Walking into the nearly furniture-free basement great room of the East Side Freedom Library on a Wednesday afternoon, I hear the happy sounds of women chatting in an unfamiliar, lyrical language, their conversation periodically interrupted a soft “thunk-thunk”. The women sit on the carpeted floor cross-legged; some are winding balls of colorful, very fine yarn; others string the yarn back and forth between two rods, while looping the yarn in mysterious ways around intermediate rods; two are sitting ramrod-straight, belted into a back-strap loom, legs pushing against the wall to tighten a long circular warp. The thunk-thunk is the sound of their sword beating in a row of weft.
The women, members of the Karen Weaving Circle, meet weekly at the library to revive, maintain and pass on their traditional weaving skills.They learned to weave from their mothers or friends, either in Burma (now Myanmar), or in one of nine refugee camps along the Thailand-Burma border.
Background
The Karen (pronounced kah-ren), an ethnic group of several million, lived for centuries in the mountainous regions of eastern Burma and bordering Thailand. For decades they have been persecuted by the Myanmar military junta and driven out of their villages and into the forests of Burma or into Thai refugee camps. At its height the camps held about 150,000 Karen.
In 2005 UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, began a program to resettle Karen refugees. As of 2014 over 73,000 Karen have been resettled in the United States, and another 20,000 in Australia, Canada, Finland, and Japan. Today, more than 12,000 Karen have settled in the Twin Cities — mostly east St. Paul and Roseville — forming possibly the largest population of Karen outside of Burma and Thailand.
Since being formed in 2014, the Karen Weaving Circle has participated in several sales events, including Art in the Hollow, Little Mekong Night Market, World Jubilee, the Gala fundraiser of the Karen Organization of Minnesota, World Refugee Day, the Karen New Years celebration, and others. They have taught weaving skills to high school students in Saint Paul.
Several groups have supported the formation and continued operation of the group as well as helping to organize sales and teaching events, including The Karen Organization of Minnesota (KOM) with support of a grant from the Minnesota Arts Board, Goodwill-Easter Seals Minnesota with support of a grant from Ramsey County, Roseville Area Schools, East Side Freedom Library, and The Weavers Guild of Minnesota.
Weaving
Watching the women weave fills one with joy and wonder: joy because they are genuinely happy connecting back to their traditions; wonder because they weave such beautiful pieces with such primitive equipment. The backstrap looms shown above is composed of rods and heddle bars of native woods. The beater sword, the weaver’s prized possession often brought from Thailand, is hand-carved from dense heartwood from an Asian tree. Not surprisingly, the women excel at making do when traditional components are absent — this weaver’s backstrap was sewn from a 50-pound rice bag, and her shed rod is a plastic pipe from Home Depot.
Warps are always circular, wound between two vertical rods, with intermediate rods used to preserve the cross. Heddle strings are continuous, being inserted as the warp is wound. These videos from a weaving group in North Carolina illustrate the method quite well. The weavers here are Montagnard, an ethnic group from the mountains of Vietnam. The technique they use is virtually identical to that of the Karen.
In future blogs I will describe the warping and weaving processes in more detail, and analyze the common structures found in their weavings.