born weavers - ongoing project (51) > Taiwanese Aboriginal Weavers, collaborating with Labay Neyong
I was invited by artist Labay Neyong to participate in her field research about Taiwanese Aboriginal weaving culture in Aug 2009. In these one and half months we had been interviewing weavers inside the Seediq and Bunun tribes, Wanrong township, Haulien county, Taiwan.
For Labay, a daughter of Seediq, it is her life long task and duty to preserve this technique and introduce this culture to the world before it is lost forever. It would be a long term project and the first step we decided to accomplish was to document these women’s stories, what makes them who they are and what they had achieved. We chose eight skillful weavers to be our interviewees, whose average age is 80 years old.
Men hunt, women weave. In these two tribes, it is customary to judge a woman’s social status according to her weaving skills and originality. As one of the grandmother said during the interview, you can’t not be seen as a woman if you can’t weave. It is essential for a mother to weave for the whole family cloth as well as for bartering goods. However, the most significant thing is to weave for the daughter’s trousseau through their loving hands. This heritage and value had been passing on generation after generation through mother-daughter coaching until modern days, until the time-consuming process was seen as nothingness.
As the interviews went by, both Labay and I were deeply touched by how this culture intimately shaped and intricately intertwined with these weavers’ values of life. From birth, through adolescence, to becoming mothers and wives, until the day they pass away. Their seasons are divided by the weaving process through linen planting, yarn making to weaving. Their daily time table is defined by weaving. Even as little aspect as the way they sit on the floor is formed by the weaving sitting position. Every detail in life is transformed into a piece of cloth, which is possibly the only thing they can offer to the people they love, which is in all probability the only way they know how to show their appreciation to the ancestral spirits and the tradition they cherish. Weaving is in their blood and they are born to be weavers.
This project is dedicated to all the weavers we met of the village of HoygYe, MaYuan, Xilin and MingLi, Wanrong township, Haulien county, Taiwan.