The Panamanian shamans working to save their ancestral medicinal plants

• In Santa Marta, a small village in Panama’s Ngäbe-Buglé Indigenous region, aging shamans are seeking to preserve and pass down knowledge of traditional medicinal plants.
• Village members say knowledge of how to identify and use local sacred medicinal plants has assisted the community to treat illnesses and viruses, such as COVID-19.
• Fearing this ancestral knowledge will be lost, Santa Marta’s shamans made a book with photos, names and information about the curative properties of local plants.
• In 2022, researchers from the Technological University of Panama published an ethnobotanical study on the species of Santa Marta’s traditional medicine plants in an effort to safeguard this sacred knowledge.

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SANTA MARTA, Panama — Mauricio Martínez was convinced he was going to die.

The year was 2021 and Martínez, gravely ill with COVID-19, struggled to breathe, walk and swallow food. As his condition deteriorated, he decided that instead of being intubated in a hospital in the nation’s capital of Panama City, he’d prefer to pass away at home among his family and friends in the small Ngäbe-Buglé Indigenous village of Santa Marta.

“I spent all the money I had left to get a private car to drive me nine hours from Panama City so that my family could see me alive one last time,” says Martínez, a tall man with thick black hair and a thin, trimmed beard.

Martínez says that when he arrived in Santa Marta, his father, Mauricio Sr., a town shaman, gave him doses of traditional medicinal plants in the form of teas and liquid drops. Over the course of a few days, Martínez says his health stabilized, his breathing returned and he regained his ability to walk.

“Thanks to traditional medicine, I survived,” the 44-year-old says. “I know I wouldn’t be here without it.”

In Santa Marta, traditional medicine plants, remedies and rituals are sacred. In green jungled plots of land in the hills that overlook the tiny town of 500 residents near Panama’s Caribbean coast, local shamans have for generations used the area’s tropical vegetation, leaves, branches and stems to cure residents’ ailments and illnesses.

There is a growing fear in Santa Marta, however, that the knowledge of how to find, identify and use these curative plants will soon be forgotten. Many young members of the town — like Martínez — leave the Indigenous territory, known as a comarca, in search of employment opportunities in places like Panama City, home to 2 million people.

Among those who continue to live in Santa Marta, local shamans say there is waning interest in learning the medicinal properties of the ancestral plants.

Mauricio Martínez, who returned home to Santa Marta when gravely ill with Covid-19, stands with his pet parrot beneath his wooden home. Image by Adam D. Williams.

“We use these plants to cure our sick, and we don’t want leave the next generation with zero understanding of how to use them,” says Mauricio Sr., who is 73-years-old and mixes in his native language Ngäbere with Spanish when he speaks. “There has to be someone pushing it forward.”

In the early 2000s, amid growing worry that these ancestral traditions would be lost to climate change, landslides and disinterested younger generations, residents of Santa Marta became proactive. The town’s three shamans — Viviana Montero, Mauricio Sr. and his sister Elicia Martínez — sought and obtained financial assistance from Panama’s National Environment Authority (ANAM), through a project known as the Biological Corridor of Panama’s Atlantic, to construct a small health clinic in the town.

Built in 2009, they named the clinic Iho Kebery — after a fabled Ngäbe-Buglé warrior who battled Spanish conquistadors — and painted it dark green with a gray and white image next to the front door that depicts traditional medicine doctors attending to a wounded patient using natural remedies. It serves as the town’s lone health clinic, and inside the low-lit center with two rooms, the shamans attend to patients using curative plants in the form of teas, tinctures and powders to treat illnesses, emergencies, pregnancies and assist in childbirth.

Furthermore, to assure that these ancestral traditions would be recorded, the shamans and residents of Santa Marta — together with ANAM — created a 19-page bound booklet that contains photos of the town’s traditional plants, their names in Spanish and Ngäbere, information about how to identify them and explanations on how they can be used for curative purposes.

“Knowing what plants to use to cure our patients’ illnesses is a gift we have,” says Montero, a 72-year-old shaman who wears her long, dark hair pulled back. “We inherited it from our ancestors and it’s part of the mystery of our people. We have a responsibility to pass these traditions down.”

Santa Marta’s shamans authored and printed a booklet that provides information, photos, names and curative properties of local medicinal plants. Image by Adam D. Williams.

Up and down the mountain

While the Iho Kebery center gives Santa Marta residents a place to go for health issues or emergencies, the clinic lacks medical and sanitary equipment and basic utilities such as electricity or running water. The Ngäbe-Buglé is Panama’s most impoverished Indigenous group and without financial support from the government or outside parties, Iho Kebery struggles to serve as the traditional medicine educational center the shamans envisioned it might be.

“We need a space large enough to allow the midwives to work, prepare the medicine and deliver a child safely in a private room,” says Mauricio Sr., wearing a tan straw hat with his bare feet stretched out on the clinic’s concrete floor. “We also need a pharmacy to store the plants and medicines so that a shaman can distribute them when a patient comes to the clinic.”

Montero explains that when patients come to visit her, because the center has limited space to dry and keep the curative plants, she has to walk up a nearby mountain — which can take up to two hours — to collect them.

“Sometimes in a day I would go up and down the mountain two or three times to collect whatever medicine the patient needs,” she says, wearing a long, embroidered sky-blue traditional gown known as a nagua. “As I get older, going up the mountain has become more difficult, and there aren’t many other people in the town that can identify the right plants for treatment.”

Santa Marta’s three traditional medicine doctors, Viviana Montero (left), Mauricio Martínez and Elicia Martínez, stand in front of the town health clinic Iho Kebery. Image by Adam D. Williams.
Santa Marta’s dense jungle vegetation is home to dozens of plant species containing curative properties that are used as medicine in the village. Image by Adam D. Williams.

An ethnobotanical study, a ‘promising future’

Eligio Castillo is trying to assist the residents of Santa Marta in their efforts to preserve the community’s sacred medicinal plants and practices.

A member of the Ngäbe-Buglé group, Castillo studied forestry at a nearby university, landed a job at Panama’s Environment Ministry and regularly visits and meets with small villages and towns along the Caribbean coast to discuss and encourage sustainable forestry and responsible ecological practices.

He lives in a small town called Silico Creek, located on a coastal highway about a kilometer from Santa Marta and has for years sought to help the village and raise awareness and funds to support the shamans and their work.

“If someone gets sick in Santa Marta, there are no cars available to take them to a local hospital,” says Castillo, who wears a white-collared shirt with the Panama Environment Ministry logo on the left breast. “The doctors here work for free and the healing knowledge they have is invaluable to the community. I’m trying to bring awareness to the vital work they do.”

In 2021, Castillo contacted environmental scientists and researchers from the Technological University of Panama, located in Panama City, and invited them to come to the village to observe and study the work of Santa Marta’s shamans. Among the academics who came to the village was José Ulises Jiménez, a biologist and former park ranger who specializes in botany and tropical forests and is employed by the university.

“We met and interviewed the three shamans, and they requested our help to help rescue the knowledge of their plants and to help them elaborate and expand their existing book with all the plants’ names and properties,” Jiménez says in an interview in a quiet university study room in Panama City.

Jiménez, together with seven other researchers and scientists from the university, decided to pursue an academic study that, in addition to providing ethnobotanical information on the properties the sacred plants, would also create further written documentation that could be used by future generations in Santa Marta.

Published in 2022, the study provides a quantitative ethnobotanical index that details the importance and medicinal properties of 17 principal plant species used by Santa Marta shamans.

José Ulises Jiménez, a biologist who studied Santa Marta’s traditional medicinal plants, at the Technological University of Panama campus in Panama City. Image by Adam D. Williams.

To conduct the study, Jiménez explains, the university researchers accompanied Mauricio Sr. up the mountain to collect samples of 70 medicinal plants used to treat illnesses and ailments. Once back at the Iho Kebery center, the scientists interviewed each shaman individually — not in the presence of the other two — to identify, name and explain the medicinal uses of each plant.

“The analysis and statistical part of the study was to observe if the shamans coincided on their explanation of the use of each plant,” says Jiménez, who is tall with broad shoulders. “If they all agreed that certain plants are used to cure respiratory problems or colds or the flu, it is likely that plant has active properties that can in fact cure an illness or contribute to reduce certain symptoms.”

The study concluded that within the community of Santa Marta, there are 17 plants — shrubs, bushes, herbs, trees and palm plants — that are considered to be of vital importance to treat illnesses within the community. The properties of these 17 species are said to cure a myriad of maladies, including diarrhea, rashes, kidney pain, menstrual cramps, conjunctivitis and snakebites.

“Medicinal plants have a promising future,” the researchers wrote in the academic study. “There are around 500,000 plants in the world and many of them have active chemical properties with medicinal uses that are yet to be studied, and could be the decisive treatment answer to many illnesses.”

‘Here, lives are saved with traditional medicines’

On a muggy morning in late August following a tropical downpour the night before, residents of Santa Marta gather in Iho Kebery to give testimonials about how, at some point in their lives when dealing with an illness, it was traditional medicine that provided relief.

Villagers recount stories of how, thanks to traditional plants, they survived snakebites, stomach viruses, infections and bouts of diarrhea, which is one of the Ngäbe-Buglé’s leading causes of death.

The stories Santa Marta residents share are similar to those of Martínez, who, three years since returning to his hometown, says he continues to deal with side effects from COVID-19, including dizziness, chest pain and discomfort when exposed to the sun for extended periods of time.

After 16 years of living in Panama City, he says he’s happy to be back in Santa Marta, and that he’s convinced the decision to return home in 2021 kept him alive.

“Here, lives are saved with traditional medicines,” he says. “Thanks to God, and specifically thanks to traditional medicine, I’m one of them.”

 

Banner image: Santa Marta’s traditional medicine doctors Mauricio Martínez, Elicia Martínez and Viviana Montero stand among a plot of land containing curative plants. Image by Adam D. Williams.

This project was funded by:

through the Health Innovation call.

Indigenous midwives in Panama strive to preserve traditional medicine for maternal health

Citation:

Jimenez, J. U., Cedeno, K. A., Duque, J. R., Chavez, A. D., Espinosa, W. W., Serracin, B. C., … Valoys, A. C. (2022). Healing plants in the traditional medicine of the ngäbe-buglé ethnic group: A preliminary ethnobotanical study. 2022 8th International Engineering, Sciences and Technology Conference (IESTEC), 381-386. doi:10.1109/iestec54539.2022.00066

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