Cloth and the Art of Connection with the Karen Weaving Circle

“I want to encourage young people to learn weaving, so they will never forget where they come from, to hold their culture alive and also pass it down to the next generation.”

This is how Ku Say, a young Karen weaver based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, explained her motivation as a student of weaving during a narrative session in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Youth and the Future of Culture program. The story of Karen people is marked by their struggle to survive. Why is the craft of weaving so central to their cultural resilience?

Karen (pronounced kuh-REN) people are a diverse ethnic minority from southern and southeastern Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand. Along with other minority groups, they have faced displacement and repression from the government of Burma for decades. In response to ongoing violent conflict, many Karen people have fled the country since the 1980s for refugee camps in Thailand, and some have made new homes abroad as part of one of the world’s largest refugee resettlement programs.

Around 20,000 Karen people and other refugees from Burma now live in Minnesota, the largest community of Karen people in the United States. To serve this population, refugees created the Karen Organization of Minnesota (KOM), a social services agency that helps resettled Karen people adjust to life in a new country and to strengthen their community. KOM’s constituents are of different generations and refugee experiences: some born in Burma, some in Thailand, and new generations being raised in the United States.

KOM collaborates with Saint Paul’s East Side Freedom Library to host the Karen Weaving Circle, offering a space for youth and senior weavers to come together, practice and teach weaving, and sell their goods through participation in art fairs and festivals.

Working with the Karen Weaving Circle, the Festival was able to highlight some of their creative, hopeful strategies for sustaining their cultural traditions and sense of belonging as Karen people.

Weaving Connects Generations

Karen people can experience the way of life in the United States as more isolating, in contrast to Karen villages where houses are close together and people work together often. Language barriers and lack of transportation are also challenges. For refugee communities, establishing regular gatherings and special events is essential to their well-being.

Rosie Say, a senior weaver at the Festival, explained that weaving is a natural part of this intentional gathering: many women have a talent for weaving, so they formed the weaving circle in 2015 simply from their desire to get together. They had little funding, so they worked with donated yarns and basic materials, but together they revived Karen weaving, a traditional women’s art form, in the United States. The circle now meets weekly to socialize and support one another and to sustain and pass on this traditional art.

During the summer, they conduct intensive classes as part of KOM’s summer youth programming, which also includes dance instruction. Weaving instruction is open to young women and men alike. Dance, weaving, traditional dress, and Karen language are anchors that ground the youth participants in their culture. The weavers participate in art fairs and events in the Twin Cities area, so weaving also creates ties with neighbors and other communities.

“Weaving itself is a metaphor for bringing people together, and for culture staying connected,” observed Rachel Cooper, moderator for one of the Festival sessions and a director at Asia Society.

Youth weavers Mae Ra Paw, Ku Say, and Htee Hser attended the weaving summer programs, seeing the lessons not only as textile training but also as an opportunity to know their own culture and history more deeply. At the Festival, they joined Rosie and KOM staff members Hta Thi Yu Moo and Synthia Htoo to demonstrate and teach their weaving, speak in narrative sessions, and even cook on the Foodways stage.

The weavers “make do” creatively. For example, they invented a folding warping board so that they could carry it in their luggage to Washington, D.C. The warping board is used to measure out and organize the warp threads, which run the length of the textile and can be several meters long, while the weft runs side to side.

Since their displacement, most Karen weavers in the United States use commercially produced cotton yarns, rather than cotton they cultivate and dye themselves, as their grandparents did. They have also adapted to making loom components out of readily available lumber, dowels, and hardware. This openness and problem solving are also part of the tradition, as research shows that historical Karen weavers creatively experimented with new materials, dyes, and yarns.

Karen weavers typically use a backstrap loom, in which the weaver’s body becomes part of the equipment with a belt or strap around their back providing the necessary tension on the warp. The loom is lightweight and portable and can be set up indoors or outdoors.

In their meeting space in the East Side Freedom Library, the weavers have put together a brace between columns that supports their looms, and they can face one another across it, allowing them to both work and converse. At the Festival, our tech team adapted this setup to the tent, so visitors could get a close-up view of the weavers’ equipment and techniques.

Clothes Tell a Story about Who You Are

The backstrap loom is relatively simple equipment that can produce complicated weaves. Karen weavers use supplemental weft designs, meaning the contrasting colors of yarn are added in individually to create surface patterns. They also use arrangements of multiple warp colors or ikat technique (resist-dyeing the warp threads before weaving) to create their complex fabrics. Garments are also enhanced with multicolored embroidery and beads made of coix seeds. According to Hta Thi, the beads are beloved because they can represent rice, which is essential to their community.

Distinctive patterns are associated with certain villages or regions, showcasing the wearer’s origin. Others relate to stories and lessons whose interpretation can vary across regions. Hta Thi gave the example of a motif that looks like diamonds, but that some weavers know as spiders.

“When they [spiders] make their web, they keep making the web until they are finished, and they never stop,” Hta Thi said. “So Karen people, they will weave: they are not going to stop even if it’s nighttime. If they want their shirt or their bag to be done, they keep on weaving.”

Ku Say emphasized, “The pattern like a spiderweb means to never give up—as a people, we have to keep trying.”

white threads or beads filling in the gaps between pink squares.

Traditional-style Karen outfits are worn for special occasions, and some wear them in daily life, adapting them to suit the climates and communities where they now live. Particular colors and garment styles are important at key occasions like weddings, Karen New Year, and wrist-tying ceremonies, an event centered on spiritual protection that is celebrated as a reunion.

Garments often use an iconic palette of red, black, and white, colors that speak to identity and stage of life: white dresses for unmarried women and girls, red sarongs for men, and black and red tunics with skirts for married women. Aside from these most traditional colors, the interplay of many bright colors is part of the beauty of contemporary Karen textiles—and part of the creative joy of weaving.

During a narrative session, Hta Thi joked that since she was wearing jeans, “I’m not a good example!” But her personal style of pairing a woven and embroidered shirt with blue jeans exemplifies the enduring relevance of Karen dress in contemporary life and in new places. 

Rebecca Fenton is a program curator at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and a textile nerd.