Indigenous native American peoples from the Arctic to Patagonia have had a pretty bad go of it for the past five hundred years or so as they have struggled to adapt to the various colonizing empires that have encroached, enslaved, pillaged, killed, subjugated, deceived, relocated, and otherwise mistreated native societies for this entire period of history. The different models of exploitation employed by the predominantly American, Spanish, and Portuguese subjugators have resulted in remarkably distinct societies across the face of the Americas. In the United States, where a policy of extermination was pursued, very little societal integration resulted, and today U.S. Indian reservations serve basically as confinement centers with a few debatable bones thrown like the freedom to operate gambling operations. The Spanish recognized the native Americans as a potentially lucrative labor force and proceeded to enslave as many Indians as possible from the Rio Grande to Argentina to work the mines that the Spanish Crown depended upon for its colonial-era wealth and global prestige. Less puritanical than the Americans, the Spanish cross-married to varying degrees, producing a mestizo ethnic mix that is for all practical purposes the Latin American demographic front-runner. The extremely less Puritanical Portuguese were sufficiently distracted with their African slave trade that they were somewhat less prosecutorial in their pursuit of the Native American forced-labor industry and uninhibited in their miscegenation—so much so that today’s Brazilian society is a genetically rich mix of European, African, and Native American bloodlines.

For a series of historical, geographic, and demographic peculiarities, Costa Rica’s native American history is unique and considerably less savage than that of other parts of the Americas. When Columbus discovered and named Costa Rica on his third and final voyage to the Americas he arrived on a land that had a considerably lower population than the centers of civilization in Mexico and South America. Add to that the density of the Costa Rican vegetation, the tenacity of the Caribbean pirates that haunted its western margin, the ferocity of the region’s wet season, and the distance from the Spanish administrative centers in Guatemala and Colombia, and Costa Rica just wasn’t very conducive for slave hunting, particularly when the natives grew wise and started loosing arrows. As a result, the Spanish that decided to remain pretty much worked the land themselves and scraped out a considerably more meager living than their contemporaries in Mexico and Peru.

The Guaymí Indians, who call themselves Ngobe in their language, occupied ancestral lands at the time that included much of southern central Costa Rica and western Panama. Nomadic, their range included the Osa Peninsula, though they were concentrated in what is today the state of Chiriqui, Panama. The encroachment of “civilization” being what it is, the Ngobe were granted lands for reservations and permanent settlements in Costa Rica on, among other places, the Osa Peninsula, where since 1968 they have occupied a reserve on the boundaries of Corcovado National Park.

The economy of the Ngobe has evolved from ancestral hunting and gathering to an increasing dependence upon agriculture, though tropical soils are notoriously poor for agronomic enterprise. With the ascent of tourism, the Osa Guaymí have been presented with a potential avenue of revenues, but at the cost of trading in elements of their tradition in exchange for the coin of the realm, a realm they never invited and toward which they maintain a well-earned mistrust.

Hand-crafted textiles, and wood sculptures and masks are manufactured from resources harvested from their forest homes, including natural dyes. Bead jewelry is also an important part of their hand-craft repertoire, but this requires the purchasing of raw materials from the outside. With essentially no centralization for marketing and promotion, the funds generated from these traditional activities means that the Ngobe are able to supplement the sustenance that they harvest from the forest with purchased food staples and clothing. However, this is no foundation for an economy of scale, and young Ngobe are faced with a difficult decision, whether to stay on their lands and propagate their culture in—relatively speaking—abject poverty, or to acquiesce to the western model and flee their home to work in the cities.

As the Ngobe struggle with the economic and societal changes brought by increasing demands for peninsular sustainable development and bans on hunting, gold extraction, exotic animal sales, and other potential avenues of subsistence, the Guaymí reservation does bound the park, bringing them ostensibly into contact with a novel industry, eco-tourism. Whether the Guaymí ultimately capitalize on this market by building lodges and sponsoring tours, workshops, yoga retreats, spas, and such related endeavors remains to be seen. For now, the foreign and domestic tourist that wishes to contribute to their economy can nominally support the embattled Guaymí by purchasing the handcrafts that they wholesale in Puerto Jimenez and from time to time hawk to passers-by.