For more than 500 years now a tide of European conquest has washed over the Americas.

Each century, each decade, each year, the native inhabitants of the "New World" have surrendered themselves, their land, and their culture ... until in many corners of these continents, the former vibrant and varied human experiment has all but vanished.

This rippling tide of conquest and change has yet ended.  It is like a stone dropped in a pool of still water, the percussive wave pressing forward, persistently seeking the outermost hidden edge of its confines.

Deep in the tropical Darien Province of Panama these interminable waves of change are still flowing into silent swamplands, and up myriad rivers and streams, even into the final recesses of an ancient and truly forbidding forest.

There are tides have finally reached the Wounaan.

The Wounaan Indians are a small group of some 7,000 souls who have made a splash on the international scene because of their incomparably beautiful and fine basketry.  Wounaan baskets are among the most intricately woven that have ever been produced by human hands.  And the finest of them, sought by collectors, can fetch extraordinary prices.

Their home, the Darien Gap, lies at the tip of a narrow land bridge that rose from the ocean floor some 5 million years ago and suddenly connected the hitherto separate floating continents of North and South America.  These two giant landmasses, over many millions of years, had evolved distinctive life-forms that had remained for eons isolated from one another by miles of open sea.

That is where the Wounaan abide today in their jungle vastness in this rich orchestral tapestry of odd life forms...

...along with re, blue, and green macaws;

...and giant harpy eagles and brightly variegated poison dart frogs;

...and mountain lions and jaguars, ocelots, margays, and jaguarondis;

...and giant tapirs and miniature deer, and giant anteaters;

...and howler monkeys and white-faced capuchins, and spider monkeys, and two-toed sloths and even three-toed sloths;

...and a thousand different species of ants and bees, and 990 species of birds.

...And God only knows how many plants and trees and insects never yet counted.

This is where the Wounaan live.  Like many, if not most, cultures found hidden in the tropical rainforests of south and Central America, the Wounaan are a riverine people.  In a land that might receive anywhere from 10 to 30 feet of rain in a season, terrestrial traffic is often inconvenient.

The natives' open-air conical thatch-roofed houses, or "tambos", are built high upon the riverbanks, and then higher yet on stilts way above a native man's head, to guard against the inevitable massive winter floods.

Until a mere 35 years ago, nearly all Wounaan still lived in small extended family groups, their modest thatch huts huddled in the bend of a great river.  Many were still fishing with wooden spears, and hunting with bows, blowguns and poison darts.

From time to time, they would simply place their family and a handful of possessions in a dugout canoe and quietly pole up or down river, closely hugging the bank and avoiding swift currents, passing neighboring families, until they reached yet another suitable verdant river-bend.  They were aquatic vagabonds.

The men were excellent woodcarvers.  After all they had to be.  Every man's livelihood in the rainforest depended upon it.  He must be able to carve a light and swift canoe with the simplest of tools to move his family along the rivers.  Nor would his children be fed and survive if he could not make a straight and accurate blowgun or bow.  There were trees to be felled and thatch houses to be built.  A machete was a Wounaan's best friends.

The women, on the other hand, were accomplished gardeners and basket makers.  Every imaginable burden basket was formed, whether to haul fifty pounds of yams and bananas with a head tumpline, or a few handfuls of sweet forest fruits.  A stiff wicker basket the size of a large suitcase could be woven in a day; a fruit cup from a banana leaf in less than a minute; or a complicated fish trap in a few hours.

And then of course, occasionally the women would weave with a bone needle and fine palm fibers a few small trinket baskets with lids.  In these they would keep their simple finery, bits of beaded necklaces and earrings, and silvery pendants cut and pounded from the soft, shiny metal of nickel-based coins.

At least three-fourths of the Wounaan continue to live much as their forefathers have, by hunting and gathering in the rainforest.

The rainforest ahs succored them.  It has given them their art and their way of life.  It has made them all that they are, and it ahs protected them from outside world.  Until now!

Until now, because only now are the Wounaan finally experiencing the full thrust of modern hegemony.

The Darien Province of eastern Panama was always the most impenetrable, most dangerous, most remote, and most intractable region of the country.   Until a mere 25 years ago, over 90 percent of its rainforest was still intact.

Today, a generation later, it is close to half gone.

Then, there were perhaps 15,000 souls, mostly indigenous natives, scattered over 7 thousand square miles of jungle.  Today, there are perhaps eighty thousand non-Indians, and more arriving every day.

How did this happen?  Some might say benign neglect; a matter of eventuality.  Others may conclude through a national policy of incremental exploitation.

But whichever it is, nothing has had a greater direct impact upon all the native people's of the region than the Panamanian government's decision in the 1990's to seek funding from the World Bank and its' sister institution, the International Development Bank, to pave a major highway into the heart of the Darien rainforest.

Aside from the purported rationale of speeding the local populace's access to national markets, this decision also provide the obverse and obvious consequence of guaranteeing access to the Darien's abundant natural resources.

And it simultaneously inspired the profoundest secondary effect of attracting wave upon wave of landless peasants from over western Panama and Central America to seek free land.

Hordes of homesteaders or "colonos" (or appropriately, colonizers) now blanket the 150 miles of roadway with fincas and ranchos, decimating the surrounding rainforest and converting it to pasture land; and what were once endless forests and native lands suddenly became squatter's rights.

As the Wounaan watch their beloved forests hacked and burned; as their precious streams are fouled by cows and sheep; as their historic hunting grounds are decimated by packs of hound-dogs and shotguns; as their women and children are intimidated by threatening strangers in the forest; as every valley and village becomes increasingly hemmed in and isolated, ...they could quietly disappear, just as so many peoples have done before.  No one would blame.

They are, after all, vastly outnumbered.  They have no weapons to fight an overpowering modern world.  They have barely the clothes on their backs.  No formal education, no resources, no voice.  These events, played out over and over, are the very essence of conquest.  And the Wounaan and their rainforests are finally nothing, but the next to be the conquered!

We say "until now!" because the Conquest does not stop!  Not until the last river is explored, the last forest is exploited, and last native people is subjugated.

Not until the wave of change begun over 500 years ago by the arrival of a foreign race has spent its course; not until the New World is fully known to its furthest edge; not until the last rippling wave has lapped over the tiny Wounaan community and at last downed out yet another human experiment.

But the Wounaan are not so pliant!

They are not yet ready to leave this stage, or be driven from the rainforest.

They demand a second act.  They demand the right to survive.

They beseech you to take another look.

"See what beauty we give you. ... it comes from us, this naked river people ... here, take it, admire the hard-working hand of primitive man ... see what wonder our forest provides ... take it, as a token, a gift of survival ... and watch it, remember it, and remember us ... and leave us be ... here in our native land ... so that we may yet bring you more wonder and beauty!"

We might conclude that Conquest and Change are inevitable.  Some might justify it historically, militarily, technologically, or even on religious grounds.

The old must make way for the new; the stronger will vanquish the weaker.  Others will claim such an outcome may be sad or tragic, and then turn to a more momentary and pressing need.

But it seems that there is till the larger truth to which we must all bear witness.  It is not only weaker or simpler or primitive human cultures that have suffered the ignominy of subjugation and decimation, and not just in the new world.

Nature itself seems to be on the run.  Even the most rudimentary measure of world changes in a single lifetime all appear to point in the same direction.

Forests generally, but especially in the tropics, are disappearing at an alarming rate.

Faunal populations of all types on land, sea and air, are under pressure and faltering.

Water everywhere has increasingly become a commodity with scarcity value.

The very air we breathe is fouled with industrial particulates that may be invisible, but nonetheless measurable.

And if nature itself, of which we as humans are an inextricable part, is somehow under assault, are we not also?

The Wounaan beseech us ... and perhaps what we must now ask ourselves is ... are we ultimately not all Wounaan?