Ancestral practices and patterns dating back 500 years are everyday fiber for the 5,000 Wounaan people, an indigenous community straddling Panama and Colombia. In international fine basketry, they set the standard for excellence.Local weavers prize matured wild werregue, the tall palm with unclimbable trunks that grows in thickly forested areas. While toucans and other wildlife propagate its seeds, this thorny palm sprouts only a few new leaves each year. Tribesmen understand the premium on werregue, and no longer hastily chop it down for fronds; instead, they carefully slash through individual leaves hanging from the soaring trees, using long poles topped by half-moon blades. For color, tribeswomen extract deep pigments from Mother Nature, shredding, crushing, boiling, and drying some of the abundant insects, plants, berries, and bark. Wounaan live in open-air stilted houses under thatched roofs along rivers of the Pacific Coast. Their part of the world is fiber rich, providing raw materials for their striking basketry within arm’s reach. Essential to Wounaan life, the basket is an everyday vessel — it carries, holds, and contains as a closet, a cupboard, a suitcase, a jewelry case, a toolbox, a doghouse, a chicken coop, a fish trap. It’s instrumental in births, weddings, and funerals. Wounaan women have been weaving the smaller-scaled Hösig Di baskets for centuries, using a fine needle for much of the work. Fauna and flora, mixed with their reverence for rain forest spirits, inspire their designs. Natural dyes supply the striking pigment for these miniatures. Hösig Di artists create baskets revered for their artistry and exactitude. Before Panama separated from Colombia in 1903, the tribe moved freely back and forth. Today lives on both sides of the border are far more restricted. Those in the Darien Gap are encroached by poachers, miners, ranchers, land grabbers, gunrunners, and now, increasing disruption from abusive human traffickers moving desperate refugees through the jungle.We show off the Panamanian Wounaan zest for earth’s treasures in some of our smaller pieces called Hösig Di, all inspired by their beloved and fragile rainforest. Only the supplest emerging fronds atop the sacred black palm tree are harvested for this fine work. Hösig Di baskets have become increasingly complex, and some of these pieces take over a year to make. Tribesmen are spiritually intent about their cultivation, and only harvest their leaves during full moons, when they believe the fiber is strongest. Smooth, firm, tight and dense, and all created in the miniature, their works are known worldwide as jewels of Panama’s Darien jungle. Tribeswomen incorporate fauna and flora into design, paying homage to the very botanicals that provide them with their astounding colors. Fruit, seeds, saw dust and swamp oil provide the deep indigos, the gradation of reds, oranges and yellows, the rich green. Their finely done anthropomorphics and zoomorphics are coveted by collectors who appreciate precision and detail, all hand-needled.