Nana Dummad

Nana, the Great Mother, is the female pole of the Guna creator dyad, named in the same breath as the Great Father in the formula Baba-Nana. She is identified with the living earth, Napguana, whose soil, forests and waters are understood as her nurturing body; in modern Guna political and ecological rhetoric Napguana has become a central emblem of the land itself. Because Guna theology conceives creation as the joint work of mother and father, Nana is never a subordinate consort but a co-equal source of the world and of its moral and reproductive order.

Domains

• earth and fertility
• cosmogony

Powers

• bring forth and sustain the living earth

Epithets

• Napguana

Relations

• spouse: Baba Dummad

Sources

• Erland Nordenskiold, An Historical and Ethnological Survey of the Cuna Indians, ed. Henry Wassen (Goteborg, 1938).
• James Howe, A People Who Would Not Kneel (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).