BASKET WEAVING with James C. Bamba

0:00Oh, hey, it's your neighbor clipping his nails on the porch again. Allie Ward, open up your fact basket, because we got a lot of cool info for you. If you have landed on smallages and you are confused why there's an SM in front of the oligee's name, it's because they're small. They're smaller, shorter, kid-friendly episodes for everyone. So we took this episode about cool baskets and we shortened it up and we delivered it in a G-rated form, so enjoy. It's a fascinating world and amazing tales that he weaves. All right. Let's venture across the sea. Let's talk about weaving, shall we? So thisologist was brought to my attention by anotherologist, the charming Corbethenitologist, Dr. Kaley Swift, who emailed me saying you got to talk to this guy. He is one of the best basket weavers in all of the ocean. And immediately I found that at least one time in the literature, someone has used the word canistromology from the Latin for wicker basket. So I'm in. Now I thought wicker, by the way, was just a type of plant, but no, it just means something

1:02woven from plant reeds or fibers or sticks. But we're expanding on this oligee to include the gorgeously intricate work of, in this case, the Pacific Islands, which feature typically angular geometric and almost like impossibly tidy methods of weaving. And they can be all one color of grassy green or they can be faded, golden, or they may have patterns and darker colors or checkerboards. And thisologist makes traditional baskets for food, for chicken laying, for rice pouches, for coconut leaf fans and hats and fisherman's baskets and fine art figurines. So can you make anything useful or museum worthy with only plants and your hands? Well, this guy can't. Thisologist has been at this craft for decades, learning the traditional, tomorrow ways of his ancestors of the Mariana Islands. Mariana Islands, in the western Pacific, they're close to the Philippines.

2:02They're kind of right under Japan on a map. They're far, far west of Hawaii, which is far, far west of the lower 48 states of America. He has recently moved to a Wahoo Hawaii to complete his degree in botany at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. And we spoke from his new apartment there. So sink in for a deep look at different styles of teaching, weaving with invasive vines. How to know when a plant fiber is ready to make stuff with. And with the anatomy of a coconut tree, with world-renowned basket weaver, artisan, mentor, educator, botanist, and chemistromologist, James Cruz-Bamba. James-Bamba, he and him. I understand that your uncle was the first to introduce you to this.

3:06Can you tell me a little bit about that discovery? Oh, so the legend goes. Oh, yes. Well, so the story goes is that it's a little bit sad, but my grandmother fell ill. And she was taken to the hospital. While she was there, my uncle made her like this coconut leaf basket and put fruits and vegetables in it as like a get-well present, get-well gift. Somebody claimed the basket at the hospital. And so I never got to see that basket in particular, but my mom was telling me about it. And I was amazed and confused because we only saw those things really at parties and during this thing we had called Chamorro Day, it's kind of like Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month concept, except it was only a day back in the 90s. And so I talked to my mom about it and she said, oh, your uncle Pedro, your uncle Pete made it for your grandma.

4:07And I said, where is it? And she goes, oh, somebody took it. They wanted it. James said he got up the courage to approach his uncle Pete, who is a widow without any kids who lived in the next village over. So the teenage James asked Uncle Pedro to spend some time hanging out to teach him how to weave such beautiful baskets in the Chamorro way. He was a shy kid, so this was kind of intimidating for James. I imagine, you know, you're, let's see, 15 at the time. I imagine that for an elder who's been doing this for a while, it's got to be hard to keep up with how fast their hands are going, right? Well, that and the fact that in traditional Chamorro pedagogy, we don't, like, hand hold and spoon feed. We just do something and say, okay, you want to learn, okay, watch, oh, and be quiet, by the way, don't talk. The first visit, he just told me to go and get coconut leaves, you know, bring materials

5:07so I can teach him. He's not going to climb a tree for me. So, okay, fast forward, I went and got leaves. They were the wrong kind. He didn't say, James, this is the wrong type of coconut leaf. Go get X, Y, and C. He said, that's wrong, that's all he said. And then he said a word in Chamorro that I don't know because at that time, I wasn't yet really fluent in the language. I go home, tell my dad, he goes, oh, he wants binga, binga, and I go, what is a binga? And he goes, no, not binga, binga, and I go, okay, what's a binga? And he goes, well, binga is the young leaf that's like yellowish green. He didn't want these ratty leaves that you picked. So this binga, no, not binga, binga, is a more soft and pliable leaf. And it's usually free of wind and insect damage. So James set off. And I went and get this thing, and it's a whole process. He looks at and goes, you didn't tolerate it. And I go, what's a tala?

6:08And he goes, you don't know what tala is. And I go, no, I don't. And he goes, you know, like with disappointment. And then he says, go put it in the sun for two hours and come back. And so basically I went back after two hours and then this began my introduction into traditional Chamorro pedagogy and how we like to teach. And the methodology that is employed by my people. And so basically he said, okay, I'm going to teach you. And I say, okay, great. So then he whips out this buck knife that I never knew he carried. And it was one of the larger those ones that you see old men carrying and he opened this folding buck knife, proceeded to weave a basket and like, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes, which to me felt like forever. And he was done. And he says, okay, so do you know how to do it now? I said, wait, you didn't teach me, you're just a wolf one.

7:10I think that's called demonstrating. And he goes, yeah, I showed you how to do it. He said, so go home and try. And if you can't do it, come back. And I went home and I tried and I didn't do it. Yep. And then I went back. And that was the beginning of my journey as a weaver or cultural practitioner from the Marianas. I know that you work with a lot of pandan and coconut leaves. There are a lot of these plants completely like native grown or do you have to cultivate them? So amongst the thousands of species of pandanhas, we have one particular named variety called agek and agek looks just like the other pandanhas trees except the leaves have this blueish green, I think in botany they call it galalkus coating on it, waxy coating

8:11that makes them look like this blueish green color. So agek or pandanhas is a plant. It looks a little susan. It's got this thin tall brown trunk, maybe four meters high with a sprout of spiky, red light leaves at the top. It's kind of like a tall Joshua tree or a spiky or fern on top of a pole. They've been cultivated on the islands for centuries by cutting off the plant at the crown of leaves where the trunk starts to become woody and then planting that during the rainier times. And while coconut trees and some other fiber plants grow in the wild, this type of pandanhas is usually planted near people's homes or ranches. James tells me. And anyway, it's just going way deep into the pandanhas growth. What types of things are woven from the smallest to the biggest items? I know that you've made everything from earrings to, you know, fishing baskets, but what types of things are woven?

9:11So we have a wide range of woven items from containers like baskets, baskets with lids, shoulder bags. And these are pandanhas, right? We have mats, sleeping mats. Then with coconut leaves, they make the fetching for roofs and then baskets and mats and wall coverings and fans and hats. So the hats were more modern in production, but our western style hats with like brims and crowns, right? So a lot of functional things like used to shade the sun to keep out the rain, hold your stuff, curl up to go to sleep on. And while a lot of Pacific Islander plant fiber art is utilitarian, it doesn't have to be. But the smallest things I've woven is like those miniature weaving that I did for an art exhibition in 2019, but yeah, we make toys too, like little figures and stuff out of coconut leaves and pandanhas, but they were all smaller than the diameter of a dime. Oh my god, it could sit on a dime.

10:14And James has crafted these tiny sculptures of thin, thin strips of plant fiber, making geometric, but intricate shrimp and grasshoppers and scorpions whose proportions are spot on, but they remain a little abstract in this angularity. And of course, the colors are fresh, green, some have streaks of dry and yellow. But all the plant strips look impeccable and unblemished and that is not by chance. And when it comes to prepping the leaves, I know that there's probably a certain tenderness that you need and a greenness that you have to weave at a malleability. Does some of that come from soaking it in water or leaving it in the sun to wilt? Is there a really narrow time window that you can weave with? So it depends on the material, coconut leaves, depending on which branch you take, because they kind of look like, you know, palm tree, right?

11:14And so the bottom most leaves are mostly reserved for satching and work baskets, because they're really stiff and they're hard to manipulate. They don't lend themselves over to fine weaving. And then the higher up leaves are more soft and supple and pliable, they easily worked. But again, they're not as structurally tough, right? So when it comes to weaving, upstairs coconut leaves or binya are softer and better for finer work. And the downstairs leaves are hardier and stiffer and better for structural functional things. But it also depends on how you treat them once they're harvested. So it just depends coconut leaves. If you pick the binga, the bing of my journey's beginning, the young leaf and you wilt that in the sun, you have maybe two days to work with it. If you keep it out of the sun, after initially wilting it, green leaves from further down

12:16the tree last much longer up the tree and then pandanis, which is really nice, augurk is a very special cultivar. You pick the leaves when they die and they've turned brown on the tree. There's a one way anyways. And you remove the horrendous thorns that grow on three sides of the leaves, the margins in the middle. These thorns are no joke, man, I look them up and they're similar to the serrated shark teeth that are on the sides of aloe plants. So first, you have to contend with and remove those. And then you roll them up into these coils that are, you know, basically if you imagine like a belt that's rolled up onto itself, like a coil of that shape. And so these leaves, if you pick them at noon when the sun is directly over you, you would think everything would be really hot and dry and brittle or crispy as we say in Chamorro English, but these leaves are still soft and supple. You can like crumple them up and wrap them around your hand and they don't crack.

13:21And that's why they're renowned in the greater micronutian region and why they've exported plants to other islands. So there's no need for soaking or wetting the leaves that you basically just process them, store them in your house. And you have to put them in the sun every so often because it's so humid in the Marianas that if you leave the coiled leaves in your house, sometimes they get moldy, you know. So when you store your leaves traditionally, it's supposed to put them in the sun like once a week if you're not using them. And then flip them over to, I think that the English word is like solar sterilized, they call it that's basically what we're doing. You know, it's funny. My husband does that with his jiu-jitsu things before he washes them. He takes his disgusting sweaty jiu-jitsu stuff, puts it on the porch and lets it dry and then he throws it in the water. It makes a difference. This is actually more than just anecdotal.

14:21There's a paper titled evaluation of the antimicrobial effect of a far UV radiation lamp in a real life environment, which reminds us that UV light has been used for over a century as a germicide, although sunshine can itself kill nasties. So when you're staring off into space, watching dust moats dancing in a beam of light just know that they are in peril and you're the villain in their story. Can I ask you some listener questions? We'll do kind of lightning round, amazing. Sure. First, we'll donate to a cause if it's choosing and this week it's going to Seaghan Kodaran Shamaro, the Shamaro Cultural Center, and we'll link the Shamaro Cultural Center in the show notes. So thanks for the heads up on their great work, James. And thanks to sponsors who make that donation possible. Okay, let's get into the weeds with your questions. A lot of people had questions about patterns, Alibi, Dave Brewer, Dianna, Mouse Paxden, Anthony Richards, Jacob Shepard, Lely Broughton, Cooper, Michael, and Alibi wanted to know are baskets

15:24and other items made by a pattern like knitting or crochet? Yes, I know. So we use these wooden blocks that we've been making for thousands of years from local woods. Like we take a log and shape it into a cylinder or a box and we would weave around that. And that's to reproduce the same thing. And on that wooden block or in the weaver's head because we were mostly a rope memorization culture, you know, there's no writing back in the day, really. They would memorize how many strips it would take to weave that certain basket. And then later on, like even I do it now where I will write, I call them my recipes. Some people say it sounds better of formula and I go, I don't care. It's just some numbers and measurements of what I need to make this purse that people really like. Okay, so how does he do it? Let's get to some behind the scenes fundamentals here. So when I come up with a new item that has a particular way of making it, I will usually

16:30make the strips as long as I possibly can, right? So they'll be long enough for the project, right? And then once I get all those information down in my head, and when I start to do the final trimming or tucking, and then I measure the leaves one last time and I write it down, right? I think we used the word interchangeably design and pattern, right? So these like patterns on the actual weaving itself, they're very geometric and very mathematical. Weaving is a holistic approach to being a jack of all trades master done because you've got to know math. You've got to know meteorology for planting the plants, right? You've got to know a little bit about weather and then you've got to know about humidity and the manipulation of the material and then you've got to know agriculture so you can plant the plants, right? It's a whole lot to think about. Well, a lot of people, the basic question, but Will Clark, Rachel Guthrie, Ariel Belk, Kelly Shaver, ESA Brillard and Adam Foitt, all wanted to know, how do you make them water

17:30tight? How does that work? So for coconut leaf weaving, you need to size your leaves, you make them all the same width. So natural materials are just that they grow as they grow and there's variation, right? So you've got to get them as close as possible to each other. Then when you weave it, they're at a pretty close 45 degree angle and you have to weave it tight and so while you're weaving it, you only weave a few inches at a time, let it wilt and dry out because it has moisture, right? And then the leaves shrink a little and then you re-tighten it and then you weave up further and then at the end you moisten the leaves just enough because they're already dried to make them pliable again, but not so moist that they expand from absorbing on water and you close the basket as tightly as possible without breaking the leaves. And then once the basket dries, you shouldn't see but just pin pricks of light through the basket, coconut leaves, right?

18:32And most people don't think of coconut leaf baskets as being able to hold water. And then when the basket gets wet and it sucks up all the leaves, the leaves expand and close up those tiny gaps that are, you know, impossible to close up, it's just part of nature. The basket swells up and I'm not saying it's like having a plastic bag, okay? But it can hold water for quite a long time. It's not like having a hydroflask or, you know, like a canteen, right? It's like it can hold water. James says it's not just the coconut leaves that can hold water. The pandanous leaves can as well with a slightly different technique. If you weave exceptionally well and exceptionally tightly when the basket expands, the leaves, the actual leaves, the material expands with the absorption of water. It swells up and tightens the weave even more. And so through this, I would call it basically through the ancient Chamorro peoples observations,

19:39I don't think they had a physics book and knew about capillary actions of leaves. But they knew that if they did it this way, it would hold water. And so some people, what they do is they double up the baskets so that it has a longer time to hold water. And so for the next three actions, I notice how plants draw water up from their roots, kind of like pulling a chain of water molecules up from the bottom of the plant through the leaves. They're like, come on, we're going this way. We're thirsty. We had some people that asked about materials and Emily Krieger says, stop it. I'm making Dog Bancord right now as I saw this post. I would love to hear more about best forged materials. Robbins said that they've been learning to weave with invasive species. Oliver Callis asked if invasive species or vines such as kudzu could be used for basket weaving. Anika Mandelort, first-time question asker, says, for those of us without any easy access to fresh pandan leaves and says, half a die from Seattle. But still want to learn this style of weaving. What other

20:40materials would you recommend using if you don't have access to fresh pandan or coconut? Okay, so forging invasive kudzu and other materials that can be used, right? So this will contine a little bit to the invasive species. Like, let's say I have this like thing planned to tree or bush or shrub in my yard and I'm trying to kill it, right? Because I don't want it there. But he says he could make something fun with prolifically growing vines, like the Japanese and Chinese native kudzu. It was introduced to the US 150 years ago as an ornamental and a potential snacky for livestock. But it has since blanketed the Eastern US. It's kudzu's world. We're just living in it. I have seen kudzu from a distance when I was down in the panhandle of Florida and it looks like kudzu produces very long vines. I bet it could be used because it produces very long materials. And so I guess transitioning into the question apparently from one of my

21:44people from Oahu to Washington. Half a day means hi or hello or hey in the Chamorro language. So half a day, Annika. The alternative materials that you could use is like those packing straps from like boxes. Those plastic ones that are like half an inch quarter inch in width, you know, if you can collect a bunch of those and try them out, they're really stiff though. And then I know that some people practice with ribbon. They'll go get like half inch wide nylon ribbon, the little bit stiffer stuff and then like cut them to length and then lay them out and weave baskets. But I have an apprentice that went to school in the States and he was my student for like three or four years and he loves weaving. He would go to his professor's office and then take all the paper from the shredder. And it would shred it in quarter inch trips. It wasn't like top secret material that was pulverized. It was just like long strips of paper and he wove me a basket. I still have it.

22:50I still have it. Leonardo or Sini, he wove me this white paper basket. I hope he hears those. What about your favorite thing about weaving? So I guess it's a two-part thing. I love creating new things. But I think for me one of the best parts is when I'm sitting there with a student or a workshop attendee or an apprentice of mine and when they learn something and excel at it and then take that knowledge and manipulate it in their way because I don't teach it. If you were one of my students I wouldn't say okay today we're going to make a purse or today we're going to make a pocket protector. It's when my students have that click and they too see the trees from the forest so to speak or the individual strips from the final product and how those things are interacting with each other to form that thing, that woven item, it really makes me feel accomplished because I'm this stoic

23:58angry Jamorro teacher. I don't let them know my emotions. No, that's not true. I really want them to know that that is like my proudest moment is when I see them doing things that for lack of a better word, endangered now, you know, the lack of people doing it. That's like my proudest like happy is the thing I love the most is seeing other succeed in this thing that I love so much, yeah. I love that you're sharing it and that it's available for people to marvel at and to learn and just to appreciate from however a far they might be. I mean keep on doing what you're doing. Yeah, thank you. I am grateful that, you know, so ask talented people tons of questions about what they love because that's how you learn things. James, thank you for asking your aunt and your uncle Pedro about baskets and sharing what you know with us and please enjoy more of James's work and his teachings on his Instagram,

25:00Kenyan Guahan, which will link in the show notes and thank you for tuning in to Smologies. If you liked the show, tell your friends, tell your teachers, tell anyone who might need a good science podcast and likes learning. We like to keep things short around here so to find us on social media, check out the links in the show notes. You can find all kinds of good stuff there, including all the credits and huge thanks, of course, to producer and lead editor Mercedes Mateland of Mateland audio and editor Jake Chafee for making sure that these find their way into your ears every week. And here we are at the end. Boom. Now we know more about baskets. Every time you see a basket, I feel like you're going to look at it differently, which is what I do. And also before you go, I'm going to give you a piece of advice and I heard this one from a listener named Elizabeth Arasek, who is a teacher who happens to teach the place that I went to high school. So I feel a special bond with Elizabeth. Elizabeth said, you don't actually have to know what you're quote, doing with your life until you're about 28. Everything you do will just make you more interesting later. Don't do anything evil or wrong, Elizabeth says. But sure, work it pizza.

26:03Teach English and Tibet. In turn, at a water treatment plant, why not? I couldn't agree more. Everything you do, you are going to apply to your life later on. Take it from someone who hosts a podcast, but at one point, I was a waitress. I answered phones at a call center in the middle of the night and learned how to talk to people there. I sprayed lettuce at an organic produce stand on the side of the road. I've been a TV host, volunteered at a dog rescue. I saw concerts for a living. I was a caterer on movie sets. Everything I did eventually made me better at what I ended up doing. You know why? Because podcasts didn't exist when I was going for school. So I think that's great advice. Take some opportunities, learn who you are, learn how to do a bunch of stuff. Elizabeth aces. All right. See you next week. Bye bye.