Ancestral practices dating back 500 years are the essence of life for the 5,000 Wounaan people, an Amerindian group living along the Lower San Juan River straddling Panama and Colombia. Perched in stilted open-air houses made of wood, expert weavers from this cross-border community create thickly-walled, water-tight vessels, with skills passed down from one generation to the next. Wounaan hunters and fishermen use the basket as an everyday vessel to trap, carry, hold, and contain. At home, it is a closet, a cupboard, a jewelry case, a toolbox, a doghouse, a chicken coop, and always instrumental in births, weddings, and funerals. The artists’ medium is a distinctively local yet dwindling supply of matured wild werregue, a tall palm quite difficult to access. With spiked, unclimbable trunks, it’s found in thickly forested areas, and while toucans and other wildlife propagate their seeds, the slow growing werregue sprout only a handful of new leaves each year. Communities once recklessly cut down tall werregue to harvest a few leaves, but today they plant and carefully cultivate the palms in protected areas. Hoisting long poles topped by big half-moon blades, men slash through the top of the soaring trees, taking only the youngest, freshest palm leaves. Women and girls then sun dry the fiber to completely strip it of color. They add pigment by shredding, crushing, boiling and drying some of the abundant nearby insects, plants, berries, bark and moss. Achiote and puchama make hues of yellow and orange. For the deep black color, they must bury the fiber in the river’s mud for a couple of days. Just as they did under their mothers’ and grandmothers’ watchful eyes, the women build tight, complex, often three-dimensional pieces using the single-rod coiled technique. Punctuating precise work with elegant geometrics, each artist can take months to complete a piece. She always begins with the center knot and a spontaneous design from her own vivid imagination, replete with deep ancestral knowledge. Like so many indigenous people, the Wounaan suffer from violent displacement. Before Panama separated from Colombia in 1903, they moved freely back and forth. Today they are bifurcated, with people on both sides of the border are restricted and endangered by poachers, miners, ranchers, land grabbers and guerrilla warfare. Abusive human and drug traffickers route through the jungle and threaten the small constellations of Wounaan life. Weavers use their baskets to heighten their cultural identity and their struggle for survival. Their work, ever more prized by global collectors, sets the bar for excellence. From the Papayo Wounaan community on Colombia’s Pacific Coast, we’re showing a striking organic shaped basket of master Crucelina Chocho, along with works of her disciples.