Among some tribes the wealth of a man is reckoned by the number of his cattle; among the Guaymies by the number of his wives. For this reason, perhaps, the attainment of marriageable age is an occasion of much festivity for children of both sexes. The boy is exposed to tests of his manly and war-like qualities, and, in company with his fellows of equal age, is taken by the wisemen of the tribe into the solitude of the forest that by performing tasks assigned to him he may prove himself a man. There, too, they learn from the elders, who go masked and crowned with wreaths, the traditions of their tribes told in rude chants like the Norse sagas. Until this ceremony has been fulfilled the youth has no name whatsoever. After it he is named and celebrates his first birthday.
The ceremonies in which the girls play the chief part are less elaborate, but one would think rather painful, since they include the breaking of a front tooth in sign that they are ready for marriage. They marry young and mothers at twelve years are not uncommon.
Once a year the Guaymies have a great tribal feast—“balceria” the Spaniards call it. Word is sent to all outlying huts and villages by a mystic symbol of knotted rags, which is also tied to the branches of the trees along the more frequented trails. On the appointed day several hundred will gather on the banks of some river in which a general bath is taken, with much frolicking and horseplay. Then the women employ several hours in painting the men with red and blue colors, following the figures still to be seen on the old pottery, after which the men garb themselves uncouthly in bark or in pelts like children “dressing up” for a frolic. At night is a curious ceremonial dance and game called balsa, in which the Indians strike each other with heavy sticks, and are knocked down amid the pile of broken boughs. The music—if it could be so called—the incantations of the wisemen, the frenzy of the dancers, all combine to produce a sort of self-hypnotism, during which the Indians feel no pain from injuries which a day later often prove to be very serious.
PANAMANIAN FATHER AND CHILD
There are a multitude of distinct Indian tribes on the Isthmus, each with its own tribal government, its distinctive customs and its allotted territory, though boundaries are, of course, exceedingly vague and the territories overlap. The Smithsonian pamphlet enumerates 21 such tribes in the Darien region alone. But there seems to be among them no such condition of continual tribal warfare as existed between our North American Indians as long as they survived in any considerable numbers the aggressions of the white settlers. It is true that the historian of Balboa’s expedition records that the great leader was besought by chieftains to assist them in their affrays with rival tribes, and made more than one alliance by giving such assistance. But the later atrocities perpetrated by the Spaniards seem to have had the effect of uniting the Indians in a tacit peaceful bond against the whites. Picturesque and graphic as are the writings of men like Esquemeling, the Fray d’Acosta and Wafer, who saw the Indians in the days of their earliest experience with the sort of civilization that Pedrarias and Pizarro brought to their villages, they do not bear more convincing evidence of the savagery of the invaders, than is afforded by the sullen aloofness with which the Darien Indians of today regard white men of any race. More than the third and fourth generation have passed away but the sins of the Spaniards are still recalled among a people who have no written records whatsoever, and the memory or tradition causes them to withhold their friendship from the remotest descendants of the historic oppressors.
There seems to have been no written language, nor even any system of hieroglyphics among the tribes of Panama, a fact that places them far below our North American Indians in the scale of mental development. On the other hand in weaving and in fashioning articles for domestic use they were in advance of the North American aborigines. Their domestic architecture was more substantial, and they were less nomadic, the latter fact being probably due to the slight encouragement given to wandering by the jungle. The great houses of the San Blas Indians in their villages recall the “Long houses” of the Iroquois as described by Parkman.
Photo by H. Pittier
Courtesy National Geographic Magazine
CHOCO INDIAN IN EVERY-DAY DRESS