In contrast to this global era in which people, goods, and information cross borders, there are also ethnic minorities in Thailand who have continued to weave their own unique culture, customs, and blood without interruption.
The Karen are an ethnic minority group that has lived in Thailand and Myanmar for centuries, and from there they are further divided into several different tribes. I could not find exact statistics, but it is said that there are about 500,000 Karen people in Thailand today. They live mainly in the mountainous areas of northern Thailand and have developed their own unique lifestyle and culture, including music, dance, costume, and language, which is related to food, clothing, and shelter as an agricultural tribe. They have continued to live with mountains and forests in the mountainous areas as they have for thousands of years.
However, ethnic minorities in Thailand are socially disadvantaged. For example, they have their own language, but in order to have their citizenship recognized, they must learn Thai and have birth certificates and other documents. The real problems seem to be a lot more complicated. In order to pass on their traditional skills and artistic sense to the modern society, Pina Paitha Home regularly holds “Karen Traditional Dyeing and Sewing Meetings” by Karen women.
In recent years, the word and concept of “craft" has come into the limelight, and there is a growing trend to reconsider the preciousness of crafts created by human hands, eyes, and senses, which are the opposite of mass products. Traditional Japanese crafts have developed as furnishings, focusing on the inheritance of specific techniques and their innovation, but today they are luxury items that are somewhat out of reach for the general consumer. On the other hand, “craft” in this case is more like folk art. Crafts and folk art. At first glance, they may seem similar, but upon closer examination, they seem to differ in nature. Crafts are first-class products made with skillful techniques, while folk crafts are more personal, and their value is found in the purpose of expressing ethnic originality, including daily necessities and festivals, made for their own use.
Folk costumes and clothing are one such example. They have differentiated themselves from other regions and asserted their ethnic consciousness so that a single piece of dyed cloth or embroidery pattern can identify who is from where. I don't know if the theory that appearance is 90% is true or not, but I think that each tribe has given meaning to what they wear and built up their pride, just like the uniforms of each country in the Olympics. There is no doubt that a lot of information was discerned by appearance.
A woman about my age (early 30s) wearing a pullover shirt with brightly colored embroidery was my teacher this time. She was born and raised in a Karen village about two hours away from Pai, and has studied the traditional lifestyle, art, and culture of the Karen people. As a member of the next generation of Karen people and the mother of the next generation of Karen children, she has inherited not only the blood of the ethnic minority but also their lifestyle and skills. Today, she taught me how to dye and embroider.
She prepared three kinds of dyes for us.
Indigo, gooseberry, and mud. There was a large pot on the fire pit outside, and some pruned tree branches were burning. Rusty iron for indigo, lime for guzberries, and alum for mud. Next to each of these materials is a plate of color-fastening ingredients. First, the cloth is placed in a pot of boiling water and simmered a little to make it easier for the color to penetrate.Incidentally, gooseberry is called “seiyo-usuguri” in Japanese, and it seems that someone in Japan grows it.
Dos-dos Jyu-jyu
Put the gooseberry in a pot of boiling water and heat it up. While the water is simmering, I finely chop the fresh leaves of indigo grown in her village with a knife and crush them in a millstone as if I were making rice cakes.
The process of dyeing involves various sounds, temperatures, smells, and textures, and is interesting because it engages all five senses.Indigo leaves crushed with a millstone are placed in a bowl and then crushed with a knife.
A dark blue liquid, a mixture of blue and gray, was produced. The cloth is then tied with rubber and rubbed with a patterned cloth, and left to soak for a while. In the meantime, the pot with the gooseberries in it started to boil, and the dark brown liquid started to bubble, so I put the cloth to be dyed in this pot as well.
It seems that indigo and mud do not need to be boiled, so I put the cloth directly into the room temperature dye solution.
The sun quickly rose to the top and it was time for lunch. Kero-chan cooked us a lot of food that day, too. Black rice, coconut milk soup, stir-fried tofu, omelette, fish and vegetables.... From one end of the table to the other, it was hard to imagine what the food tasted like just by looking at it. German and Israeli participants in the workshop joined us around the table.
In the afternoon, we washed and dried the cloths soaked in the dye solution. The indigo turned out dark blue, the gooseberries gray, and the mud orange. The cloth was removed from the dye solution, rinsed with water, rubber bands were removed, and the cloth was spread out. Until then, we do not know how the cloth will turn out. The most exciting part was the moment when we unfolded the cloth. I put in everything I had that could be dyed as far as the eye could see, including white T-shirts, eco-bags, and knickknacks. I was very satisfied with the natural and vivid colors and patterns that came out beautifully.
I am sure that dyeing workshops are held all over the world, and the same dyes are used in many different places. However, depending on where and from whom you learn and what you eat in between, the same content can be a completely different experience. After the dyeing, we moved to Kero's clothing shop and began the embroidery session. I was taught two different ways to sew Karen flower embroidery patterns, which I decided to sew onto my favorite samue jacket.
The teacher placed a ruler on the jacket on the worktable, drew lines and marked them. Then, she made a model of one piece, slowly showing me where the needle would go at each glance. As I silently stared at the needle and thread, two hours passed quickly and the sun was beginning to set. We decided to do the rest after dinner, took a commemorative photo, and called it a day.
After dinner, I was sewing the rest of the story on the bed, and the day passed by so quickly that I rushed to turn off the light. Even though I was meditating, the needle and thread kept moving in my mind for a while, and I made up my mind to keep pressing the accelerator of embroidery, and then I was fast asleep.
The most important lesson I learned this time was that making something to wear is not just a way of life, but an activity of expressing one's ethnic identity. Wearing the same thing that someone else is wearing is not even remotely interesting. Rather than wearing something mass-produced and losing sight of my own identity, I would rather make and wear something that is not sold anywhere else with my own hands, in search of something original. Also, I have been on the planning side of workshops for the past few years and have forgotten to be on the receiving end. So it was great to be able to spend a whole day learning directly from others for the first time in a while.
Pina Paitha holds workshops on a regular basis, so if you are ever in Thailand, I highly recommend that you attend one.
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