Art Empowers

Faithfully, for nearly each of the last 1,000 days, Alina Itucama has been metamorphosing silk-like strands of a little-known fiber into jewel-toned butterflies and lush orchids.

Over 17 of her 35 years, she’s perfected her needlework skills, which she painstakingly translates into collectible baskets, like the three-year masterpiece adorned with delicate butterflies and flowers, nearing completion.

Itucama, one of 75 master artists selected from around the world to participate July 17-18 in the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market 2004, is Wounaan.

Her people, which number only about 6,000, inhabit one of the world’s most beautiful and, like the motifs on her baskets, most fragile, places—the Darién Rainforest of Panamá.

It’s a small country. A five-year-old census pegs the population at fewer than three-million people—less than that of Los Angeles.

Of course, long ago there was hardly anyone, especially in the rainforest. In the late 1700s, the Wounaan and neighboring Emberá tribes began moving into Panamá from Colombia. These Wounaan and roughly 15,000 Emberá live mostly in the Darién Province, with less than two households per square kilometer. Their “reservations” are called comarcas.

The Wounaan, whose clans are scattered throughout the Darién in 15 or so villages, mostly along rivers and streams, have used their natural resources to good advantage.

They’ve become world-class weavers. In fact, according to an article in the Summer 1996 issue of Native Peoples magazine, some museum curators claim Wounaan basketry rivals the finest in the world.

Master weaver Itucama learned basket-making from her mother. Coaching weavers throughout much of the Darién, she now passes along those basic skills as well as refined techniques acquired through trial and error: harvesting conservation practices, intensifying natural dyes, creating pleasing color combinations and striking designs, maintaining a basket’s shape. Nearly every woman weaves. Some are better at it than others.

Darién Rainforest basket-making wasn’t always so organized. Over the hundreds of years of their production, loosely woven baskets served utilitarian purposes and were constructed on an as-needed basis. Even the tighter, unadorned baskets to house small treasures or religious objects served a vital purpose within the home. But the rainforest environment has returned to the earth that which was taken from it. Ancient basketry—at least in the Darién—is a thing of legends.

Anthropologists surmise that though baskets were woven watertight, they were never used as vessels in that region. Pottery, which was prevalent, precluded the need.

Though utilitarian and ritual baskets are said to have a long history in Wounaan culture, the museum-quality baskets of intricate workmanship and motifs comprise a new art form that has evolved only over the last two decades.

These contemporary Wounaan Hösig Di baskets, like their historical counterparts, are woven with the same technique and raw materials. Weavers sew threadlike strands of organically dyed Astrocaryum standleyanum, called locally by its Spanish name, chunga, around a stiffer, yet flexible, coil of Carludovica palmate, or naguala.

But the similarities end there. Contemporary pieces showcase a weaver’s skill in working a complex design upside down, beginning at the tiny initial knot at the bottom.

Competition among weavers is fierce, though friendly. A weaver strives to create a basket that is more colorful, more dramatic, more unusual, more salable than her sister’s or her neighbor’s.

Publishing findings from studies she conducted for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on the use the fiber palm Astrocaryum standleyanum (Arecaceae) by the Wounaan and Emberá, J. Velasquez Runk writes, “The sale of A. standleyanum baskets is an important source of cash income.
A. standleyanum is one of the many non-timber forest products (NTFP) used by these indigenous artisans as the primary material for their commercial ethnic art.” Chunga palm, from which only the young “spear leaf” is harvested for basket fibers, is a sacred tree found in forests ranging from Costa Rica to Colombia and Ecuador.

Also frequently called “black palm,” it can reach a height of 45 feet. Its intimidating trunk is covered with fierce six-inch spines, making it impossible to climb. Stripped trunks are used for traditional house posts, as most Darién thatched-roof huts are erected in small clearings and raised four or five feet above the jungle floor. 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 is pulled in at night.


Copyright © 2004 Charlotte Meares

Weaving Hösig Di, Fine
Wounaan Rainforest Baskets
Made of Chunga

Discovering the changing face of cultural identity

Copyright © 2005 Lorran Meares