How Wounaan Weavers Make Their Colors: Cocobolo, Pucham, Achiote and Turmeric

Hand-dyed chunga palm fiber, braided into hanks before weaving.

Wounaan baskets are colored with plants. The weavers of Panama's Darién dye split chunga palm (Astrocaryum standleyanum) with four main sources: cocobolo wood for brown and black, the pucham vine for red and green, achiote seed for orange, and turmeric root for yellow. The dyed strands are then stitched over a coil of nahuala (Carludovica palmata, the Panama-hat palm) in the technique the Wounaan call hösig di. None of it comes from a bottle, and in most of the families I buy from, the woman who weaves the basket also made its colors.

That second fact is the one collectors rarely hear. A Wounaan basket is two crafts in one object. There is the stitching, which gets most of the attention, and there is the dye work that comes before a single stitch is placed. This post is about the second craft and the weavers who have pushed it furthest.

What natural dyes do Wounaan weavers use?

The core palette comes from a handful of plants that grow in or near the villages. My working reference is Weaving the Scarlet Macaw, the 2009 book on hösig di by Charlotte and Lorran Meares, and it matches what the weavers themselves describe.

• Cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa). Shavings of this rosewood are boiled with the fiber to make brown. Mud takes that brown to black.
• Pucham (Arrabidaea chica), the trumpet-flower vine. Fresh leaves give green. Dried leaves give a deep red.
• Achiote (Bixa orellana), also called annatto. The seeds inside the spiny pod give the most saturated orange in the palette.
• Asafrán, which is turmeric (Curcuma longa), not saffron. The root is grated and pounded for yellow.

Dried pucham leaves going into the pot over an open fire. Dried leaves give red. Photo: Weaving the Scarlet Macaw, 2009.

Working ground turmeric through split chunga by hand, with a second pot of it ready. Photo: Weaving the Scarlet Macaw, 2009.

Undyed chunga is its own color, a pale straw that reads almost white next to the black. Everything else a weaver shows you, from rust to pink to purple to gray, is built from these sources by adjusting how long the fiber sits in the pot, how much material goes in, and what it is combined with. Each weaver keeps her own recipes.

Who first dyed chunga black with cocobolo?

Dalia Negria did. She grew up in Sinai, a remote Wounaan village in the Darién, and learned chunga from her aunt. Cocobolo had been a carver's wood, reserved for Wounaan men. Dalia was the first to boil it for basket fiber and produce a true black. She also developed the red from pucham, a leaf the Wounaan already used as medicine for wounds.

Those two colors redrew what a Wounaan basket could look like. The crisp black-and-white geometrics collectors now associate with the tradition depend on a black that stays black. Dalia has since taught more than 400 Wounaan weavers chunga basketry through Emberá-Wounaan organizations and church-led workshops, so her dyes travelled with her technique. She and her sisters Miriam and Cristina moved much of the family to Chepo about a decade ago, because school in their village ended at sixth grade. Weaving income paid for that move. Cristina's daughter, Maricin Cheucarama Negria, went on to university.

Dalia Negria, Sinai, Darién. She was the first to dye chunga black with cocobolo.

How much palm does one color take?

More than most people expect. Sobeida Cabezon Membache of Majé, who sold her first basket for $5.00 when she was about ten, told us in a 2021 interview that she sizes a basket at roughly one palm tree per color. A four-color basket starts as four chunga palms. Her father gathers the palm, and Sobeida does the dyeing and the weaving. Her income goes to her four sons' education.

Gathering is its own day of work. Chunga trunks are covered in long black spines, and the young leaves have to be cut from the center of the palm. Yoli Jinguimia, who started weaving at 12 out of need, said gathering material takes her a full day. Her basket income pays for her daughter's university.

A chunga palm trunk. Every strand in a Wounaan basket starts past these spines.

Sara Jinguimia, Yoli's sister and the master of the feather motif, splits the work with her husband. He goes into the forest with a coa, a sharp-bladed digging tool, and cuts the chunga. Sara does her own dyeing, and she trades with other weavers for tones she does not make herself. Her weaving has helped two of her sons build homes of their own, and it pays university expenses for two of her children.

Do Wounaan weavers invent new colors?

Yes, and they remember the first one. Brisaidita Mejia Ortiz, one of six weaving sisters in Majé whose parents came from Colombia in 1965, started weaving at 12 and works mostly in florals. The first new dye color she created was a gray. A gray does not come from any single plant on the list above. It comes from a weaver adjusting a black until it stops being black. Her weaving income has gone to building a house and to school supplies.

Marisela Guacoriso Membache, also of Majé, started at 15 and wove a shell design for her first basket. She gathers and dyes everything herself, while raising six children. When a weaver controls the whole chain, from the palm to the pot to the coil, the colors in her baskets are recognizably hers, and that is part of why collectors learn to spot a maker from across a room.

How can you judge the dye work in a Wounaan basket?

Stitch density gets most of the attention in judging quality, but the color tells you a lot. Here is what I look for when a box arrives from Panama.

• Saturation through the strand. Good dye work colors the fiber, not just its surface. Look at the edge of a stitch where it turns over the coil. The color should hold there, with no pale core showing.
• Even color within a field. A black field should read as one black. Slight shifts between batches are normal in hand-dyed fiber, but blotching inside a single band means the fiber was rushed out of the pot.
• Nothing comes off. A finished basket should never leave color on your hands or on a white shelf. Dye that runs is a red flag, either for poor fixing or for a synthetic shortcut.
• A natural palette. Plant dyes give warm, slightly complex tones: rust, brick, ochre, a black with brown underneath it. Flat neon brights do not come from these plants.

Plant color is stable in a room, but it is still plant color. Keep a Wounaan basket out of strong direct sun, the same way you would a watercolor. Our guide to where fine coil work belongs covers placement, and the short version is a table, a shelf or a pedestal, away from a south window.

Why do natural dyes make a Wounaan basket more valuable?

Because the color is part of the labor, and the labor is the value. A finished hösig di basket represents palm gathered by hand, dyed over days, split to near-thread thinness and stitched for months. Large pieces can take a year or more. Every basket is one of one and is never restocked, and Wounaan basketry is collected by museums for exactly this combination of material and skill. The colors are also a signature. Dalia's black, Sara's red and green, Brisaidita's gray: collectors who know the weavers can read them.

It matters for the weaver too. Jennifer Kuyper sources directly from Wounaan weavers in Majé, Chepo and the wider Darién, buying from the weaver herself or from a member of the Wounaan tribe who knows her well and visits more often than I can. The weaver is the first person paid, not the last. For the families in this post, that has meant a daughter's university, a house in Chepo, school supplies and two sons' homes.