Ancestral practices dating back 500 years are the essence of life for the 5,000 Wounaan people, an Amerindian group 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 put it to work for trapping, carrying, and containing. At home, the basket becomes a closet, a cupboard, a jewelry case, a toolbox, a doghouse, a chicken coop, and at 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 given its spiked, unclimbable trunks. Toucans and other wildlife propagate their seeds in thick forest where slow growing werregue sprout only a handful of new leaves each year. Wounaan communities once recklessly cut them down 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 crown of the soaring trees, taking only the youngest, freshest shoots coveted as the most pliable, and most accepting of color. Women and girls then sun dry the fiber to completely strip it of color, and smooth the surface. Pigments are distillates from shredded, crushed, boiled and dried insects, plants, berries, and bark, all abundant and nearby. The swamp makes for a richly hued green while achiote creates yellow and orange. For the deep black color, the fiber is buried in the river’s mud for a couple of days. Just as they did under their mothers’ and grandmothers’ watchful eyes, artists build tight, complex, often three-dimensional vessels using the single-rod coiled technique. Exacting and precise, the artist can take months to complete a work. Always beginning with the center knot, she designs and weaves spontaneously, a fusion of skill, imagination and deep ancestral knowledge. Anthropologists rely on the continuing history of these baskets where the environment has become the most embattled rainforest in the world: 750,000 migrants, gang “guided” or trafficked, will push through the jungle this year. The Wounaan community has long known violent displacement. When the US carved Panama out of Colombia in 1903, it intruded and divided the community, leaving it to reckless governance on both sides of the border, where poachers, miners, ranchers, land grabbers and guerrilla warfare take the upper and abusive hand. Gangs trafficking humans, narcotics and guns route through their forests trampling on constellations of Wounaan and other indigenous life. Emblematic of cultural identity’s struggle for survival, these woven pieces are ever more prized by global collectors, and set the bar for excellence in basketry. From the Papayo Wounaan community on Colombia’s Pacific Coast, we’re showing elegant and sleek geometrics by master Crucelina Chocho, along with several works of her disciples.