They live primarily in remote settlements on the rivers Coco, Waspuk, Pispis and Bocay in north-eastern Nicaragua, as well as on the Patuca across the border in Honduras and far to the south along the Río Grande de Matagalpa.

Sometimes posited as a coastal-dwelling Mayangna sub-tribe,[7] but given their distinctive language more likely to have been a related Misumalpan group,[8] the Miskito people, who appear to have originally lived on the northern Atlantic Coast around Cabo Gracias a Dios, are an interesting example of people who grew through culture-contact on the Coast, and whose ethnic identity and even racial composition is intimately intertwined with their position as intermediaries in the relations between the Europeans and the other Indigenous living in the region, who also included the Pech and the now much reduced but previously widespread Rama in the far south.

Miskito raids into the interior carried away increasing numbers of (primarily Mayangna) captives, of whom the women were kept and the men sold on to the British to work the growing Jamaican plantations.

[11] In the same period, the Mayangna themselves also increasingly succumbed to the better-armed Miskito raiders, and began a steady retreat into the interior, towards the headwaters of the rivers along which most of the groups had originally lived.

[13] The Mayangna population continued to decline after the British gave up their claim to the Mosquito Coast in 1860, due to the combined effects of disease,[14] internecine warfare, and assimilationist pressures from both Miskito and the new Nicaraguan state.

[16] The final blow for the Mayangna came at the beginning of the twentieth century with their conversion to Christianity, a task undertaken by missionaries from the Moravian Church, who arrived in the region from Germany in 1847 but only began to make a real impact on the native population after the departure of the British.

During the so-called ‘Great Awakening’ of the 1880s much of the Miskito population converted to the new faith en masse, and buoyed by this success the Moravians increasingly turned their attention to the Mayangna.

Just as the Catholic missionaries of the colonial era had done throughout the Spanish Empire, this first involved persuading the Mayangna, who up to this point had lived in dispersed family groupings and had continued to observe a traditional and often semi-nomadic lifestyle based on hunting, fishing and a shifting agriculture, to come together and settle permanently in new, compact and accessible communities, centred around a church.

[24] For the Mayangna, an escape from the conflict was only possible after a genuine shift occurred in the Sandinistas’ own nationalist ideology, which moved beyond a purely rhetorical acceptance of the ‘differences’ on the Coast towards a practical commitment to embrace them as part of the process of constructing a new society.

Soon after, in April 1985, the recently elected Assemblea Nacional passed an amnesty decree, proposed by Mayangna leader Ronas Dolores Green amongst others, which specifically covered 'miskitos, sumos, ramas y creoles.

[26] In the Mayangna language, ‘autonomy’ translates as “alas yalahnin lani” – ‘to live our system of life.” However, the current autonomous political system falls far short of this ideal in the eyes of the Mayanga, who feel that despite countless sacrifices they are still caught between two fires; with the advancing ‘agricultural frontier’ of mestizo peasants, who invade their communal lands and despoil their forests, on the one side, and on the other, once again, the Miskito leaders, who ignore their distinct problems as a people and yet still portray themselves as representatives of all of the indigenous of the Coast, depriving the Mayangna of the chance to ever make themselves heard.

In 2001 the Mayagna of the small community of Awas Tingni (then 1100 people) won an important ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, established in 1979 by agreement among the signatories of the Organization of American States (OAS).