Emberá and Wounaan weavers hail from two tribes that once seamlessly populated Colombia’s Chocó river systems, a part of what the United States later carved up to establish Panama in 1903, and by 1914, the Panama Canal. Today’s Panamanian Emberá live in the Darien Gap. Like their tribal cousins in the Chocó rainforest, they are the most talented weavers in the world, creating vessels and ritual bird masks from the wilds of Panama, which claim over a thousand different species. Their medium is prized new fronds that sprout from the tops of impossibly tall, spikey black palms. For pigment, the artists rely on abundant seeds, fruits, insects, bark, leaves, mud and ash from the forest. While the black palm baskets take months to make and are astoundingly beautiful when finished, they’re soon put to work in daily life, holding what’s foraged from the forest, containing the day’s river catch, storing dry goods. The smallest baskets, the precise, truly minute hand and needlework called Hösig Di, require even more dexterity, and more specialized skills. Like other creatives in the rainforest, Hösig Di artists devote all of their designs to the botany that surrounds them. The tribes, along with the fauna, the flora and the rest of the ecosystem, are compromised as clear-cutting mining companies grab and corrode the soil, water and air; and armed militias rage through the jungle, targeting women to rape and patriarchs to kill. Indigenous tribes here face extinction. From their once-vibrant small communities of stilted houses along the rivers, tens of thousands have uprooted from their Pacific coastal jungle to landlocked cities already teeming with millions of unhoused residents. Widely regarded as world class, these artists gain the recognition they deserve while they continue to lose the resources they need to create.