Creating a Connected Textile Community
Politics, religion, and the discovery of oil have brought major changes to the Arab world over the past few generations. Many of the customs, crafts, textiles, and way of dress inherent to the region do not exist anymore or are fast disappearing. As the current generation of custodians, we have a responsibility to document and preserve these customs and tradition.
One day in the winter of 2021, Cecilia, a mother, a migrant, and an indigenous weaver from the mountains of Guerrero in Southern Mexico, saw an old broomstick tossed aside at the border shelter in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. From that day on, she scoured the grounds of the shelter for sticks and broken branches, determined to build a backstrap loom with whatever she could find. INGLÉS/ESPAÑOL
If you have not yet watched “A Sheep’s Tale: Preserving the Churro,” the WARP-organized webinar about Navajo-Churro sheep, don’t miss it. The three presenters—Molly Manzanares, Alta Piechowski-Begay, and Lyle McNeal—have been stars in one of the primary constellations by which I’ve navigated my life for a number of decades.
There has been a particular rethinking among ethnology, natural history, art and national museums that display textiles and other traditional cultural expressions that have roots in contemporary communities and living cultures. There is now an effort to address the historical lack of agency of these communities in how their identity was portrayed by engaging them in museum activities.
On the one hand, books are fixed, stuck in time, immutable. On the other, they have secret lives based on the relationships, known or unknown, among the people who read them.
A textile tour is an opportunity to meet the beautiful people that create such treasures and to learn a bit from their wise cultures. Unfortunately, since early 2020 the pandemic put a stop to most organized textile travel. Many weaving communities dependent on tourism have suffered greatly, with few visitors to buy their textiles on top of the suffering that covid itself brought.
The National Maya Weavers Movement Ruchajixik Ri Qana’Ojbäl in just a few years has risen to national and international prominence. Thanks to the movement, for the first time in centuries, we have the opportunity to hear the voices of Maya women who live traditional lives in their villages as they formally commit to protect and defend their textiles and their way of life.
Recently we put out a call for WARP authors to send in a list of their books to be included in an online library, or at least reference list, available on WARP’s webpage for the people who want to know more. So far only 15 authors have submitted information, but the range of subjects more than confirms what a good idea this is.