Rupununi Weavers conflict reported in New York Times
THE Rupununi Weavers Society made news on the front page of the New York Times [please note: link provided by LOSP web site] yesterday because of a reported conflict between groups in the region. The story headed `Weavers Go Dot-Com, and Elders Move In' by Simon Romero, said Lethem, where the society is based, had "no phones until two years ago, and the concept of paying with money is still quite foreign to many residents." "But it was in this community of 2,000 people that an organisation formed by indigenous women of two tribes revived the ancient art of hand-weaving large hammocks from locally grown cotton -- and then took their exquisite wares online", he wrote. The society last year sold 17 hammocks to people around the world for as much as US$1,000 apiece, and selling through electronic commerce created tension between the weavers and the traditional regional leadership, according to the report. "Threatened by the women's success, regional leaders moved in and took control of the weavers' organisation. The woman who created the Web site quit in a fury, and the group has been struggling since then to get by", it said. Romero noted that Matthew Squire of the British Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) was instrumental a decade ago in reviving hammock making by Amerindian in the Rupununi. Using 19th-century accounts and illustrations of the hammocks made by European travellers, Squire and several women reintroduced the process, from cultivating the cotton on small family plots to weaving the brown-and-white hammocks. Squire, who now lives in Sussex, England told the writer, "This was something that was untainted by the rest of the world that was still alive in memory." According to the newspaper, by the mid-90's, the weavers, 300 women from the Wapishiana and Macushi tribes known as the Rupununi Weavers Society, had sold a hammock to the British Museum in London. The museum called it "one of the most perfect forms of indigenous art we have purchased this century." Romero related that two years ago, as the weavers tried to sell their hammocks to museums and collectors by mailings through an unreliable postal service, the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph (GT&T) company installed telephone lines in Lethem using an innovative satellite system. He found out that a few months later, the chief executive of the company, Bill Humphries, an American, offered the weavers society two telephone lines, free Internet access and US$12,000 worth of equipment, including a desktop computer and a scanner. "It was a marvelous opportunity to get good publicity and free advertising," said Humphries, now an executive with a telecommunications company in Nashville, Tennessee. Someone was needed to coordinate maintaining a Web site capable of marketing the hammocks and GT&T paid for Sharla Hernández, a promising young member of the group and a protégée of Squire, to go to Georgetown to learn about the Internet, the newspaper said. After Ms Hernández returned to Lethem with knowledge of the Web, the enterprise took off and since mid-1998, the society has sold 20 hammocks over the Internet, it said. "Although their prices seem high here (in Lethem), they are not much considering that an estimated 600 hours of work goes into each hammock", Romero wrote. But members of the society told the newspaper local government leaders did not like their success. "We became a huge threat," Hernández, 21, said in an interview. The newspaper said former district chairman Muacir Baretto and others made a successful effort to take control of the weavers' society. Although he has stepped down as chairman, Baretto remains the most influential management figure from behind the scenes, it said. The struggle for power has not just been between the women who provide the labour for the enterprise and the region's men, Romero wrote. Shirley Melville, owner of a general store that doubles as the main watering hole and money-lending operation in Lethem, is a crucial member of the governing body. "I'm here to make sure our culture is not damaged," she told the New York Times. Hernández said she felt that she was being marginalised and resigned from the organisation last month. "I was made to cry by these people," she told the newspaper. The New York Times report said that since her resignation, the weavers' society has had just one inquiry about buying a hammock over its Web site, www.gol.net.gy/rweavers. "Regardless of what has happened and been said," Baretto told the newspaper, "we have the best interests of the society's members at heart."
|