The Wounaan Indians, a truly indigenous people, in the Darien Rainforest of southern Panama are making the finest baskets anywhere in the world today. We at the Michael Smith Gallery are proud to feature their finest baskets made today.

Wounaan weavers develop their own design processes, create phenomenal array of colors and patterns. The fabulous craftsmanship and beauty are the result of their own instincts, views, and historical inclinations.

The Gallery donate 10% of profit to Native Future, Inc., a nonprofit organization that helps the Wounaan on land right issues and education funds. We contribute to Native Future because we seek to protect the Darien rainforest, the environment for the Wounaan and for us.

We've been selling Wounaan baskets for two years and hosted three Wounaan Benefit Shows during the summer. We wrote the following articles to share with the public:

1. Understanding and Appreciating the Wounaan Basket
2. Out of Darien

The SUN Monthly, a local publication, has the same concern for the Wounaan. They interviewed Michael Smith and published "Wounaan Basket Makers - STITCHING FOR SURVIVAL", in the July Issue of 2007. You can read the archive article at SUN Monthly or a copy of the article at our gallery website.

Click here to browse our selection of Wounaan baskets.

UNDERSTANDING AND APPRECIATING THE WOUNAAN BASKET

First Impressions

Before getting into a detailed technical analysis it may be useful to remind ourselves that there is an opportunity early in the visual arts experience to simply respond emotionally to an art object. For Wounaan baskets this might mean simply "soaking-in" what comes in through our eyes and finger tips, we can feel the gracefulness of the form. We see the thousands of individual stitches that make up the basket and immediately recognize the labor and the precision; we see that the images, whether depicting some living thing or simply a geometric pattern, is made of thousands of individual colored and contrasting stitches.

Brief Cultural History

The Wounaan tribe, along with the Embera tribe, are indigenous to the Chocho region of the Amazon Basin of northern Columbia, but with the pressures of the arriving Spanish they fled further and further north. In eastern Panama the Wounaan People found an environment, with its hidden rivers and isolation that might both protect them from the violence of the western world and provide a sustainable source of both food and spiritual power, in short an environment for cultural sustenance. And of course living there before there was any Country of Panama, with all its government and laws, the Wounaan did not know that they needed to "own" their land. So, while these indigenous people are practicing both the craftsmanship and ecological patterns necessary to their way of life, the world around them is fighting over resources.

A Tradition of Fine Craftsmanship

Baskets have been part of the way of life as far back as anyone can remember. They are tools useful for carrying food, tools, or talismans, and for storing food, even cooking in. One of the most interesting aspects of these baskets is that it was only with the Panama Canal and its boat-loads of tourists that the Wounaan began to make baskets to sell. They were encouraged to move from a strictly subsistence food-gathering society to one supported, at least partially, by the income from what has become known as "craft sales." So, what seems to have happened is that the Wounaan society, a society whose everyday survival and life required great powers of observation, attention to detail, and an understanding of the appropriateness of materials, has served them well in all the intricate requirements of jungle survival. They had built a society that relied on fine craftsmanship as a component of survival, so when "survival" required making a marketable basket, they were able to shift very quickly, to apply their long history of fine craftsmanship, to making spectacularly beautiful, and therefore saleable, baskets.

Basic Styles

In trying to impose some order we've come to recognize three different, and relatively distinct, "styles" of Wounaan basket. And within each of the three primary style types there is also a very large range of personal styles. Individual approaches as to form and to the relationship between the size of the fiber bundle and the size of the basket vary tremendously. The "Primitive" style generally connotes the earlier, plainer and more traditional basket. It has a simple shape, the stitches may be up to ½" apart, and with a lid these baskets are simply decorated and have an obvious utilitarian basis. The "Pictorial" baskets have surface images of animals and/or plants and may be brightly colored. They are often of a very fine weave because a "fine" image requires a "fine" matrix, so the stitches are usually small and close together. These can be very complex, birds flying in front of falling fruit during a specific season of the year with identifiable species of flora, fauna, and animals, or relatively simple with simply a representation, or abstracted version, of a particular animal, plant or insect. The "Geometric" style encompasses all those baskets with surface patterning of abstracted line, shapes, patterns that, because of their visual balance, can jump from positive to negative reading. Patterns are usually variations of meanders or spirals and occasionally employ some animal form that, technically, makes them a cross between two primary styles.

The Technique

While the stitching of the silk-threadlike palm fiber is a fascinating skill to watch, there are other aspects of the overall process that require as much, or more skill, and every phase must be mastered before a fine result is possible. Consider the steps:

First Phase

• Identifying and locating the two correct species of palm
• Cutting the fronds at exactly the right time of the year
• Drying and bleaching the fronds without their molding (in the rainforest)
• Stripping the frond down into the individual uniform fibers
• Identifying and collecting the plant materials that will be used to dye the fronds once they are dried and bleached
• Dying the fronds and re-drying them
• Conceptualizing the form and surface pattern

Second Phase

• All of the actual work of stitching the basket (several weeks to several years)

Third Phase

• Finding a market, a difficult prospect when one is so extraordinarily isolated
• Determining to sell on consignment, or outright
• Transporting the basket, usually along a trail, then by canoe, then by truck, to markets in Panama City or to an exporter

Judging a Basket

When looking at a specific basket it is important to remember that everything you want to know about it is right there in front of you, if you will exercise the patience and intelligence to see. Nearly every aspect of judging is a function of so called "common sense." You should ask yourself if it is a size and form (shape) that you like and to which you respond. Set the basket up on a shelf, or pedestal, at eye level in front of you and look at its profile; evaluate its form. Are the edges of the form smooth and graceful, and do any reversing curves, as where the neck takes off from the shoulder, intersect without lumps or bumps? Set the basket on a table and look directly down into the top opening and then turn it over, set it on its top and look directly down onto the bottom. The top should be almost perfectly "centered" and not off to one side. Most Wounaan weavers take great pride in the decorations on the bottom. It should be a small surprise, it should be related to, but not overwhelm, the other patterns on the sides, and it too should be almost perfectly centered on the bottom of the basket. Is the surface pattern or decoration done smoothly and consistently? Do the colors compliment or conflict? Most of the organic dyes are quite fugitive and if the basket is old it may have faded from exposure to the sunlight. Usually this only adds to the character, but be conscious of it. It may not be the quality you desire.

Is there a consistent size and spacing to the individual stitches? Does the basket sit flat on a smooth surface or does is lean and seem wobbly? If there is a surface pattern, either pictorial or geometric, is it balanced and spaced consistently, or are there places where the pattern ends arbitrarily as though the weaver ran out of room? Is the basket "tight"? It should not be easily squeezed out of its shape. It should feel strong and light, almost like an over-inflated soccer ball, due to the consistency of the stitching.

Generally the more stitches per running inch of coil, and the more coils per vertical inch of basket, the "finer" the basket is considered to be. But this is somewhat of an over generalization, and "fineness" may not be our personal criteria. The number of stitches per square inch of surface should be appropriate to the size and form of the basket. A very, very few of the finest baskets will have upward of 1,200 stitches per square inch and in a very large basket this can mean over a million total stitches! But this in no way implies that other baskets with fewer stitches per square inch are inferior.

Of course there are wonderful baskets that break any or all of these rules. The exceptions can be the most expressive, but in these cases, the cases where the so-called rules are broken; it should be through the choice of a master weaver, not the inadvertent outcome of a novice. And this is where background knowledge may be helpful and it will be useful to have the advice of an experienced gallery or collector.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ­­­­­­­­­­ABOUT WOUNAAN BASKETS

• The Wounaan Tribe is indigenous to the Darien Rainforest of eastern Panama.
• They have made utilitarian baskets for generations but only for the last twenty years have they made such intricately designed and decorated baskets for income.
• Nearly all the baskets are made by women.
• The baskets are made from two varieties of Palm frond, the chunga fiber, or black palm, for the outer wrap and the navala, or Panama Hat Palm, for the filler fiber.
• The fronds are collected and bleached white in the sun. Some are dyed with various plants and minerals.
• The technique employs a small steel sewing needle.
• The Michael Smith Gallery works closely with Native Future, Inc. This is a private, non-profit, tax-exempt organization based in Hawaii, and is dedicated to protecting the interests of native people. The gallery donates 10% of every sale to Native Future, and 25% of the sales during the Wounaan Basket Benefit Show in July.
• Most baskets take between one week and six months to make. A few extraordinary baskets may take up to three years.

The geometric patterns have a basis in the temporary body decoration seen on many of the makers and their families.

OUT OF THE DARIEN,

THE WOUNAAN BASKETS OF PANAMA

By Verne Stanford

It's the heat of the afternoon, just under 100 degrees and 88% humidity. I sit cross- legged on the rough mahogany floor 8 feet off the ground in the small round, palm thatched pole house of Wounaan basket maker Lolea Mejla. She smiles gently and draws a steel needle through the rim of her basket with elegant regularity. There is an aura of peacefulness and yet determination. Nine other Wounaan women also sit cross-legged around the perimeter of this house; the conversation slowed as I entered. There are both giggles and focused work. Each woman holds a basket in progress; four also hold sleeping infants. Drifting through the damp air are the mixed sounds of chickens, wild birds, distant barking thin dogs, and the continual chip, chip, chip of men with chisels on cocobolo or mahogany. A bit of smoke wafts up from a nearly dead cooking log. It carries the heavier sweetness of banana, coconut, and plantain. I am in the village of Rio Hondo in the Panamanian jungle.

I've come here to see these baskets, to see them being made, and perhaps to understand a bit of the mind of the women who make them. I watch Lolea work on her basket. It is the finest of the fine, and one of the finest baskets ever produced by human hands! Slowly I take in the consistency of her rhythm; I see the benefit of her discipline and control in the smooth curve and perfect circle of her 17" diameter nearly spherical basket. I cannot but be aware of a powerful intelligence. She breaks new ground with the design, and yet she is totally focused and maintains, with repetitious, mechanical, physical movement of the wrist, arm and shoulder, the perfect rate of stitching required for this most graceful curvature. She has spent one year and has just passed the half-way mark on this basket; there will never be any notes or sketches. While her life will be very much a part of her family and village, she will conceptualize, make and sell this basket entirely alone. She will have selected and dried and split and dyed all the fibers she will use. She will have imagined the size and form, the images, the range of colors, tints, and shades, the size of the stitch and, all inside her head, assembled the surface design patterns so as to fit absolutely perfectly on her three-dimensional form.

The images on this particular basket are more pictorial than geometric. The gracefulness of the composition and the visual balance of figure with field is immediately apparent. She depicts hummingbirds in flight in front of the falling leaves of the rainforest dry season. The leaves are of graded value and hue. There are three species of rainforest trees, and several of butterflies. Some of the birds are outlined in a very fine black line. And yet all of this design work can only be applied because of an intensity of labor and technique that I find nearly impossible to imagine.

There is such a fine and tight stitch that the surface of the basket feels like silk. Even at this half completed stage it is as firm and tight as an over-inflated basketball. There is by definition a matrix quality to any image made up of points on a surface. The more points there are for a given surface area, the higher the resolution, or the more distinct and clear and easily read is the image. Typical American Indian and Yupic Eskimo coil baskets may have 5 to 7 coils per vertical inch and 25 to 35 stitches per running inch of coil giving them a total or 125 to 250 stitches per square inch. The very finest of silk Turkish rugs may get to 900 knots per square inch of surface. The basket being made by Lolea has between 20 and 22 coils per inch and 50 to 60 individual stitches per running inch of coil for a total of between 1,000 and 1320 stitches per square inch. I quickly estimate the surface area of her basket in my head. The area of a sphere, and this basket would be a sphere if the top were simply closed instead of extending upward to form the neck, is 4 times pi times the radius squared. I do the radius at 8.5 inches and come up with 908 square inches. This means that there will be between 900,000 and 1,200,000 individual stitches in her basket. A million stitches in two years is 41,000 stitches a month, or 1,300 stitches a day, every day.

She stitches while I watch, and I am suddenly overwhelmed with a kind of privileged insight. I wonder how it is that some people are able to make this investment. What do the masters have in their internal clock that allows them to always see, to imagine, the completed piece, to take such powerful short term loss for the long, long term gain? What are the sacrifices and investments that allow some people to see off into the distant future, while others need a more immediate satisfaction? What allows someone to pursue such a long term goal? I am struck by the range of human behavior that means one person will be able to concentrate and invest and imagine only to a certain point. Then they are done; they are done and they are tired of it and they are ready for the ending and for the reward. Yet another person is somehow able to envision a grander and significantly more complex outcome.

Is this the outcome allowed by embracing the slog, by loving the "work", by belief in discipline and in what it means to see ones work "add up"? I wonder what it is that determines that point of patience in any of us. I look around the room. The other women stitch on perfectly wonderful baskets as well, but they are more modest, they'll be completed in a matter of months instead of years. I am suddenly astounded at this range in our ways of working, and I wonder at those who can make the "investment", who can take the short term loss of the long term gain, and wonder if they have some quality of self-understanding that does not require the same gratification and praise as the rest of us. I watch her stitch. Perhaps in the beginning we are able to only really work toward that for which they can see clearly the outcome, and perhaps it's only later that we learn to assemble the steps and embrace a longer view. I think of the range of differences between expeditious, utilitarian craft and the investment going on in front of me. Regardless of our culture it must be that each of us has a place in the spectrum.

My journey to these rainforests, to this village, and to this house had begun some months earlier while pulling trash out of the Santa Fe River with friend Michael Smith. He told me that he had been asked to host a fund-raising event on behalf of Native Future Inc., an organization dedicated to protecting cultures and conserving threatened lands. He was also being offered the opportunity to sell in his gallery baskets made by people of the Wounaan (pronounced "Wouu-non" with the accent on the second syllable) Tribe, a very small, very remote, and very threatened group indigenous to eastern Panama and the Darien Rainforest. Michael had been a dealer in antique baskets for many years, and he had never seen any baskets as fine as these. I agreed.

The fund raiser went well; several members of the Wounaan Tribe came to the gallery for the event and it was the very first time for many folks to hear the Wounaan and to see the phenomenal quality of their work. I became enthralled and after many hours on the phone was able to arrange the journey to Rio Hondo with Clive Kincaid, the founder of Native Future and the current supplier of baskets to Michael.

Yesterday we left the pleasant and very affordable little Hotel California in Panama City at 5:00 a.m. We drove down the crowded Pan American Highway several hours through the town of Chepo to a small private port and boat ramp on the Bayano River. Still in the dark, but with the right tide, we put a daypack each into a fiberglass boat with an outboard motor and begin the six hour journey down stream, along the coast, past several coastal Wounaan villages, and back up another river to the village of Maje. As the river widens from a hundred feet to a mile or more the sun arrives. The wind from the boat's speed offsets the humidity, but as we travel from the green fresh river to the blue salt water we encounter an ocean chop that is extraordinarily violent. We charge forward several miles offshore; even at this distance the sea is afloat with jungle debris of leaves and logs. White Pelicans present their low soaring and arching dive dance while the boat slams brutally onto each new wave. The outboard fumes and the spilled gasoline don't help, and when we finally get off the boat we are all nauseous. I have large bruises on my forearms from the gunnels, I've chipped one tooth, and I'll find it painful to sit down for the next two days. We catch our breath heading up the calmer river water during the last miles of the journey.

The Rio Balso narrows; we move through mangrove. The "captain" makes seeming arbitrary decisions through complex channels speeding past trees full of monkeys and birds and flora of every description. Just as the water becomes too shallow to proceed we arrive at the edge of the village. With 99 buildings and 980 people Maje is the largest village of the Wounaan Tribe. We spend the rest of a blazing hot day in this picturesque village of thatched pole houses and beautiful painted small people. We talk, eat, look at baskets, and laugh with people. I am fascinated by the basket makers; I take notes and photographs. Clive negotiates basket prices. On the journey into the village I came to see the how the rhythm of life here is part of the rhythm of the tides. It's a powerful tide, looking to me to be around 10 feet, sweeping up and down the rivers, in and out of the mangroves twice each day and there is little human activity that does not comply with its influence.

Back in the boat, the tide is at the last of its outflow. Shallow water means that we'll drift without the motor for a half hour or so. The timing is carefully done; we'll have the incoming tide later to help carry us up the Rio Pasiga to village Rio Hondo. For the next three hours we charge downstream and then west along the coast. At twilight we are wishing we'd left earlier. As we switch off the motor in the shallow water of the village it is the beginning of the pitch black night. There is a sky full of bright stars but only one or two small flashlights for seeing and no moon yet. We are greeted by the sounds of children playing, welcoming voices and yelping dogs. In the dark our packs are snatched away and small hands grab mine and lead me along the jungle path from the river through the center of the village to the small house that will be ours for the night.

We've spent the night under mosquito nets, had our hot coffee and fried plantains and been treated to the scurrying of brightly colored skirts. Now, as we walk toward the house of Lolea Mejla, the evidence is everywhere, not only of a healthy and happy village, but of thriving basket production. I soon see the two different fibers used for making the baskets. The filler fiber, inside of the coil, is stiffer and does not have the tensile strength required of the outer wrapping fiber. The inside is the so called Panama Hat Palm, or Navala Palm (Carludovica palmate) and it's actually not a palm at all but a cyclanth, a member of the Cyclanthaceeae Family. Maintaining a uniform size to the bulk of the coil is critical to the uniformity of the basket. Some women use a small clear plastic tube and slide all the inner fibers through it. Keeping it full all the time assures a uniform bulk. I've see others using a white bead, perhaps from some game. The hole in these little "gages" can vary from 1/8^th inch to nearly a quarter inch. The outer fiber, or thread, is from the Chunga Palm (Astrocaryum standleyanum) and the technique is to split them down into very fine threadlike fibers, twist them severely, and thread them through a medium sized steel needle. These threads are normally a foot and a half to two feet long. They are extraordinarily strong, some say stronger than nylon.

This twisted and dyed outer thread is then wrapped around the bundle of filler fiber while simultaneously catching a bit of the previous bundle with the needle. All this is done in one continuous overlapping spiral and, in my mind, is related to the construction of an igloo with its spiral of slowly changing radius. All this, of course, sounds much easier than it is. It is desirable for the "thread" to lie flat and fully cover the filling material which may be of a contrasting color or value; however the thread must be twisted to have its full strength. This means that the needle is pulled through flat but that the needle is then spun in the finger tips at the end of each stitch. This is a wonderfully complex movement. The raw "threads" are being held between the toes; the needle is run through and then flattened against the bundle with the other hand. Then the fingers holding the needle twirl it between thumb and forefinger to give it a bit more strength while the wrist then gives it two or three light tugs to cinch it tightly into the bundle.

While this stitching process requires total mastery for anything near consistent results, there are other aspects of the whole production process that seem to require more attentiveness. Splitting the palm leaf, collecting the other plants that are used for dying and collecting the young chunga palm fibers at the right time, are each steps with exacting demands if the product is to have the desired quality. I am reminded of my years of conducting glaze tests for pots, but I at least had reference books, and I didn't have to keep all my notes in my head.

Strolling around the village I see beautiful fans of fibers everywhere. They are laid out neatly on some smooth patch of ground or on top of hedges to dry and bleach in the sun. They are not yet separated into individual threads but left on the main stalk for easy gathering and turning. I see that there are many styles and types of fiber containers from big open-weave "back-pack" affairs to small rather square "waste basket" shapes. But for the market though there seem to be only three identifiable categories. Any of them can come from a woman, or girl, of any age.

What visitors call the "Primitive" style are the simplest and quickest to make. They are the traditional 3" to 6" oblong basket with a tightly fitting lid and modest, if any, decoration. They have binding threads, or stitches, that do not meet one another on the sides, but run vertically from coil to coil. They were most often used by shamans to contain the small tools of their trade. These were the most common basket of the Wounaan before the construction of the Panama Canal. But now the "Geometric" and the "Pictorial" styles are powerfully popular with collectors, and it's easy to see why.

Now, some months later, I'm back in the Michael Smith Gallery in Santa Fe. Many of the baskets we brought out of the villages have found good homes, homes that will appreciate the heritage, the ultra fine craftsmanship and design excellence inherent in each absolutely unique piece. And, while these baskets appear empty when they are shipped and sold, I see now that each carries something inside it. Each contains a smell and a flavor and a spirit that is a piece of the life of the woman who made it. Each began its life in a small chunga, or nahuala, palm buried deeply inside a distant rainforest; it was selected and dried, and woven by beautiful fingers, handled lovingly many times with caring gentleness, and with that attending care it became a modest yet powerful gift for our hand to hold and our eye to scan, our own unique heart to embrace.

Verne Stanford has served as Executive Director at the Penland School of Crafts, the Maui Arts and Cultural Center, the Visual Arts Center of Alaska, the New Mexico Crafts Council, and the Nelson Island School of Design, among many others. He lives in Santa Fe and on the island of Paros and writes about art and craft. He consults on cultural issues and worked for the Michael Smith Gallery.