The Ngäbe. Pronounciation: “gnaw-bay” Language Meaning: "the people.”

More commonly known as Guaymí, a misnomer applied to them by Spanish colonizers, the majority of the Ngäbe people have historically lived within Panama and the southern tip of Costa Rica’s Pacific slope. They resisted Spanish conquest and it was not until the 1930s they were forcefully expelled by cattle ranchers and banana companies into more rugged and marginalized lands.

Beginning with the construction of the Panama Canal in the early 1900's, livestock farms began moving into Ngabe ancestral homelands causing displacement of indigenous people of Panama further into Costa Rica. At the same moment in time, the United Fruit company began moving from the north of Costa Rica into the south Pacific where they concentrated massive tracts of land to prevent corporate competition in the banana trade. As a result, inhabitants were expelled and forced to settle in the most remote mountainous areas and steep slopes where they currently live and where their identity, culture and traditional knowledge has been sown deeply into the region.