Signs and Portents

Signs appeared yesterday in Paso Ancho advertising a property for sale. The property in question has been inhabited for years by a family with whom I am friends. The first sign I noticed was affixed in front of their vegetable garden, which is where they grow the food they need to survive. The parents are hardworking and deeply devoted to their children. The children are charming: whenever I walk by their home,

they start shouting my name with glee and circle around me so we can laugh and play together; as a volunteer I have also taught them in the local primary school, and know them to be excellent students. One of the boys, Isaiah, loves to talk with me about his hopes for the future of his life. One of the girls, Lized, has often helped me in my first efforts to learn the Guaymi language.

Around the corner from this family is another family with whom I am friends – again, hardworking parents and five delightful little children with the most beautiful smiles. These children I have cared for, with the parents’ permission, and a friend has, also with their permission, provided medical assistance to them. Whenever I walk by these children too, come running out with exuberant joy, hopping up and down in their happiness to see me.

A new house is being built across the calle from their home – and there couldn’t be a greater contrast between the vast proportions of the castle under construction, obviously to attract gringo money, and the simple shack put together from cobbled materials in which my friends live. The man in charge has expressed aloud his considerable distaste for my family of friends, saying the unsightly view of their house will be unacceptable across the road from the mansion he is overseeing construction of. He has put up metal fences right next to their home and has made it clear that his intention is to squeeze them out.

What these two families have in common is that they are Guaymi, Native American. What they now also have in common is that they are unwanted, and are being forced off the land that is home for them, where they have lived, poor but comfortable, raising their children for years. What is being used to get rid of them is not legal – I have been told that there is a law on the books in Panama forbidding forcible eviction of Native Americans who have lived on a property for a significant period of time, but the law is rarely if ever seriously enforced. What is being used to get rid of them is pure muscle: intimidation and threat.

What I am seeing right now, here in Panama, is the past repeating itself. Before this country became the land of Panama it was entirely Native American territory. Everywhere was home to the people who lived here. But now, like the Indians of North America, the Aborigines of Australia, the Tibetans of Tibet at the hands of the Chinese, and formerly the Jews and still the Romany and Muslims of Europe, and many other peoples, they are being expelled in such a manner that they will have no home anywhere. These local forces in Paso Ancho, and their equivalents in other communities throughout this land, just want these Indians gone. They don’t care about where they go, and they don’t care about the fact that – since the powers-that-be in every other Panamanian community is doing the same thing – there is no “where” where they can go. This is not their concern; they simply want these Indians gone. They simply want these Indians to disappear into thin air and never be seen, heard, or spoken of, again.

The term “Panamanians”, if you do not recall, refers to local people who claim to be of pure Spanish ancestry, though their features and coloration show clearly that most of them have plenty of Native American blood. Yet, in their quest to set themselves in a class of society separate from and unquestionably above the Native Americans, they refer to the latter as trash, as worthless people, and the Panamanians say the Indians are nothing but squatters who, when they see a piece of land not in active use, build their homes without permission or legal right.

Squatters on the land? An interesting proposal, considering the fact that these Guaymi once held this entire land, from ocean to ocean, from horizon to horizon. This entire land was home to them. They still have in their hearts and in their culture the understanding that this land is sacred, and that Creator has given to them the right to live in it and care for it. It was wrested from them by force. And now they have no real home. How can these good people ever feel a sense of “home” again? They are being thrown out of their properties like refuse – just as local Panamanians customarily throw their garbage over the fences that edge their properties – so rich gringos can come down here and dig in like potted plants into their estates, their transplanted plots, of Holland or the United States or whatever.

History is repeating itself here, even though many Americans would like just to forget the lessons taught by history. There are those in the United States – of European ancestry, of course – who say the past is gone, and it’s more than time for Native Americans to forget about whatever injustices were done and become mainstreamed as Americans. Bryan Fischer, a right-wingnut (already famous for such bons mots as his statements that Islam is Satanic and homosexuals are evil) recently said on his broadcast talk show: “Many Native Americans to this day continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity” and seeking to be assimilated into mainstream culture. He went on to say that the best thing Native American parents can do is “get their children off the reservation” such that they can become a part of “Christian culture”.

Put aside the fact that people have every right to worship, or not worship, exactly as they choose. Put aside the fact that the Native American spirituality is, as I detailed in my book The Circle of Life, a worthy and dependable path into the Sacred. What we have here is the final chapter in the efforts of political, economic, religious, and educational power in the United States to destroy Native American culture.

It was President Andrew Jackson who coined the term “Final Solution”, later adopted by the Nazis, who based and justified their genocidal war on Jews on the United States’ Indian policy. Jackson, despite a United States Supreme Court ruling that his action was unconstitutional, force-marched Eastern Native Americans out of their reservation lands, coveted by whites, in the Trail of Tears. In his time mission schools were established, sanctioned by United States government, where young Native Americans were caged, shorn of their hair, beaten if they spoke their own languages or worshipped as they had been taught, all with the objective of turning them into dark-skinned white folks, into Christians like the masters who beat and raped them while stealing their families’ land.

Most of the territories now comprising the United States and Canada were taken not by fair fight in war, but by treachery and deceit – deliberately false treaties that were immediately ignored, treaties that the whites intentionally had signed by Indians who did not represent the people whose land was stolen soon thereafter. Waves of white homesteaders poured into land that the United States government had formally recognized as sovereign to the Native Nations, and that government did absolutely nothing to stop them. Moreover, Christianity and alcohol became tools of subjugation; when, for instance, the whites realized Native Americans have a genetic difficulty with digesting alcohol, liquor was generously provided to them.

Now I am seeing it happen here. Land is being stolen before my eyes. Christianity is being used to destroy an ancient culture. Alcohol is being used to sap the indigenous people of their dignity and strength. The manager of a company that oversees the harvesting of onions and their sorting and packing in twine bags told me that his indigenous employees work the hardest of any – yet, at the end of the day, not only does he pay them their nine dollars for working from dawn to after dark, but he gives each of them a little plastic beaker of gin, colorless odorless and therefore extremely deceptive in its power to destroy, continuing and hastening their ultimate decline as a people.

I, together with some friends, am attempting to contact officials to see what, if anything, can be done to help my two family-friends. While the Guaymi people I know are almost universally dignified and proud, always dressed in clean clothes even if they don’t have a closet full of options, always holding their heads high, they are not likely to fight this unfair, illegal pressure to get rid of them – they will just quietly move on, and move on again, and again, until, as the prophet put it, “there is no more room left for them in the earth.”

Sometimes I wonder what the rich gringos who will be living in these castles under construction would say if they knew how their land had been acquired. Based on what I have seen in the rich gringos already living here, I doubt they will care. But I, at least, wonder deeply: how was the land that I am living on acquired? What horrible tragedies were written in the soil of this beautiful country that will never be told?