Taiwan Indigenous News
Tuesday, 25 October 2005
Female head of the national park system seeks to improve parks
... She said she could sense the wisdom of the mountain forests as passed down throughout the ages by Taiwan's indigenous peoples. The ...
Hsieh reveals moves to help indigenous students
... crystal display television to the students at an elementary school in Taitung County and announced more measures to help Taiwan's indigenous children secure ...
Tribe wants official recognition
... "Taiwan's indigenous tribes are all unique minorities in this country, but we are all the original residents of the island. Every ...
The Kavalan make and weave their clothes with natural materials, and they are expert weavers and embroiderers. They employ mobile horizontal weaving machines to weave their favored ramie (China grass) into clothes, achieving aesthetically pleasing patterns by interweaving them with colored yarn. Banana trunk fiber or fiber from other trees is also spun into yarn and interwoven with the ramie material to provide extra protection against cold and wind.
The most cherished and special traditional Kavalan craft is banana fiber weaving: the leaf sheaths of the banana tree’s false stem are separated, dried in the sun and processed into fiber yarn—all by hand.
Today, only the Kavalan women of Hualien County’s Hsin She still preserve the art of making yarn from banana trunk fiber and weaving it into cloth. In the Lanyang Plain, the tribe’s original home, the Kavalan way of weaving and making clothes has long been lost. It is a rather complex process that involves separating the leaf sheaths, hanging them out to dry, applying the yarn to the weaving machine, and finally weaving it into cloth. In many ways, banana fiber weaving has become a symbol of the Kavalans’ cultural revival, a kind of totem that proves the tribe’s existence as a distinct ethnic and cultural entity.