Cloth and the Art of Connection with the Karen Weaving Circle

“I want to encourage young people to learn weaving, so they will never forget where they come from, to hold their culture alive and also pass it down to the next generation.”

This is how Ku Say, a younger Karen weaver based mostly in Saint Paul, Minnesota, defined her motivation as a scholar of weaving throughout a story session within the Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Youth and the Future of Culture program. The story of Karen individuals is marked by their wrestle to outlive. Why is the craft of weaving so central to their cultural resilience?

Karen (pronounced kuh-REN) individuals are a various ethnic minority from southern and southeastern Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand. Along with different minority teams, they’ve confronted displacement and repression from the federal government of Burma for many years. In response to ongoing violent battle, many Karen individuals have fled the nation for the reason that Nineteen Eighties for refugee camps in Thailand, and a few have made new properties overseas as a part of one of many world’s largest refugee resettlement packages.

Around 20,000 Karen individuals and different refugees from Burma now dwell in Minnesota, the most important neighborhood of Karen individuals within the United States. To serve this inhabitants, refugees created the Karen Organization of Minnesota (KOM), a social providers company that helps resettled Karen individuals regulate to life in a brand new nation and to strengthen their neighborhood. KOM’s constituents are of various generations and refugee experiences: some born in Burma, some in Thailand, and new generations being raised within the United States.

KOM collaborates with Saint Paul’s East Side Freedom Library to host the Karen Weaving Circle, providing an area for youth and senior weavers to return collectively, observe and train weaving, and promote their items by participation in artwork gala’s and festivals.

Working with the Karen Weaving Circle, the Festival was capable of spotlight a few of their inventive, hopeful methods for sustaining their cultural traditions and sense of belonging as Karen individuals.

Weaving Connects Generations

Karen individuals can expertise the lifestyle within the United States as extra isolating, in distinction to Karen villages the place homes are shut collectively and folks work collectively typically. Language boundaries and lack of transportation are additionally challenges. For refugee communities, establishing common gatherings and particular occasions is important to their well-being.

Rosie Say, a senior weaver on the Festival, defined that weaving is a pure a part of this intentional gathering: many ladies have a expertise for weaving, so that they fashioned the weaving circle in 2015 merely from their want to get collectively. They had little funding, so that they labored with donated yarns and primary supplies, however collectively they revived Karen weaving, a conventional ladies’s artwork type, within the United States. The circle now meets weekly to socialize and assist each other and to maintain and go on this conventional artwork.

During the summer time, they conduct intensive lessons as a part of KOM’s summer time youth programming, which additionally contains dance instruction. Weaving instruction is open to younger men and women alike. Dance, weaving, conventional costume, and Karen language are anchors that floor the youth individuals of their tradition. The weavers take part in artwork gala’s and occasions within the Twin Cities space, so weaving additionally creates ties with neighbors and different communities.

“Weaving itself is a metaphor for bringing people together, and for culture staying connected,” noticed Rachel Cooper, moderator for one of many Festival classes and a director at Asia Society.

Youth weavers Mae Ra Paw, Ku Say, and Htee Hser attended the weaving summer time packages, seeing the classes not solely as textile coaching but additionally as a chance to know their personal tradition and historical past extra deeply. At the Festival, they joined Rosie and KOM employees members Hta Thi Yu Moo and Synthia Htoo to display and train their weaving, converse in narrative classes, and even prepare dinner on the Foodways stage.

The weavers “make do” creatively. For instance, they invented a folding warping board in order that they may carry it of their baggage to Washington, D.C. The warping board is used to measure out and manage the warp threads, which run the size of the textile and will be a number of meters lengthy, whereas the weft runs aspect to aspect.

Since their displacement, most Karen weavers within the United States use commercially produced cotton yarns, quite than cotton they domesticate and dye themselves, as their grandparents did. They have additionally tailored to creating loom elements out of available lumber, dowels, and {hardware}. This openness and drawback fixing are additionally a part of the custom, as analysis reveals that historic Karen weavers creatively experimented with new supplies, dyes, and yarns.

Karen weavers sometimes use a backstrap loom, by which the weaver’s physique turns into a part of the gear with a belt or strap round their again offering the required pressure on the warp. The loom is light-weight and moveable and will be arrange indoors or open air.

In their assembly area within the East Side Freedom Library, the weavers have put collectively a brace between columns that helps their looms, and so they can face each other throughout it, permitting them to each work and converse. At the Festival, our tech workforce tailored this setup to the tent, so guests may get a close-up view of the weavers’ gear and strategies.

Clothes Tell a Story about Who You Are

The backstrap loom is comparatively easy gear that may produce sophisticated weaves. Karen weavers use supplemental weft designs, that means the contrasting colours of yarn are added in individually to create floor patterns. They additionally use preparations of a number of warp colours or ikat approach (resist-dyeing the warp threads earlier than weaving) to create their complicated materials. Garments are additionally enhanced with multicolored embroidery and beads made from coix seeds. According to Hta Thi, the beads are beloved as a result of they will symbolize rice, which is important to their neighborhood.

Distinctive patterns are related to sure villages or areas, showcasing the wearer’s origin. Others relate to tales and classes whose interpretation can fluctuate throughout areas. Hta Thi gave the instance of a motif that appears like diamonds, however that some weavers know as spiders.

“When they [spiders] make their web, they keep making the web until they are finished, and they never stop,” Hta Thi mentioned. “So Karen people, they will weave: they are not going to stop even if it’s nighttime. If they want their shirt or their bag to be done, they keep on weaving.”

Ku Say emphasised, “The pattern like a spiderweb means to never give up—as a people, we have to keep trying.”

Gallery

Traditional-style Karen outfits are worn for particular events, and a few put on them in each day life, adapting them to go well with the climates and communities the place they now dwell. Particular colours and garment kinds are necessary at key events like weddings, Karen New Year, and wrist-tying ceremonies, an occasion centered on non secular safety that’s celebrated as a reunion.

Garments typically use an iconic palette of pink, black, and white, colours that talk to id and stage of life: white attire for single ladies and ladies, pink sarongs for males, and black and pink tunics with skirts for married ladies. Aside from these most conventional colours, the interaction of many vibrant colours is a part of the magnificence of up to date Karen textiles—and a part of the inventive pleasure of weaving.

During a narrative session, Hta Thi joked that since she was carrying denims, “I’m not a good example!” But her private fashion of pairing a woven and embroidered shirt with blue denims exemplifies the enduring relevance of Karen costume in up to date life and in new locations. 

Rebecca Fenton is a program curator on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and a textile nerd.