues until the mist-filled treetop canopy soaks up sunset.

Cement has transformed the rainforest. Dugout-born bags of the gray powder, mixed with mud straight onto the ground, also turn once minnow-slick dirt paths into safe walkways for grandfathers, grandmothers and mothers-to-be.

But the concrete ball courts hold a special meaning that needs no translation and which transcends time. If we listen, we can still hear the cheers, roars, and scuffling of pre-Columbian ball-court players.

But in this new age, children consider themselves lucky to have a real ball, even as hoops go netless. Rules of the game are ubiquitous, and it’s unisex—until puberty culls the girls from the boys.

In Villa Caleta, as in many villages, the alcalde orchestrates “community improvements.” A blue solar-powered telephone booth gawks perpetually at an adjacent soccer field (ball improvised as needed). Cement blocks, holding up a rusty corrugated tin roof, define a place of elementary-school learning, striped in the same reflex blue as the phone booth. Orderly arrangements of cement blocks form four walls here, there—new community-use structures that are supplanting airy pole-stilt and palm-frond-crowned ceremonial roundhouses, perhaps because they appear modern . . . or safer.

Fear is a devilish slave driver. It cracks its whip in villages perilously close to Colombian borders and the jungle routes of rifle-shouldered marauders. Fear is reinforced by the unknown as well as by experience.

A cement-block “medical” building symbolizes hopefulness and security. Its walls are clean and appear freshly painted. Its broken electric generator was long worn out before being donated by a non-profit agency that must have thought some shamanic ceremony could heal it. The building’s medical supply shelves are cobwebbed and bare. No refrigeration, no penicillin, no antivenin.

In their next dance they mimic the spastic rodent hop of the ñece, a nocturnal-to-early-dawn creature—a dead-ringer for a streamlined rat on steroids. Ñece, fried and lightly salted, is served much like pork. Except for their distinctly porcine noses, skinny Darién pigs bear little resemblance to the overfed porkers marketed in the US.

Gathering—as they frequently do for ceremonies, speeches, and important events—under roof of a slightly cooler, shady concrete-block community center, villagers catch up on news and gossip, breastfeed babies and relax as they watch dancers perform ceremonies threatened by time. Someone who remembers what they symbolize must teach dances to each successive generation. Like language, rituals evolve, and sometimes disappear. Sometimes both are relearned—with broad interpretive strokes, their original meanings lost.

Not unlike many of the world’s remote and fragile places, the selva, or rainforest, is changing. It is shrinking. What remains is sought after by more people for more reasons than can be easily understood. In the jungle—always a mysterious place, where the polarities of abundance and the potential for instant death coexist—danger doesn’t have to be found, it is everywhere.

The rainforest threatens and is threatened. Creatures with zero to umpteen legs hide, live, hunt, kill, and are killed here. Those who venture into the jungle chance encounters with the feared Fer-de-lance (Bothrops lanceolatus) pit vipers, big, irritable, fast, and perfectly marked to blend into leaf litter on the forest floor. Antivenin (also interchangeably called antivenom) may or may not save a life if administered in time. But the Fer-de-lance shares the list of Panama’s poisonous snakes with twenty other species.

The Darién Gap earned its fearsome image. Among the deadliest killers are biped guerrillas armed to the teeth with high-powered weapons. The Gap is a corridor for criminal activity and cartels—a route for illicit drug smuggling and human trafficking. Animals and humans aren’t the only threat to life as the Wounaan and Emberá have known it. Asphalt, ribboning the length of the Darién, is proposed to connect the last road leading into the rainforest with Colombia, may be feared more.

As the spiny chunga palm withdraws deeper into the rainforest, retreating up cloud-shrouded mountainsides, the chunga-palm gatherers must cover greater distances to get it. And the farther they go, the greater the danger. But it is a risk villagers so far are willing to take. Chunga palm-fiber hösig-di baskets have become the primary income source for many families.

Without this cottage industry, the Wounaan’s forward economic momentum would screech to a halt. The infusion of many hundreds of thousands of dollars annually into the Darién from the sale of craft and folk art empowers these indigenous peoples and shouts loudly to their non-native government that they have a right to be acknowledged, heard, and their lands and ways protected.

Christianized by missionaries decades ago, the Wounaan—like many indigenous peoples who yet walk a cultural tightrope—meld traditional spiritual practices with their adopted faith as circumstances warrant.

Doubling the spiritual whammy, the power of this shaman to protect chunga gatherers until they return safely to the village is bolstered by a cluster of holy women and initiates, or apprentices. The walk between worlds is made particularly poignant in the contrast created by the shaman’s undyed loincloth and the angel-white parumas of the bare-breasted holy women and the Western hip baggy shorts worn by the teenage boys.

A PEOPLE ON THE RISE: A RAINFOREST ON THE BRINK

NATIVE DESIGN: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE DARIEN RAINFOREST

From the Archives

Welcome Dance and Dance for Protection

Rivers: The Source of Life

Village Life

The Chicken That Strayed for Breakfast

Ball Games at Villa Caleta

Ceremony

Diversity

Weaving Art is an Extended Family Affair

The Canoe Builder

Extracting and Boiling Cane Syrup

Washing Chunga and Laundry in the River

Pounding Rice

The Harvester

Weaver with her Baby

Chunga Spines

Cutting Palm Fronds

Cocobolo and Tagua: The Raw Materials for 3-Dimensional Artistry

Achiote and Chunga Colors

A Girl and her Basket

Cocobolo Wood Carving

Jagua Juice and Body Painting

From the Rainforest to the World Stage