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"There is no Internet in the comarca, but here in Panama we have a website to sell our art around the world." Thus Tilicia Valdespino, the governor of the Embera-Wounaan Comarca, summed up the latest state of development in her Darien jungle constituency at a June 17 gathering at Panama City's Multicentro shopping mall.

Valdespino headed a delegation of Embera public officials, basket weavers, tagua nut carvers, musicians and dancers who came to the capital to promote http://www.emberanation.com and the Fundacion Amigos de Los Embera-Wounaan. The new website, created through the help of non-indigenous friends, is for the purpose of popularizing Embera culture and selling Embera art around the world.

The Embera-Wounaan Comarca, which includes two non-contiguous districts (Cemaco and Sambu) in parts of Darien province where the roads don't go, is home to some 17,000 people, mostly Embera with a Wounaan minority. The Embera and Wounaan speak distinct languages of the Chocoan linguistic family, and trace their roots back to the Amazon Basin. By contrast, all of Panama's other indigenous nations speak languages of the Chibchan family, which have their ancient origins on Colombia's central plateau. The comarca, which is semi-autonomous, was created in 1983.

It does not include all Embera and Wounaan communities. Some such villages outside the comarca have gained legal collective title to their lands, but these and other communities are still locked in frequent disputes with the government or with land invaders from the Interior. When asked by a diplomat about the status of Embera communities outside the comarca, Valdespino said "we are the owners of Panama. We are autochthonous. We were here before Columbus. We have a right to live in any part of Panama."

Judged in terms of dollars and cents of cash income per capita, the Embera Comarca is desperately poor. However, much of their economy is not about money earned but fish and shrimp caught, jungle fruits gathered, wild game hunted, pigs, chickens and ducks raised, and the vegetables they grow in their gardens. Measured in terms of child malnutrition rates and other non-monetary economic indicia, people in the comarca aren't as poor as the people in Ngobe country, but they are still on the whole much less prosperous than Panamanian society as a whole.

Since the Spanish Conquest, the Embera have traditionally defended their way of life by retreating to parts of the jungle too remote to attract much interest from the white invaders, all the while fighting --- and mostly winning --- centuries of little wars with the Kuna for control of the Darien.

But now the world economy is encroaching, the traditional semi-nomadic way of life is ever less of an option and the first generation of Embera students are at this country's universities. Like it or not, the cash economy is in Embera country to stay and the people in the comarca are acquiring business skills.

Here we have snake dancing, in the Embera style.

This little basket is not only pretty. It is so tightly woven that it will hold water.

At the Multicentro event the prices for the baskets were a bit higher than people here have known in the past. Embera baskets fetch high prices at art galleries in North America and Europe, and part of the new Embera business initiative is to say goodbye to the days when a weaver would spend a week making a basket and ask $10 for it, only to be beaten down on the price by some tourist who was told that it's the proper thing to do.

This toucan is carved from tagua nuts --- so-called vegetable ivory --- which is a relatively recent medium in Embera art.

The baskets get their colors from various natural dyes that Embera artisans collect from their surroundings.

Right about now a fair number of people are starting to buy Embera art for this year's Christmas presents.

Also in this section:
Business & Economy Briefs
Embera launch new effort to sell their art online
Rosas regime in public education approaches its end with scandals, protests
Former port workers want Hutchison Whampoa contract scrapped

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