A People Who Would Not Kneel

In the 1920s, Panama's Kuna Indians, celebrated for their long resistance to outside domination, found themselves under attack by colonizing police and bureaucrats. After years of suffering, turmoil, and failed attempts at peaceful resistance, the tribe rose up in rebellion, achieving a rare example of indigenous success against colonial oppression. This is the story of that rebellion -- its causes, its happy outcome, and the remarkable cast of outsiders who came to the aid of the Kuna -- based on a wealth of oral and documentary sources, and told by the leading scholar of Kuna history. "This history of the Kuna struggles, culminating in the Kuna rebellion of 1925, is meticulously researched and beautifully written. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of indigenous resistance in the Americas, but it reads like an adventure story involving pirates, Indian chiefs, heroic but intransigent missionaries, intransigent but less heroic administrators, and a North American adventurer who involved himself in the relations between Panama and the United States."-- David Maybury-LewisHarvard University and Cultural Survival