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Ítem Building and 'De-indianising' a Nation. The Kuna and Guaymí People and the Formation of the Panamaniam State(Springer, 2021) Solano-Acuña, Ana Sofía; Díaz-Baiges, DavidIn this chapter we survey the diverse political and ideological strategies put forth by the state and elites in order to take over areas of the ‘national territory’ thought of as ‘empty’ and ‘wild’, tear apart ethno-territories and cultural universes, and manage indigenous people and their resources under the veil of a consolidating a ‘national state’. We examine the experiences in the eastern and western frontiers of Panama during its transition from the Colombian period into republican life after 1903. Each case study illustrates the social construction of the indigenous societies (Kuna and Guaymí) targeted by these strategies.We consider that although the colonial enterprise was one, each territory strongly determined the specific modes of state encroachment, construction of the cultural other, and the discourses deployed to bring these social bodies within the national project. The documental corpus used in our study comprises press articles, official documents, and the writings of intellectuals and Catholic missionaries. In the eastern frontier the role of Catholic missionswas key, as they were tasked with converting the indigenous population into ‘citizens’ useful to the homeland; to culturally ‘de-indianize’ (desindianizar) their ways of life and settlement; to wield political and economic power over the lands bordering Colombia; and to re-signify the ethnic territory. In the western frontier de-indianization must be understood differently, as it involved many central-western villages administratively losing the category of ‘indigenous’, giving way to the emergence and consolidation of a new socio-racial category, which not only reaffirmed the low-class status of the indigenous, but also obliterated any recognisable historical roots of prior categories.