Miriam and Cristina Negria with their family in Chepo, Panama.

Cristina, Miriam, and Dalia Negria are master Wounaan weavers from Panama, three sisters whose baskets are known and collected for their intricate figurative designs. Each has a specialty. Miriam has perfected the finest weaving and is known for her macaw baskets and cultural motifs. Cristina works quetzals, butterflies, and scarlet flowers. Dalia is a color innovator who built new dyes from the rainforest itself. All three work in chunga palm, the silk-fine black-palm fiber their people have woven for generations. Their work is recognizable across a room. So is the reason they weave.

From a Darién village to Chepo

The Negria sisters come from the Darién, the forested province of southeastern Panama where most Wounaan still live. Dalia was born in Majé and grew up in Sinai, a small, remote community in the rainforest. Weaving carried the family out of that isolation. Today they weave in and around Chepo, just outside Panama City, where the next generation can finish school and reach university. Weaving income paid for the move and keeps paying for the education.

RFB buys directly from the weavers themselves and through their cooperative and tribal representatives, so each basket comes with its story intact. The story of that move is one she returns to often, because it explains what a basket actually buys.

How to recognize a Negria basket

The Wounaan do not sign their baskets, but families carry signatures all the same, held in motif and hand. The Negria signature is rib-stitched bird motifs and small-leafed greenery, a family style the sisters learned together and pass to their daughters. Within it, each sister has a specialty. Miriam weaves macaws and other cultural designs at the finest stitch counts. Cristina works quetzals, butterflies, and scarlet flowers. Dalia is known as much for color as for form. She was one of the first Wounaan weavers to work in chunga palm, and she built new dyes from the rainforest, including a black drawn from local cocobolo wood, the dense hardwood Wounaan men usually reserve for carving, and a red from pucham, a Darién leaf also used to heal wounds.

The materials are constant across all three. Chunga (Astrocaryum standleyanum) is stripped to threads finer than sewing thread, washed, sun-dried, and dyed, then sewn over a coiled core of naguala (Carludovica palmata) one stitch at a time.

The weaver who made new colors

Dalia Negria, one of the three Negria sisters, at work in Chepo.

Dalia Negria was born in Majé in 1962 and grew up in Sinai, a small, remote community in the Darién. She started weaving at sixteen, taught by an aunt who instilled in her a passion for the work and showed her how to weave with shredded chunga palm. For years Dalia used sewing thread; she now works entirely in dyed chunga over a naguala coil. When her husband, Trucman, began university studies in Panama City, she moved with him from the rainforest to the city.

What set Dalia apart early was color. Master weavers mix their own dyes to deepen and extend a palette, and Dalia began making new designs and dyes when she was young. She was the first to draw a black from local cocobolo wood, the dense hardwood Wounaan men usually reserve for carving, and a red from pucham, a Darién leaf also used to heal wounds. She has five daughters, three of whom weave, and she puts her earnings toward her home and her daughters' schooling.

Maricin, the daughter the baskets sent to university

Maricin Cheucarama Negria is Cristina's daughter and a skilled weaver in her own right, raised in the rib-stitched bird and small-leafed style the family shares. She lives in Chepo in a small concrete house with her mother, next door to her aunt Miriam and up the road from Dalia. The family has been in Chepo about ten years. They are not from there. The sisters moved so their children could reach high school and university, which the village schools, ending at sixth grade, could not provide.

By 2014 Maricin had finished high school and begun studying at the university, where she wants to train as a businesswoman. She will likely set weaving aside while she studies, and may not return to it if she finds work in the city. That makes her baskets rare. The income from them, alongside her mother Cristina's weaving, is funding a different future.

Wounaan weaving is matrilineal knowledge. Mothers teach daughters, and a motif can stay inside one family for generations. The Negria sisters carried the Darién with them into Chepo, and the bird in their baskets is older than the move.

— Jen