The News, Culture and Practice of Sailing woodenboats
in Australia, New Zealand & The South Pacific.
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They Kept Outsiders Away for 500 Years. Their World Is About to Change.
In 1970, my father, a shaggy 25-year-old from the Chicago suburbs finishing his Ph.D. in anthropology, traveled with my mother to the Gunayala region of northeast Panama to ask its inhabitants, the Guna people, for permission to study them. The Guna lived on an archipelago of sandy, palm-covered islets along the Caribbean coast and had a reputation as prickly and disagreeable.