A Guna makes fake wooden guns for a children’s reenactment of a 16th-century battle against the conquistadors. The Guna people have fought for survival for hundreds of years. But modern threats are testing its cultural resilience Vanishing act: Panama’s Guna people forced to move as the sea swallows their island – in pictures In a church built on stilts facing the sea, two 19-year-old American Mormon priests sit in front of the altar chatting to young Guna people. Elder Burr and Elder Aba, from the US states of Utah and Oregon respectively, reached the island of Kanir-Dup , in the Guna Yala (San Blas) archipelago in Panama , by pirogue more than four months ago, sent by their movement to teach the Indigenous community about the word of Jesus Christ. Since their arrival, the missionaries’ daily routines have been on a continuous loop: prayers, sports, meals, Bible studies and mass. Yet Burr does not seem to mind the repetition; he has his mind on the greater aim of his proselytism mission. “We are here to convert these natives,” he says. With an area equivalent to five football fields, around 1,500 Gunas live crammed together on the island. History suggests that Burr and Aba’s task will not be simple: preachers are nothing new for the Guna people. For more than 500 years, these Indigenous people , originally from northern Colombia and the Darién Gap, have been harassed by conquistador s , Christian evangelists, authoritarian governments and other Indigenous peoples who have tried to massacre, conquer or convert them. They have constantly been confronted with the outside world and fought against it, trying to preserve their identity at all costs. The first Spanish expeditions to the American continent began to be a threat in the 15th century, eventually forcing the Guna […]