The Wounaan Land Tenure Project is at the heart of Native Future’s mission.   Through the Wounaan Land Tenure Project, Native Future seeks to help three Wounaan communities gain legal title to their lands.  Together, Native Future and these three communities have developed a two-year project plan to achieve this goal.  (Download a pdf copy of the project plan here).

The three communities that are the focus of the Wounaan Land Tenure Project are Río Hondo, Platanares, and Majé-Chimán.  (Río Hondo and Platanares share the area to the left; Majé-Chimán is to the right).  They are located in the District of Chimán along rivers that flow into the Pacific Ocean – Río Hondo, Río Platanares, and Río Majé.  For generations, these three communities have claimed, conserved, and used as communal lands the forests within the watersheds of their respective map of deforestation in wounaan areas rivers.

Much as their ancestors before them, the 1,000 Wounaan who live in these communities live a largely traditional lifestyle that is heavily dependent on the land.  They hunt game in the upland forests, gather fruits and medicinal herbs, plant small fields of rice and plantains, make handcrafts out of forest products, and fish in the streams and mangroves.  This is their life.

Now all of that is threatened by ranchers who come from Panama’s central provinces to cut down the Wounaan forests to create pastures and commercial farms. The red areas on the map are those Wounaan lands that have been deforested by these ranchers within the last six years.  Native Future seeks to assist the Wounaan of Río Hondo, Platanares and Majé-Chimán gain legal title over their traditional lands so that they can preserve their culture, their livelihood, and thousands of acres of neo-tropical rainforest.

There is some promise.  A U.S.-based international human rights lawyer, Professor Leonardo Alvarado, recently traveled to these three communities, and found their claims to their traditional lands to be meritorious.  (Download a copy of his report in Spanish here, or the executive summary in English here.)  Before they can present their case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, however, the Wounaan must exhaust all available domestic legal remedies in Panama.  This process will begin in earnest once Leonides Quiroz, a Wounaan leader from the community of Río Hondo, graduates from law school in Panama in July of 2008.  When he does, he will be the first Wounaan ever to graduate from a university program.  In the meantime, Native Future is helping these three communities to more accurately map their traditional lands with GPS equipment.

The problems of the Wounaan are not unique.  The loss of traditional lands and culture is a plight that nearly every indigenous people is now facing.  But this is one place where you can help make a real difference.  A small amount of money can go a long way towards helping preserve tens of thousands of acres of neo-tropical forest and three indigenous communities’ existence and way of life. Please consider donating to Native Future’s Wounaan Land Tenure Project.