Feature Article

Wounaan Master Weaver Honored at Santa Fe International Folk Art Market 2004—Part III of III

© 2004 By Charlotte Meares

Photography © 2004 Lorran Meares, All Rights Reserved

As very fine and intricately patterned baskets take months and even years to weave, they are always intended for market. While a small, exquisite piece may have been created solely as a treasured gift for someone special, keeping a basket for herself would be a luxury few weavers could afford.

Loosely woven, often irregularly shaped baskets that can be produced easily in a few days to several weeks generate quick cash at cruise-ship stop-offs—artesania centers or a Panamá City department store. But work from the most highly skilled artisans is virtually always destined for a collector, gallery or museum in the U.S. or abroad.

Despite the obvious differences in skill levels, in the late hours of the morning or early afternoon, several generations of weavers gather in breezy, favored homes, as though for coffee klatch, to stitch, laugh, tell tales on their husbands, balance nursing babies and growing baskets on enlarging pregnant stomachs. At their sides or nested in their baskets are tangled skeins of brightly dyed chunga.

During a January interview in one village, a handful of weavers laughed when asked if basket-making is women’s work. While that has been the norm, the women explain why men are abandoning their traditional farming, fishing and carving for weaving. And it’s not just because baskets fetch a higher price.

As Colombian guerilla activity increased, and the fields were no longer safe places for them and their families to work, weaving looked like a viable alternative. And the men lived with their teachers.

Unlike curious or exploit-driven touristas, visitantes willing to listen and learn are welcome in close-by villages that are out of harm’s way from Colombian guerilla invasions and raids. Government officials aren’t welcome, however, though the presence of armed militia in small guard shacks at threatened village entrances does offer symbolic security.

Rape and murder of villagers, hostage taking—the guerillas successfully instill fear, Itucama says. The unease is not just an undercurrent. It manifests in how free people feel to wander away from village perimeters and even how new homes are constructed. For some families, pleasant, airy open-sided palm-thatched huts on stilts are a thing of the past. Replacing them are mini-fortresses—claustrophobic, clapboard-style on-ground homes capped by tin roofs and sealed with boltable doors and windows.

Itucama, who sometimes forays into and between villages alone, tries to be prudent. But she’s often too busy to give danger a second thought. Her hours are divided among teaming with her husband to manage their small shop, traveling by dugout canoe to remote villages to coach weavers and keeping the new home they built and share with their extended family pristine and ordered.

Time changes many things. Signs, symbols and icons of the 21st-century punctuate a seemingly idyllic Darién village. Expensive outboard motors hang from hut rafters, protected from rust-producing downpours. Brown Formica and metal desks line up inside cement-block schoolhouses generously splashed with bright blue paint.

Concrete-slabbed basketball courts cover a square of jungle. A solar-powered telephone booth appears guarded by thatched-roof huts. The low-frequency drone of a generator powers a Coke cooler. The village teacher sports a Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt. Scrubbed Nikes dry on a clothesline. A pet parrot perched on a railing squawks at a ringing cell phone.

It’s not just material things, Itucama says of change. The new generation of Wounaan men no longer hunt with blowguns. Instead, they’re taking up basket-weaving. And the new generation of chunga-gatherers no longer gives thanks to the espiritu of the plants before harvesting them, as did their parents and grandparents, Itucama laments.

Still, some things remain unchanged…for a while, at least. For the Wounaan, she says, there is “a good time for everything to be done—when to plant, when to hunt, when to harvest. The chunga must be gathered ‘after the first week of the dark moon.’ Then the fibers will be strong.”