In the remote village of Santa Marta in Panama’s Ngäbe-Buglé Indigenous territory, shamans are racing to preserve generations of knowledge about sacred medicinal plants, remedies that have long helped their community treat everything from snakebites to COVID-19. Across the same region, midwives travel long distances on foot to attend births, using plant-based medicine and techniques passed down orally through mothers and grandmothers. In 2024, Mongabay spotlighted these two parallel efforts to safeguard ancestral knowledge.
In July, a report explored how Indigenous midwives in one Panamanian comarca (Indigenous territory) are keeping maternal care rooted in tradition. Working without government recognition or formal support, these midwives blend practical birthing care with plants used to ease labor and prevent hemorrhaging. But as forests shrink and climate change threatens biodiversity, their access to essential plants and their ability to pass on this knowledge is increasingly fragile.
In October, another feature focused on aging shamans in Santa Marta who, fearing their wisdom would disappear, created a 19-page booklet cataloging key medicinal plants in both Spanish and Ngäbere. They also partnered with researchers from the Technological University of Panama, which in 2022 conducted a formal ethnobotanical study to document 70 species, finding that communities consider 17 plant species as important to treat everything from menstrual cramps to kidney pain.
Impact
As a result of Mongabay’s article on the shamans working to save their ancestral medicinal plants, the biologists, scientists and researchers at the Technological University of Panama named in the story received funding to further their biological studies and research of traditional medicinal plants in 2025.
In December 2024, the article’s reach expanded even further when the publisher DK (a division of Penguin Random House) contacted Mongabay’s reporter to request inclusion of images and excerpts in an updated edition of Eyewitness Plants, part of DK’s best-selling Eyewitness series. The publisher is expected to print 20,000 copies of the book over the next four years, which includes modern developments in plant science — from genetics to plant-based medicine — as well as information about scientists and activists who are using plants to change the world.
Mongabay’s coverage of the Indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé midwives also had tangible ripple effects. After reading the article, the nonprofit organization Phalarope, which works on healthcare and community development in Panama and Guatemala, expressed interest in supporting the ASASTRAN midwives’ group profiled by the article. As head of an organization focused on addressing health disparities and enhancing outcomes for underserved populations, the Phalarope’s CEO expressed interest in meeting with and providing financial and clinical training for the midwives.
