The Indians of Kuna Yala
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The Republic of Panama
The Indians of Kuna Yala, Panama
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Source: Richard Holledge / Times Online
An independent island society off the coast of Panama retains its traditional culture in idyllic surroundings
Surprising place, Panama. A few minutes from the city with its shiny new 21st century skyscrapers the plane is flying over empty rainforest.
The only sign of life below is the Trans American Highway, which in various forms starts in Alaska and comes to a stop 110 miles from the border with Colombia before continuing to the tip of the continent.
It’s a cramped, knees-up-to-the-chin, 50-minute flight which ends on a grass strip right on the water’s edge. A short walk and a boat trip to the island of Uaguinega and the tourist finds he has taken a journey into the past.
This is Kuna Yala, an autonomous state of Indians who originally settled in the Darien area of Panama after fleeing Colombia in the 1600s and then left the disease of the jungle for the sea and the islands in the 18th century. Life has been carefully - and tenaciously - frozen in time. It’s as much of a contrast with Panama City as you could imagine.
Kuna Yala is a strip of land and string of 365 islands that stretch 200 miles along the Caribbean coast. For the tourist the lure of the islands is irresistible, particularly as there are few places to stay, keeping it untouched, uncommercial and as soothing as you could hope with clear seas and palm-lined beaches and always in the distance the misty ridge of the mainland mountains like a barrier to the outside world.
Anyone expecting the bland luxury of a Four Seasons-style resort will be disappointed. The few lodges on the islands are made of the local materials, thatched in palm with walls of bamboo and shutters which are simply planks of wood.
When the winds gets up at night the cabin creaks and billows like a yacht under full sail. The electricity – in the form of a 40 watt bulb - is switched on at six and off at eleven, the facilities are simple with water warmed by solar power.
Food is invariably fish or lobster with tamales and plantain. And don’t expect anything as 20th century as a television. But that’s the appeal, even if Dolphin Lodge, which is one of the biggest resorts with 11 cabins, costs £194 a night per person. Tour operator Journey Latin America offers a two-night three-day package from Panama City including flights and transfers for £372 per person.
The Kuna have fought, literally, to keep things simple. In 1925 an armed group attacked the Panamanian police who had been involved in the violent suppression of Kuna cultural practices by the government and in 1930 they were granted their independence rather in the way Scotland has its own administration.
Ever since, the Kunu Yala – 72,000 of them - have been determined to preserve their traditional life. The islands are tightly packed with one-roomed houses of bamboo, smoke spiraling from an open fire. Small shops sell crisps, biscuits, washing powder and tins of meat. Simple cafes serve Coke to the few tourists, each island has a school and a square for basketball.
The men work on their fishing nets, the waters alive with boats struggling against the waves with outboard engines, paddles and scrawny sails. One of their biggest catches is lobsters, most of which end up on tables in Colombia and Panama City.
Each island has its own identity. Utupu a stomach–turning one and a half hours through a heavy swell demands a $4 dollar entry fee and is like a little bamboo Venice with bridges over lagoons and houses built around inlets.
No pictures are allowed unless you pay one dollar – then it’s not a problem. The men of Utupu provided a spectacular side show. Our guide took us to a yard where a tapir – a sort of pig with a long nose - had been caught. Its head sat in a washing up bowl while the hunters enthusiastically hacked its body to bloody pieces in a dug out canoe. Well, that was the village’s supper looked after.
It seems a civilized and gentle society (unless you are a tapir) though it is hard to tell after only a few days. Co-operative labor is still the norm - they all take it in turns to sweep the dusty lanes, for example - but there is no escaping the fact that they are poor, relying on the 30,000 plus who live in Panama City to send home money.
They have over-fished their waters and increasingly have to turn to tourism to make a living. The biggest source of income, after the few lodges, is the sale of the traditional embroidery which enlivens the costumes of Kuna women.
Known as molas, they consist of a patterned blue cotton wrapped skirt, red and yellow headscarf, arm and leg beads, gold nose rings and earrings and the many layered and finely sewn blouses with patterns of flowers, sea animals and birds. Brightly-colored leggings complete the ensemble. It is striking how few dress in western style even when they move to Panama City.
As the tourists stroll on the island of Achutupu, right across the water from Dolphin Lodge, they are soon caught up in a non stop display of wares. It’s all very gentle with women, grannies and children gathering outside their houses holding up their embroidery. There is no attempt to haggle or harass and everything seems to cost five dollars.
Our guide took us to meet his family, as he probably does with every group of tourists, to entice us to buy molas and good luck charms. His young bride and new baby lolled on a hammock, a talking doll beside her, still in its wrapping. It was her christening present, reciting, at a push of its stomach, 'Have a Nice Day' in an American accent.
The mola is the most striking symbol of the Kuna’s independent spirit but maybe the most admirable feature of their society is simply that it has survived with much of its unique cultural identity intact. Despite the talking doll.
YALA, Kuna
Panama (CNN) -- Hunched over a campfire in eastern Panama, Embera tribesman Raul Mezua chanted a
KUNA song his grandfather taught him when he was a boy.
KUNA song his grandfather taught him when he was a boy.
Embera tribesman Raul Mezua sings traditional songs over a campfire in Panama.
Story
By David Ariosto
CNN NEWS
The words are memorized, passed down from an aging generation to a new group of tribal youths.
"The song means a lot to me," Mezua told CNN, the fire's dying embers splashing a red glow across his face. "But I don't know what it means."
It's not just the song but their language and culture that Mezua and his tribe fear losing as deforestation from logging and cattle ranching threatens the rainforest that is part of their identity.
But recent trends could usher in a welcome reversal for Mezua and his tribe. Rural workers are migrating toward cities in search of jobs, and forests are re-emerging where now abandoned farms and cattle ranches once flourished, according to a 2009 report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
Such "secondary" forests in the tropics can rapidly grow in areas once cleared for logging and cattle ranching if left alone, said Joseph Wright, senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. "After about 20 years (of being left alone) the forest will be about 60 feet tall," he said.
Deforestation and re-growth in Panama may reflect a snapshot of a bigger picture involving rainforests throughout Central America. With more than three-quarters of people across the region now living in urban centers, the United Nations expects rural farming and population growth -- the usual culprits behind deforestation to dwindle.
Some call forest re-growth a victory in the climate crisis. Trees consume carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat within the Earth's atmosphere. "Biology is the only way we can remove carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere," Wright said. "There's no way to do it faster than to let tropical forests re-grow on abandoned land."
Others say threats to primary forest, or original jungle, is the real issue and that its loss can cause irreparable damage to the surrounding ecosystem.
"Places in Colombia, places in Central America, places in Mexico, places in many of the Andean countries are the last bunkers, the last bastions of hundreds of unique species in each place," Lider Sucre, director of Panama's Museum of Biodiversity, told CNN.
"If you replant 10 times as much forest but you lose these last large pockets, you lose a huge amount of biodiversity forever and ever."
The value of primary and secondary forests is a debate heating up within the environmental community as new woodlands begin to wrap themselves around barbed-wire fences that still dot cattle-driven landscapes across Panama.
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"We have to make that distinction, that fundamental difference, between re-growth and the original forest," Sucre said. "Re-growth is only a shadow in terms of the diversity of life within it."
In places like Panama's Kuna Yala, a semi-autonomous tribal region and the country's largest tract of rainforest, new growth can bridge gaps between the remaining pockets of pristine old growth forest.
"Because of its size, because of the health of the entire ecosystem, it has an extraordinary potential to serve as a kind of a Noah's Ark -- a place that can safeguard biodiversity and the full complement of species," Sucre said.
Recently, a scientific expedition unearthed 10 new amphibious species on both sides of Panama's mountainous border with Colombia, according to Conservation International, an environmental advocacy group based in Washington.
At least 25 percent of the area is being deforested, putting the rich biodiversity in jeopardy, the group said. Across the region, the United Nations says tropical rainforest land is still being lost at an alarming pace.
More than 7 million hectares of forests were destroyed globally each year between 2000 and 2005, the U.N. says.
Slightly less than one-fifth of the world's carbon dioxide emissions stems from the effects of deforestation in poor countries, the U.N. said -- a figure comparable to the total output of the United States and China.
For indigenous tribes -- who rely on the rainforest for everything from medicine and food to homes and artwork -- the reality behind the figures is staggering. "The rainforest is something we depend on," Kuna tribesman Toniel Edman said, standing beside a thatched hut made from rainforest wood.
"The problem is actually with the farmers and ranchers," Edman said. "They invade our land and deforest it for their own gain." But here, cattle is king. "We don't have another way to support ourselves," rancher Oriel Gonzalez said, overlooking cow pastures where rainforest once dominated.
"We go looking for work elsewhere but there isn't any. We don't know how to do anything else." He added that loans for raising cows are just easier to come by than financing for crops or other livestock. "It's partly tradition. The banker is used to lending money for cattle -- that's what he's always done," said Wright, the Smithsonian scientist.
Wright noted that for lenders, there is inherently less risk with raising cattle. "We have droughts. We have plagues of microbes. Plagues of insects. You can have a 100 percent loss with a row crop," he said. "That just never happens with cattle. You can always get the cattle to market and sell them."
For lawmakers, striking a balance between preservation and the "need for people to grow the land" comes with "difficulties," Panama President Martin Torrijos told CNN.
Torrijos highlighted his country's recent successes in combating deforestation; Panama recorded drops in rainforest loss during the 2000 to 2005 period, the U.N. reported. But he also recognized a brewing conflict between indigenous tribes and the ranchers, farmers and loggers who encroach on tribal land. "Every now and then, issues occur and we deal with it," Torrijos said.
Part of the problem is "unclear ownership of the land," said U.N. Forestry Officer Merilio Morell. "By law, the indigenous own the comarca (tribal district). But exercising ownership is not easy," he said. "They cannot patrol ever single meter of land ... and the borders aren't marked."
Scientists say efforts to promote carbon trading -- a process intended to get companies that exceed their allowed CO2 emissions to buy credits from groups that pollute less -- could provide the mechanism needed to slow deforestation.
Earlier this month, delegates from donor and developing countries around the world met outside Panama City to address carbon trading amid the fallout from a global recession. Environmental consequences from the economic crunch are still uncertain.
But U.N. projections show a growing global demand for rainforest products like fuel and timber. That demand could thwart the resurgence of the rainforest.
