Feature Article

Weaving Hösig Di, Fine Wounaan Rainforest Baskets Made of Chunga—Part II

© 2004 By Charlotte Meares
Photography © 2004 Lorran Meares, All Rights Reserved

Chunga stilts also elevate huts well above the mud during the May to January rainy season and help keep most uninvited guests on ground level. A notched log ladder pulled in at night helps, too.

Gathering chunga isn’t a matter of walking a few feet from the hut with the machete. According to Runk’s research, travel time to locate chunga usually ranges from one and one-half hours to more than five hours.

Those greater distances place gatherers increasingly in harm’s way. Countless Fer de Lance vipers, one of the world’s most venomous snakes lives in this jungle. Then, too, there are the Colombian guerillas, kidnappers and drug-traffickers. Chunga-gatherers find safety in numbers. Frequently, during their absence, the shaman, women elders and tribal leaders pray, dance and chant to ensure their safe return.

Tribal spiritual leaders contend that the chunga can only be harvested during “the week following the dark moon.” There is a time and place for everything.

Village leaders, weavers, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and other concerned organizations have designed and are assisting the Wounaan and Emberá in implementing conservation and replanting practices, which they hope will ensure economic sustainability and provide future resources closer to villages.

The naguala, Carludovica palmate, which comprises a basket’s coil, is easy to harvest with a machete and is primarily women’s work. Women and children also gather roots, leaves and berries for making dyes.

A weaver typically boils dye plants over an open fire for one or two hours until the color reaches the desired intensity. Then she adds wet skeins of thinly peeled chunga. Vigorously fanning the coals, she allows the mixture to boil for another several hours. Fibers may be re-dyed with cocobolo ash or another plant dye to create subtle variations and depth. Harsh chemical mordants are not used to fix the delicate organic-dye colors. Because dyeing is a labor-intensive process, a braided skein of dyed fiber (the equivalent to a single spear leaf of harvested chunga) sells for as much as US$ 15.

Plain baskets without the colorful woven designs, available until the early 1970s, are now extremely rare. Zoomorphic designs, popular in Panamá, are seldom woven in neighboring Colombia. Instead, these distant cousins work simple anthropomorphic designs over much-thicker coils, wrapped with wider, heavier strands of chunga.

The result is a more primitive-looking basket with much coarser construction. These baskets from the Colombian Wounaan and Emberá are decorated primarily with black, red, orange and yellow.

As with coiled pottery, the larger the basket, the thicker the naguala coil must be to support its weight and shape. Necessarily, the chunga connecting these denser coils is longer and wider, leaving room for only 25-35 stitches per inch. Wounaan weavers of some of the finest small baskets can work in as many as 60-70 stitches per inch.

As their distinctive styles emerge, the finest artists are beginning to weave their personal “signature” designs into the bottoms of successive baskets. They market their work individually, without a co-op.
While Runk’s research cites 33 as the average age of a weaver, two years younger than master weaver Alina Itucama, a few rising stars in their late teens and early twenties are creating high-quality, distinctive baskets. But the field of museum-quality belongs to a seasoned few.

The rush to perfection is driven by money—dark green U.S. dollars, and plenty of them. Surveying villages in 2003, Runk concluded that full-time weavers “may earn anywhere from US$ 150 to US$ 500 a month for basketry in an area where full-time labor yields US$ 150 per month.”

In fact, for most families, basket income was reported to represent more than half of a weaver’s household income. Market-driven prices for collectible, museum-quality baskets are attracting men to weaving.

An exceptionally fine, tightly woven basket 10-inches tall can take a weaver up to a year to complete. Very large baskets taller than 20 inches can take two or three years and with asking prices of thousands of dollars.

As life in remote Darien villages becomes intolerable or unsafe, increasing numbers of families are relocating to other villages or to Panamá City. Itucama and others concerned about cultural preservation wonder about the future of Hösig Di basketry. Will young women reared in urban environments be seduced by the allure of its western ways and unwittingly forfeit their potential to join ranks with some of the world’s finest weavers?