By Howard V.Walker

Exactly one hundred years ago, Kuna islanders watched curiously as a black-robed, weather-beaten Spanish priest stepped ashore onto the island of Nargana, Kuna Yala. The date was Easter week, March, 1907, and the occasion the arrival of Spanish missionary Father Leonardo Gasso.

The impact of this passionate, zealous priest (the first recorded in these islands) was to prove no less dramatic than his appearance, or voyage, down from Colon. Rocked in his small craft for eight days in high, wind-swept seas and blistered from hot steam leaks spouting from a defective boiler (his umbrella was no match) he gave grateful thanks to St.Joseph, statue in hand, as he finally stepped ashore.

According to James Howe in his landmark study A People Who Would Not Kneel, he wasted no time to begin his conversions, even on chief Henry Clay of the neighbouring island of Nusatupu,, who courteously had gone out to greet him in his dug-out canoe. As it happened, the chief was not receptive to Gasso's quick summary of the dangers of hell fire and damnation. He rejected the mission forthwith. Fortunately for the determined priest, he did receive a warm welcome from Chief Charly Robinson of Nargana who invited him as his guest into his two storey home and store.

On his second day, Good Friday, Father Gasso raised a large cross at the place of his landing. His followers sang and knelt to kiss it, but arguments broke out with others who had come to mock, and protest, the intrusion of this new religion and outside culture. That morning gave a foretaste of the conflicts and hostilities which were being spawned and which were to characterize succeeding years until the revolution of 1925. Within two short years the cross had disappeared.

A group of Kuna men. One hundred years ago, father Leonardo Gasso unsuccessfully tried to convert their islands into Jesuit communities

For conservative Kuna traditionalists, Father Gasso and Charly Robinson represented threatening change, not only in terms of religion, but with their liberal ideas for literacy and education. Chief Charly was literate and English speaking, one of the few; his foreign up-bringing had given him a taste for things North American. Considered radical by some, his plans soon provoked opposition from his people. Father Gasso also had to contend with a formidable adversary from outside, Anna Coope, an English Protestant missionary who brought to Nargana a quite different message of salvation.

It is tempting to say that "it all started" with Father Gasso, undoubtedly he was a major player at the beginning of the social upheaval that was to rock Kuna society in the coming decades . Also it is clear that, inevitably, the winds of change were headed for the Kuna islands as surely as they had swept over the isthmus with the founding of the new republic, in 1903. Certainly, this fiery proselytizer was the forerunner of the host of 20th century intruders, missionaries, traders, government officials, adventurers and travelers, all of whom subsequently came to Kuna Yala with their own agendas in mind.

Father Gasso did not succeed in transforming Nargana into the Jesuit community that he desired. The cultural resilience and strength of character of the Kuna people had proved too great. He returned home to Spain finally in 1912. On August 27th.1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Father Gasso was taken out to a highway and shot by Republican forces. A martyr's death, consistent with the life and dedication of this impassioned, controversial and courageous Christian.

The writer is an English-Canadian, an architect retired from practice in Canada and now living in Panama