Emily Weidner

Struggles for Cultural Survival in a Changing Environment: Two Panamanian Hydroelectric Projects and their Impacts on Indigenous Communities

Small and slow change is natural and normal to both environmental and indigenous cultural systems. The simultaneous changing and evolving of indigenous cultures and their environments defines an unconventional interdependency between the two, called the environment-culture bond. The Bayano Hydroelectric Project constructed in the 1970s in central Panama brought with it comparatively quick and large environmental change which led to the environmental instability of the area. This instability is defined by the loss of complexity, and change or loss of the central character of the environment. The environmental changes in the area of the Bayano project and the cultural changes of the Kuna living in the area are broken down into their most basic causal form.

A causality model describes a changing environment and culture. First a linear causal line is formed from environmental change to environmental instability, to cultural change, to cultural instability. Subsequent environmental changes and instability come from cultural changes. Additionally, cultural conflicts not originating from environmental change/instability, but from the decision-making process, also create cultural instability and subsequent environmental changes. The compounded environmental and cultural instability threaten the cultural survival of the indigenous groups in the area.

It is expected that the proposed Hydroelectric Project of Bonyic, a Panamanian hydroelectric project in the traditional lands of the Naso, would perpetuate a similar model of environmental and cultural change leading to an eventual environmental and cultural instability, and a people struggling for cultural survival. To assure Naso cultural survival environmental and cultural instability must be avoided.