Guna

The Guna, who call themselves Dule, the people, speak a Chibchan language and trace a migration from Central America into South America centuries before the conquest. At European contact they lived around the Gulf of Uraba in northern Colombia, where the expeditions of Ojeda and Balboa met them in 1500 and 1501.

Their society comprised ranked chiefdoms with matrilocal marriage, farming maize and coconuts alongside fishing and trade. Slavers and wars drove migration west through the Darien, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they occupied lands emptied by the destroyed Cueva chiefdoms, absorbing Cueva fugitives and settling Caribbean shores and the San Blas islands.

They kept councils and trade networks, trading coconuts, canoes and cloth with Spanish, Scottish and Dutch visitors; by the early nineteenth century they held the coast from the Darien to the Isthmus of Panama, unsubdued by any colonial power.