Yesterday I posted about this thinking it was just a funny coincidence, but the more you research about it the weirder it gets.

Props to my friend @formatkamui that also got into the rabbit hole and found a lot of the info

A thread about the white indians of Panama:

In 1925, the indigenous Guna of Panama rebelled and took control of the province of San Blas, declaring it independent under the flag of the "Tule Republic"

The Indepedence declaration of the Guna was written by an American called Richard Oglesby Marsh, who was exploring the Darien gap region of Panama at that time.

What had an American to do with a very isolated Panamaian tribe?

Marsh believed that the region housed White indians - indians who happened to have European ascendancy.

He succesfully convinced Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford to fund his expedition.

If you know 2 things about Henry Ford is that: 1) He was a big industrialist that developed the T model and 2) He was one of the biggest nazi supporters of the US

But what reason Marsh had to believe there were White Indians in the region? Well, get this: the Guna have some of the highest incidence of albinism in the world.

In fact, albinism is so important amongst the Guna that they consider albinos a special race of people, tasked with the duty of defending the moon against a dragon, and are the only ones allowed to go out during a lunar eclipse.

This is also due to the fact that the Guna are extremely endogamous and only reproduce amongst themselves.

After all, they consider themselves a "people of gold"

Here are some findings of the Marsh expedition amongst the Guna. I recommend giving it a read.

Here are some of the children that Marsh took back to the US:

This is weird enough, but the Guna have a strange origin story for albinos. According to the coastal Gunas, inside the Darien jungle there lived a white race of indians, called Wallas.

These Wallas were "a separate race entirely" - I'm quoting Marsh speaking with Chief Bibia here - they were "strong, powerful men, white with yellow hair." Their language was different from the Gunas.

They also had powers such as telepathy and could cause earthquakes

Marsh was travelling with 3 linguists, including a guy from the smithsonian and another from Tulane University. According to them, the Guna language had an "Aryan structure" and 60 words were identical to Old Norse.

The Guns revolution eventually succeeded in creating better conditions for the indians - in a conflict explicitly framed against "black panamaians" - and would lead to the creation of the autonomous province of San Blas in 1938.

This was the flag adopted in 1942:

The circle was eventually dropped, and the swastika was argued to be an ancestral symbol called Naa Ukuryaa, representing the 4 sides of the world where people emerged.

But common, this was 1942. They knew what they were doing.

The flag was eventually dropped in 2010. The earlier version, without the circle, was also the flag of the San blas province)

And this...this is just a funny detail