Description:
In the years following its conquest by the Spanish, the Central American region called Panama saw a series of invasions as England, France, Holland, and other European powers sought to control it. The indigenous Kuna Indians, who had already suffered terribly under the Spanish, found themselves caught in the middle of these contending European ambitions, and they suffered still further. Their difficulties did not lessen when the United States engineered Panama's secession from Colombia in 1903. The central government waged a slow war of attrition on the Kuna and other indigenous peoples as it attempted to develop the country's Atlantic coast, while the Kuna led a powerful resistance movement. Enter the ne'er-do-well American explorer Richard Marsh, who had heard tales of a lost tribe of "white Indians" who lived somewhere in Kuna territory, and who was determined to locate its members and secure his fame. A sometime diplomat who had earlier pressed for the United States to annex Panama, Marsh found his grail in the form of a few albino Kunas. He also helped organize a Kuna uprising, appealing for American "protection from the imposition and brutality of the Panama Gov't," as he put it in a telegram to the State Department. The American government did not extend that protection, but the rebellion bore fruit nonetheless in securing the Kuna a measure of autonomy in their homeland. James Howe, an anthropologist who has worked among the Kuna for many years, recounts this strange story: a historical sideshow, to be sure, but a fascinating one all the same. --Gregory McNamee
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