Pech people
[4] Before the colonial period in the sixteenth century, the Pech people migrated from the south to inhabit a large territory close to the border of Nicaragua.
[1] The Pech Indians occupied a large portion of north-eastern Honduran land, which anthropologists define as "lower Central America.
[5] Following, in 1713, the son of Bartolomé de Escoto, a Spanish coloniser, was titled as the "governor and conqueror of the Paya" and was earning a salary of "one hundred pesos.
[5] Also in 2004, Pech land rights activist and community leader, Elipidio Martinez Chavarria was killed in Dulce Nombre de Culmi, Olancho, as part of the violence connected to land-grabbing.
According to historians, Martynas Snarskis and Mary W. Helms, pre-European settlement, the Pech people did not possess "key cultural attributes as highly stratified societies, political organisation at the state level, intensive agricultural cultivation techniques, metallurgy, or large urban centres.
[5] For the Pech, fishing also consists of gathering crustaceans and mollusks, including shrimp, crabs and jute, a freshwater snail.
A 'slash and burn' method, where stone axe and fire are used to clear a field of trees and undergrowth of roots, is implemented to dig sticks to plant.
[12] Today the main economic activities conducted by the Pech people include tree clearing, gold panning, breeding domestic animals and extracting fragrant resin from liquidambar for perfumes, incense and adhesives.
[2] The Pech people also earn profit from selling handcrafted items, including woven baskets, bags, placements and corn-grinding stones.
Most Pech people today identify as Catholic and have only retained a small amount of myths and oral stories from their traditional religions.
[5] Pech traditional religion included ceremonies to the spirit of the mountains, the spiritual owners of animals, and to the mermaid who cares for the fish.
[3] The earliest indication of Pech life and presence dates back to Christoper Columbus' trip where he reached the Bay Islands and the mainland of Honduras on July 30, 1502.
[14] Originally, the Pech people inhabited from interior departments of eastern Honduras to the south of present day Trujillo.
[17] Growing land displacements, dispositions and a lack of territorial formalisation is a prominent daily challenge of indigenous peoples in Honduras.
The aggressive raids of the Miskito were in large manner responsible for the gradual withdrawal of the Pech into the mountainous regions and away from the coast.
[19] Beginning from the middle of the 17th century, it has been documented that the Miskito dominated the coastal Pech people and were forced to take rescue along the Patuca, Sicre, Platano, Twas, Paulaya and Sico rivers as well as in the Olancho valley.
[5] The Pech suffered heavily from the emergence of the Miskito in the 17th century and their alliance with outsiders, especially British traders, and with the runaway slaves who made up the "Mosquitos zambos".
The Pech people are considered to be one of the nine ethnic groups recognised by the Honduran state, the others including Tawkahka, Tolupan, Lenca, Maya horit, Graifuna, Islenos de Habla Inglesa and Nahua.
[16] Previously, the Federation fought the creation of a 'people-free' national park, which aimed to cut communities off from their traditional livelihoods and stop the using of land to harvest liquidambar, a sweet gum used in fragrances.
[16] This agreement legally allows the Pech people to co-manage 34, 000 hectares of the Anthropological and Forest Reserve, Montana del Carbon.
[16] The Federation has also established a liquidambar cooperative, which shares the profit between community members and funding for education and public health systems.
[2] Furthermore, some Pech communities situated in the Olancho valley, joined the Unión de Campesinos (UNC) in an effort to reclaim their land territory.
[5] During the dictatorship of General Tiburcio Carias Andino between 1933 and 1948, the process of 'Mayanisaton', as coined by Euraque, constructed a national identity that ignored the lived realities of indigenous groups of Honduras.
