In the politically charged shouting match that has raged in Congress over the past months concerning Nicaragua, often something very important is forgotten. People. While there is no denying the strategic importance of the region, there are also very human dimensions to the conflict south of our borders.
I came to encounter, at least for a short time, one of many such dimensions. I had the privilege of living with the Miskito Indians of eastern Nicaragua for a total of seven months during 1983 and 1984 while making a film about them. The film, Nicaragua Was Our Home, aired nationally on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) June 17, 1986. It depicts the tragedy of a gentle people suffering the agony of mass displacements and genocide.
Isolated paradise
Ten years ago, a film on the Miskito Indians would probably have been about isolated turtle fishermen in beautiful tropical settings. Eastern Nicaragua is a place where dense emerald rain forests and warm marine waters meet in a broken shoreline scalloped by long thin lagoons, river bars, mangrove swamps, and narrow beaches. Much of the inland area is and narrow beaches. Much of the inland area is covered by pine forests, and there are some gold mines. The area is isolated from western Nicaragua by mountains and, until recently, there were no road connections between the two sides. Living in this almost unpenetrable setting isolated the Miskitos from latinos in western Nicaragua but that's the way the Miskitos preferred it.
The Miskitos descended from the non-Mayan Indians that, as they would probably put it, discovered Christopher Columbus when he brushed up against the jutting northeastern coast of Nicaragua and named it Cabo Gracias a Dios - Cape Thank God.
All attempts at conquest by the Spanish were successfully repelled by the Indians. To facilitate this, the Indians formed strategic and business alliances with French buccaneers and English pirates, who provided them with weapons, in the early seventeenth century. Some of the Europeans settled down with Indian wives. In addition, when a Portuguese slave vessel sank offshore in 1641, the Indians captured all the survivors, whom they incorporated into the society. Eventually, German Moravians evangelized the Indians. The various mixtures that emerged became known as the Miskito Indians. About 120,000 Miskito Indians live in the region along with about 30,000 English-speaking blacks and a few thousand Sumo and Rama Indians.
The Miskito Coast or Miskitia, as the eastern part of Nicaragua is known, was a British protectorate from 1678 until 1894. Its people have historically always considered themselves autonomous from the western part of Nicaragua. The Treaty of Managua of 1860 recognized the autonomy of Miskitia from the rest of Nicaragua, as did the Harrison-Altamirano treaty of 1905.
When the Somozas came to power, as bad as they were for the rest of Nicaragua, they basically recognized the autonomy of the Miskito coast. They did very little to advance Miskito culture but at least they left the Indians alone. Foreign economic interests centering on fishing, mining, or lumbering would exploit the resources of the Atlantic coast, often giving the Miskitos very little in return. When the Miskitos look back on the
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