BASKETS MADE BY THE WOUNAAN AND EMBERA INDIANS FROM THE DARIEN RAINFOREST OF PANAMAS
SHOP THE GALLERIES
Each Gallery Page at the top shows the baskets available for sale.
The book, Darien Rainforest Basketry, is no longer available.
Ebooks are in English, French, and Spanish.
You may still order while I am in Panama and I will let you know when I can ship them. Ebooks can be downloaded immediately.
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Hösig Di Geometric or Cultural Designs
Traditionally, the hösig di were either plain white or decorated with simple geometric motifs. Sometimes these patterns are referred to as “cultural” designs. Many of these geometric motifs have been and still are traditionally used in body painting, especially for chin tattoos painted with the blue-black dye of the jagua fruit, traditional tattoo designs used by the Wounaan for centuries. Some of these geometric patterns are said to be entoptic in origin, visual symbols and experiences that come from within the optical system, experienced in shamanistic trance states. Many of them are similar to Native American Indian designs found everywhere in the Western Hemisphere, especially in the Pre-Colombian pottery and pictographs of the American Southwest.
Hösig Di Pictorial Designs
Since the Wounaan in Panamá began making baskets for collectors and tourists, they have incorporated familiar plants, flowers, birds, fish, insects, animals and their tracks into what are often referred to as zoomorphic “pictorial” or “natural” designs, all part of their natural rainforest surroundings. These “pictorial” designs are the ones most likely to incorporate new and vibrant colors. In addition to the ovoid baskets and coiled plates, the Emberá in Panamá have begun experimenting with creating masks, insects, and animals of coiled chunga.
Utilitarian Baskets
Woven utilitarian baskets have served many purposes for centuries: closets, cupboards, suitcases, jewelry cases, implement holders, doghouses, chicken coops, and they have many other uses such as fish traps, seen on the left.,
The Wounaan and Emberá Indians from the Darién Rainforest of Panama
The Darien Rainforest is part of the Chocó Bioregion, the tropical rainforest lowlands on the Pacific Coast of Eastern Panama, Colombia, and northern Ecuador.
Wounaan Houses along the Upper Chagres River
No roads go through the Darien Rainforest into Colombia, and almost all travel is still done by shallow dugout canoes. Since the Indians traditionally live on the edge of a river, ideally where two rivers come together and high enough on the riverbank that they do not fear floods, they are accustomed to having close access to fresh running water for drinking, cooking, and bathing.
Wounaan House
Their houses are ideally suited to the warm, humid, tropical climate. The living quarters are on a wooden platform built up on stilts 4 to 12 feet off the ground, usually divided into three separate use areas with a central all-purpose room, sleeping and storage areas on the sides, and a kitchen area. There is no furniture other than little wooden benches and hammocks for sleeping and sitting. Poles rise from the sides to form the roof supports, and palm fronds are thatched together to complete the roof. Low-hanging eaves further protect the inhabitants from rain. One enters the house by climbing up a notched log that has been placed at an angle against the side of the house. In the kitchen floor area, three large logs on a wooden frame filled with packed earth support cooking pots.
Plantain, a starchy banana look-alike, is their staple crop and a traditional meal always included plantains and usually fresh water fish from the river. These Indians were clever, successful hunters. With their blowguns, bows, and poison-tipped darts and arrows, they traditionally brought home an adequate supply of protein from the Rainforest, and they used to fish with wooden harpoons and spears from their dugouts.
The Wounaan and Emberá have always used a slash and burn method to clear land for their small household gardens, and since they were a small and migrant population, the Rainforest has always been able to recover after they have moved on. They also harvest other useful fruits and medicines that grow naturally in the Darién and do not need to be cultivated. Sugar cane is especially important, and the Emberá are even called “people of the cane”.
Their clothing is as well suited to the climate as their houses. Traditionally the men wore a narrow loincloth and the women mostly still wear the traditional short paruma.
Body decoration, usually geometric designs, has traditionally been an important part of Wounaan and Emberá dress and appearance. The juice of the jagua fruit (Genípa americana) is the basis of most body decoration: as the juice oxidizes, a deep blue-black indigo emerges on the skin where the jagua juice was painted. The color lasts about eight days. This same jagua juice is also the basis for many colors used in basketry.
Red, the other important decorative color found in the Rainforest, comes from the annatto fruit (Bixa orellana). The women often decorate their faces with bright red circles on their cheeks from the annatto juice, and the reds, oranges, and yellows from the annatto fruit also form a basic color in the range of dyes used in basketry.
Wounaan and Emberá society has always been relatively mobile. With a history of horrendous floods on the rivers, houses and gardens are flooded out or completely washed away every decade or so, and families are forced to reestablish themselves in a new location.
At the time of the Conquest in the early sixteenth century, the Wounaan fought hardest against subjugation by the Spanish. All the indigenous peoples in Colombia, the Kuna, Emberá, and Wounaan, fled slowly westward to escape the encroaching Europeans who brought disease and enslavement with them. In Panamá, over 3,000 Wounaan have now been living in close proximity to 12,000 Emberá for over 50 years.
Today the Wounaan and Emberá are best known in the outside world for their fine craftsmanship as carvers and basket weavers. Traditionally they have always been noted artisans and many people think that the Wounaan are the originators of fine art while the Emberá are only imitators of Wounaan ideas and creations, but there has been a lot of sharing of ideas and cross-cultural influences on crafts. There are fine artisans in both tribes, and even the Indians themselves cannot necessarily identify a basket as being distinctly Emberá or Wounaan in origin, although they might be able to identify the work of an individual artist.
The Wounaan and Emberá men are traditionally master wood carvers, especially of the tropical rosewood cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa), carving animals and other representational figures on ceremonial healing sticks as well as making rough figures for toys. Wounaan and Emberá women make baskets, both the utilitarian ones used every day, and the fine hösig di baskets for collectors.
Panamá has historically and culturally had strong ties to South America, and was actually part of Colombia until 1903; the Indians still live on both sides of the border. They could once move relatively freely from one country to the other; now, however, it has become too dangerous to wander around the Darién because of the current plague of guerrilla activity on both sides of the Colombian border. Additionally, the Wounaan and Emberá are increasingly being squeezed out of their traditional living areas by encroaching campesinos, ranchers, loggers and miners, and it is becoming progressively more difficult to find the plant materials needed for basket weaving. In order for their children to go to school, many Indians have left their isolated homes in the Darien to move into villages and also into the cities of Colón and Panamá City, although they return frequently to the Darién.
As a result of their centuries of isolation on riverbanks in the Darién, the Wounaan and Emberá Indians had learned few skills for coping with the outside world. Since the 1980’s, their traditional skills as artisans have provided an accessible means for them to earn money and function in a cash economy. Their fine hösig di baskets deserve to be recognized as the equal of any fine baskets made anywhere today, and indeed many collectors consider them the finest contemporary baskets in the world.
The Wounaan and Emberá have always used a slash and burn method to clear land for their small household gardens, and since they were a small and migrant population, the Rainforest has always been able to recover after they have moved on. They also harvest other useful fruits and medicines that grow naturally in the Darién and do not need to be cultivated. Sugar cane is especially important, and the Emberá are even called “people of the cane”.
Their clothing is as well suited to the climate as their houses. Traditionally the men wore a narrow loincloth and the women mostly still wear the traditional short paruma.
Body decoration, usually geometric designs, has traditionally been an important part of Wounaan and Emberá dress and appearance. The juice of the jagua fruit (Genípa americana) is the basis of most body decoration: as the juice oxidizes, a deep blue-black indigo emerges on the skin where the jagua juice was painted. The color lasts about eight days. This same jagua juice is also the basis for many colors used in basketry.
Red, the other important decorative color found in the Rainforest, comes from the annatto fruit (Bixa orellana). The women often decorate their faces with bright red circles on their cheeks from the annatto juice, and the reds, oranges, and yellows from the annatto fruit also form a basic color in the range of dyes used in basketry.
Wounaan and Emberá society has always been relatively mobile. With a history of horrendous floods on the rivers, houses and gardens are flooded out or completely washed away every decade or so, and families are forced to reestablish themselves in a new location.
At the time of the Conquest in the early sixteenth century, the Wounaan fought hardest against subjugation by the Spanish. All the indigenous peoples in Colombia, the Kuna, Emberá, and Wounaan, fled slowly westward to escape the encroaching Europeans who brought disease and enslavement with them. In Panamá, over 3,000 Wounaan have now been living in close proximity to 12,000 Emberá for over 50 years.
Today the Wounaan and Emberá are best known in the outside world for their fine craftsmanship as carvers and basket weavers. Traditionally they have always been noted artisans and many people think that the Wounaan are the originators of fine art while the Emberá are only imitators of Wounaan ideas and creations, but there has been a lot of sharing of ideas and cross-cultural influences on crafts. There are fine artisans in both tribes, and even the Indians themselves cannot necessarily identify a basket as being distinctly Emberá or Wounaan in origin, although they might be able to identify the work of an individual artist.
The Wounaan and Emberá men are traditionally master wood carvers, especially of the tropical rosewood cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa), carving animals and other representational figures on ceremonial healing sticks as well as making rough figures for toys. Wounaan and Emberá women make baskets, both the utilitarian ones used every day, and the fine hösig di baskets for collectors.
Panamá has historically and culturally had strong ties to South America, and was actually part of Colombia until 1903; the Indians still live on both sides of the border. They could once move relatively freely from one country to the other; now, however, it has become too dangerous to wander around the Darién because of the current plague of guerrilla activity on both sides of the Colombian border. Additionally, the Wounaan and Emberá are increasingly being squeezed out of their traditional living areas by encroaching campesinos, ranchers, loggers and miners, and it is becoming progressively more difficult to find the plant materials needed for basket weaving. In order for their children to go to school, many Indians have left their isolated homes in the Darien to move into villages and also into the cities of Colón and Panamá City, although they return frequently to the Darién.
As a result of their centuries of isolation on riverbanks in the Darién, the Wounaan and Emberá Indians had learned few skills for coping with the outside world. Since the 1980’s, their traditional skills as artisans have provided an accessible means for them to earn money and function in a cash economy. Their fine hösig di baskets deserve to be recognized as the equal of any fine baskets made anywhere today, and indeed many collectors consider them the finest contemporary baskets in the world.
Rosalina Tascon
with one of her butterfly baskets.
Basket making, a traditional art that has been handed down from mother to daughter since the earliest times, represents the deepest traditions of Wounaan and Emberá culture. Baskets are usually made by women. All the baskets made traditionally by the Wounaan and Emberá are woven with different materials found in the Darien Rainforest, and come in many different shapes and sizes, depending on the specific use for which each is intended. In my book, Darién Rainforest Basketry, I divided the baskets into two separate groups: hösig di, the fine baskets of chunga (fibers from the black palm tree (Astrocaryum standleyanum) made with a coil construction, and the woven utilitarian baskets. Since the fine chunga baskets are the most tightly constructed and are the most difficult to make, they are the ones that most interest collectors of fine baskets. Since they were traditionally made only by the Wounaan, I chose to call them by their Wounaan name: hösig di.
Chunga is historically important to the Wounaan and plays a very important role in Wounaan life. It is used in healing ceremonies, making weapons, and for house posts. It is the tree from which the Creator of Everything, Hẽwandam, made the Wounaan people. (Some creation stories credit the peach palm or cocobolo, instead). Chunga is the symbol of creation, force and power, and the fine baskets are made of chunga fiber.
Hösig di, the traditional Wounaan baskets made of fine chunga, were not greatly decorated. Sometimes a few black or red designs were incorporated into the natural white undyed chunga, but most often they were plain white. Since they are difficult to make, they were usually quite small. Only in 1982 did the Wounaan start to make their fine chunga baskets for collectors. Friends and patrons suggested that more designs, finer stitches, and more symmetrical shapes would increase the quality of the baskets and bring higher prices from collectors. Both Wounaan and Emberá were making chunga baskets to sell by 1990, and they have become highly-prized collector’s items.
These baskets are made exclusively from the tender, young, emerging leaves of chunga and nahuala (the Panama Hat Palm). The women peel away the tough outer layer so that they have a wide inner strip of fiber that is then cut into several very narrow strips which are washed and bleached in the sun to create a strong fiber as fine as sewing thread. Strips of nahuala, the Panama Hat Palm (Carludovica palmata), so called because Panama hats are made from it, form the central core of the fine hösig di baskets.
The colors are all natural and are extracted from fruits, leaves, wood shavings, roots, mud, ashes, and other natural products found in the Rainforest. The intensity of the color varies according to how long the chunga fibers are left in the dye. Different artists have different recipes for blending their colors and mixing their dyes; as they experiment with new dye materials, they are creating an even greater spectrum of colors.
White is the natural color of the tender young chunga leaflets; black comes from cooking the white chunga fibers with shavings from cocobolo wood (Dalbergia retusa, tropical rosewood) and burying them in mud where the tannin in the earth dyes the material. Black can also be created by soaking the chunga fibers in jagua (Genípa americana) juice and then burying them in black mud. Red comes from the annatto fruit (Bixa orellana).
Since the mid-1980’s, when the baskets began to be prized by collectors and the international art market, the Wounaan and Emberá have become very creative in their use of natural dyes. They are constantly experimenting with new color possibilities, combinations and sources. Some of the most common are the following: P’ucham vine (Bignoniaceae arrabidea chica), Trumpet Vine Flower, Cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa) shavings, Palo tinte, Turmeric or azafrán root (Curcuma longa); Teak leaves, P’ucham amarillo, a yellow Trumpet Vine Flower, Jagua (Genípa americana), Titiimie, the mucuña vine leaf, Hoja venenosa (soliman), Flowering wild orange ginger (Renealmia aromatica), Annatto fruit (Bixa orellana); Sidí(W), from the fruit of a vine that grows on the riverbanks.
The weaver begins her hosig di by tying an overhand knot with a small bundle of nahuala strips, then she takes a fine strip of chunga that has been threaded through a needle and begins to stitch around the bundle of nahuala strips, coiling the bundle of strips around the center knot. She continues to enlarge the spiral, using the wrapping-sewing strand to fasten the new section of coil to the previous coil until she has produced an oblong or circular coiled mat that creates the bottom of her basket or tray. She will include her colored strips of chunga in the bundle of nahuala strands so that her new color is always available to sew her pattern. She uses non-interlocking stitching where the sewing strand passes through the lower coil between the preceding stitches. Because the stitches lie almost directly above each other, they form a straight line on the basket. The smaller the coil and the smaller and more even the stitches, the finer the result. The most common stitch is called the diente peinado (combed teeth) because the stitches appear to be lined up in a straight line. The medio doblado (half-doubled) stitch uses more nahuala strips in the inner bundle and the ribs are more easily apparent: the first half-stitch loops around the nahuala core, the second stitch passes through the lower coil between the stitches.
(Excerpted from
Darién Rainforest Basketry)