Emberá people

The rainforest rivers of Colombia's Chocó region are the homeland of the Emberá, a riverine Indigenous people who also live across the border in eastern Panama. Older writings call them the Chocó or Katío Indians. Together with the closely related Wounaan they form the Emberá-Wounaan group, and today they number roughly 240,000, about 196,000 of them in Colombia and some 52,000 in Panama.

Emberá is less a single language than a chain of related varieties, spoken by perhaps 100,000 people. A northern group includes Catío and Northern Emberá, the variety used in Panama's Darién; a southern group includes Chamí, Baudó and Eperara, or Épera, spoken along rivers of the Pacific coast. With Wounaan they are the only surviving members of the Chocó language family, which has no proven link to other families in the Americas. The word ẽberá can mean a person, a man or an Indigenous person, depending on context.

Traditionally the Emberá did not live in villages. Extended families built round, open-sided houses on stilts, with palm-thatch roofs and floors of palm bark, scattered along the riverbanks, often hundreds of metres apart and out of sight of one another. A notched log served as a ladder and could be turned to show the household was busy or away. Fish and plantains were staples, and rivers carried daily life: fishing, washing and travel by dugout canoe. Making a canoe was an important skill for men, and in older practice the dead were buried in canoes. Ethnographers describe a strongly egalitarian society with no chiefs or councils, in which the shaman, the jaibaná, held a special place as a healer with deep knowledge of plants and animals.

In the late 18th century, in a migration prompted by the Spanish, Emberá began moving from the Chocó into what is now Panama's Darién, which had been Guna country; the move involved conflict that pushed the Guna towards the Caribbean coast. Through the 19th century the Darién was home almost only to Emberá, Guna and the darienitas, descendants of people who had escaped slavery, who tended to live in port towns while the Emberá lived upriver.

Panama's independence from Colombia in 1903 changed little at first. From the 1950s missionaries and then the government of Omar Torrijos encouraged the Emberá to gather in villages to gain schools and health posts; the first formal Emberá town was founded on the Río Balsas in 1963. The Pan-American Highway brought settlers, logging and cattle ranching into the Darién. In 1985 about a quarter of Panamanian Emberá still lived in the old dispersed pattern, but village life is now the norm, and by 2010 more than a quarter lived in urban districts of Panama City.

Panama's first National Indian Congress in 1968 encouraged the Emberá to organise politically. In November 1983 the National Assembly created the Comarca Emberá-Wounaan, a collectively owned territory of about 4,384 square kilometres in two separate districts, Sambú and Cémaco, with its capital at Unión Chocó. It is governed by a general congress under an elected cacique general, with regional and local caciques beneath. Among recent debates within the community has been the campaign to end female genital cutting, which became widely discussed after a girl's death in 2007.

Our 1492 map draws an approximate territory labelled Emberá/Eperara/Épera in western Colombia, beside other Emberá groups and the Wounaan; the Darién lands where many Emberá live today came later. See also Colombia and Panama.