The Wounaan indigenous people have faced illegal rosewood logging and centuries of exploitation with wisdom and beauty

Cut logs of rosewood are stacked in a large pile. These logs, whose exact species is unknown, are found in Madagascar, one of the key points in the global rosewood trade.

Maky via Wikimedia Commons

For millennia, the Wounaan people, who inhabit some areas of what is now Panama and Colombia, have carved and sculpted various types of wood. The cocobolo rosewood, Dalbergia retusa, is especially prized for carving ceremonial canes used in traditional medicine and in commercial art depicting tropical plants and animals. The Wounaan are just one of the peoples around the world who have used rosewood to make a wide variety of items, including gun stocks, furniture, and musical instruments.

Today, there are more than 140 species of trees that are traded as rosewood, all of them having lustrous and dense wood that generally has a reddish tone. Rosewood is popular for its intense color and fine texture.

This sample is of cocobolo wood, Dalbergia retusa.

Pommeroys via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Since the late 2000s, global demand for rosewood has outstripped legal supply. These beautiful woods have become popular investments, especially during the real estate boom in China, as well as highly regarded tone woods used in the manufacture of musical instruments.

By 2012, the value of cocobolo in China had soared to over $13,000 per cubic meter. Today it can cost three times as much, a price considerably higher than that of, for example, red oak, which is around $1,500 per cubic meter.

In 2011, some loggers began illegally cutting rosewood trees in the mature forests of eastern Panama, home to the Wounaan people. In Panama, most Wounaan and many Emberá do not have legal rights to those forested lands, despite having inhabited them for generations.

Following the invasion of illegal loggers, elected Wounaan authorities presented complaints to various Panamanian officials, both local and national, while seeking the support of the press and public opinion.

But this was just the beginning.

During that first season of logging, there was a three-month standoff between the illegal loggers and members of the Wounaan communities. One logger killed an elected traditional authority, hapk'ʌʌn Aquilino Opua Puchicama.

In response, the logger, Ezequiel Batista, was killed. The Wounaan realized that the loggers were willing to kill in order to obtain rosewood.

Rosewood chairs were already popular in China in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Cleveland Museum of Art via Flickr

Over the next four years, illegal logging was intense. In 2014, tiny Panama ranked 16th in the world for the volume of roundwood sold to China and 11th for the value of the wood.

That year, China recorded importing 10,827 cubic meters of rosewood logs and 4,731 cubic meters of sawn rosewood from Panama, valued together at $55.5 million.

Before the rosewood boom, the International Union for Conservation of Nature had classified cocobolo as “vulnerable, with a high risk of extinction in the wild.” However, in 2019 it was reevaluated as “critically endangered.”

That is one way to tell the story: as a more or less linear sequence of tragic and catastrophic events.

However, in presenting our research, we have opted for a different form, one that reflects and encompasses the lives, values, science, and experiences of the Wounaan, and that reveals not only loss, but also the joy of resistance and care for one another.

An attempt to provide “traceability” through the use of physical barcoded tags – which allowed extractors, regulators, and customers to track the logs – never really managed to prevent illegal logging in Panama.

AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco

A broad perspective and a local one

We are part of an initiative to share this research in a new book, “Interwoven Rosewood: Collaborative Ecologies, Colonial Entanglements, and Indigenous Resistance.”

The book is the result of a multi-year collaboration between the Wounaan National Congress (Wounaan Podpa Nʌm Pömaam), which represents the entire Wounaan people of Panama; the Local Wounaan Congress of the community of Majé (Wir Haigpai Podpa Nʌm Majé), which represents a community with numerous artists.