Women Artisans Finding Ways to Thrive

As quarantines and lockdowns pressured tens of millions around across the globe to adapt to what the McKinsey Global Institute calls an “accelerated workplace experiment,” an op-ed appeared in Fortune magazine underscoring the merits of an undervalued sector of remote workers that has existed since the Middle Ages — that of traditional artisans.

Penned by Rebecca van Bergen, the founder of Nest, a nonprofit supporting an extensive global community of artisan businesses, the article reads: “As we navigate how to move forward during this pandemic, the artisan community worldwide has some valuable lessons on what the future of work can — and should — look like. We often think of artisanship as a thing of the past. But in many ways, it is the future. At a time where there is an urgent call to bring Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) voices to the table, the cottage industry model — already perfected by Black, brown, and Indigenous communities for centuries — could help suggest a new way of work.”

The often-overlooked artisan sector is, implicitly, a model of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Artisans are an integral part of communities and economies globally, especially in developing countries, and are drivers of economic growth. The Artisan Alliance, in Washington, D.C., a resource for a community of more than 240 artisan businesses, reports that the sector is the second-largest employer in the developing world, after agriculture, worth over $32 billion every year. It’s comprised of hundreds of thousands of small producers, the majority of whom are women, working, informally, around the world. They are skilled craft workers creating products (functional or decorative) by hand, using traditional tools and techniques. Traditional artisans make such things as furniture, jewelry, clothing, household items or decorative art, and the sector includes artisans of the global South as well as master craftspeople in developed countries. Fully 74% of all artisan enterprises have female founders, and 62% live in towns or rural settings, away from major urban centers.

Angela Milo Huallpa is a traditional weaver in the community of Totora, in the High Andes of Peru. Weaving has deep roots in Peru, with a 5,000-year history, and is considered an important part of the country’s cultural identity. Huallpa and the other women of her community wear traditional clothing of capes and shawls with decorative embroidered skirts and vibrantly colored hats. She is the president of an association of weavers in her community that is supported by Threads of Peru, a nonprofit offering secure market access for products coming from traditional artisans in the region. Huallpa raised her siblings after losing both parents at a young age. For many living in the high Andes, access to education is a challenge. Her village sits at an elevation of 13,757 feet, and she would have faced an hours-long mountainous trek to school that would have put her safety at risk. In this region of Peru, many children have farming and familial responsibilities that also stand in the way of them receiving a formal education. In Huallpa’s words: “We didn’t even make it to the door of a school.”

Huallpa’s story, her place in the world as a traditional weaver, is one that reminds global consumers to not only think about where their products come from but to recognize that, with traditional artisans, there is often an entire history (not just a factory) behind the products made. For these women, a labor-intensive process, which begins with harvesting plants for fiber and spinning and dying the fiber by hand, precedes the weaving of such things as shawls, throws, hats, and bags. All of this entails knowledge that has been passed down to them through generations.

Huallpa speaks positively about living in a remote village, far from the nearest city of Cusco, once the capital of the Incan Empire. “I think, in the city, there is a lot of contamination, but here, life is more natural. In the city, everything is about money. Here, we don’t spend much money, we mostly consume what we produce.” Weaving allows her to care for her children while still maintaining a traditional lifestyle. While she still raises alpaca, sheep, and cows, being a weaver provides her with an income to provide a more comfortable life for her family.

Not all traditional artisans work from home or at personal workshops; some are employed by small, agile community cooperatives, often with flexible schedules that accommodate the workers’ needs and provide training and a fair wage. It’s pertinent to point out that working remotely has not shielded the sector from the effects of the pandemic. Most have found themselves with no sales or income over the past year, as they’ve been unable to meet delivery dates or receive supplies and as co-ops have been shut down amid stay-at-home orders. Some, like Threads of Peru, have received relief funds from organizations like Nest to carry them through.

From New York City, van Bergen further explains what traditional artisans represent, as the world emerges from the pandemic: “I think the resilience of home-based labor has been seen at a global scale, and I think that there will be sustained concern about overcrowded work environments, including factories, for quite some time, making investments in transparency, safety, and well-being of home-based workers, from those of us in the United States to our global neighbors, critical.

Tizita is an artisan living in Ethiopia. She, like most women living in rural areas of the country, learned to spin cotton at a young age, but was offered little in terms of employment. She is also HIV positive, and after being shunned by both her community and family, she sought refuge at a church on Mount Entoto, a site offering holy water as a cure, on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. It’s also where she found Entoto Beth Artisan, a social enterprise that employs 150 HIV-positive women, providing fair-wage employment making leather goods, garments, hand-woven shemma cloth (material native to Northern Ethiopia), and jewelry made with local materials such as recycled tire thread, recycled bullet casings, reused artillery shells to make metal beads, and even coated Ethiopian coffee beans.

Traditional artisans often use natural or recycled materials and keep waste to a minimum. A transparent supply chain is one of the criteria for receiving certification or a seal of approval from such organizations as the World Fair Trade Organization, Nest, or The Artisan Alliance. Vetted artisan businesses promote sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers. Artisans are also fundamental for sustaining cultural heritage. A report by the Aspen Institute (which is a co-founder of The Artisan Alliance, along with the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Global Women’s Issues) states cultural heritage is an “essential component of healthy and sustainable development — development that is grounded in the uniqueness of people and place.”

Van Bergen maintains that “with climate change and environmental responsibility finally gaining momentum, I think business models will begin to pivot and start including efforts such as repair and renewal rather than solely new production. I think skilled artisans are well poised to be this workforce in the future. Technology continues to expand, but in parallel, the human psyche tends to need authenticity to counterbalance this movement towards our lives being increasingly digital, so we have really seen the demand for artisan and small manufacturing rise at the same time.”

In addition to organizations that support artisans of the global South, European artisans and master craftspeople are represented by local national bodies as well as an umbrella organization called the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship. They celebrate such artisans with their newly created Homo Faber Guide, an online platform dedicated to craftsmanship, allowing for the discovery of artisans and their masterpieces; the exploration of museums, galleries, and shops selling unique objects; plus the booking of travel experiences with artisans and their workshops. In the U.S., PowWows.com offers a listing of Indigenous artisan businesses, and in Canada, Indigenous women artisans are supported by Pass the Feather, a website offering background information about the artisans and their crafts as well as online shopping, grants, and other resources.

Canadian Ojibway artisan Melissa Lowe was taught sewing and beading skills from the age of 3 by her kokum (grandmother), prior to being put into foster care in Winnipeg. In her teens, she returned to Whitefish Bay First Nation (Naotkamegwanning First Nation), and as she continues with her creations, she says her kokum remains the source of her inspiration. Lowe beads and sews from her home-based business called Mellow Creations. One of Lowe’s specialties is the jingle dress, First Nations and Native American women’s powwow regalia that is believed to have originated on her home reserve. Of her business she says: “I love being my own boss; it doesn’t stress me out. When you take an order from someone, you’re not the boss anymore, it’s the person who hires you, and that’s why I rarely do orders unless there’s a reason, or tell me the story behind it, then I may, with consideration.”

As with many artisan enterprises, issues of social injustice are threaded into the fabric of Lowe’s business. In 2018, she donated three red jingle dresses in support of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW). This human rights crisis affects Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States, including the First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and Native American communities, and has, in Canada, been identified as a genocide. The jingle dress is both a dress and a dance, and together they are considered a celebration of the healing power and dignity of Ojibwa women.

According to an article entitled “The Origin of the Jingle Dress,” the attire’s association with healing first appeared around World War I. The article quotes Brenda Child, an Ojibwe professor of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, saying it was “perhaps in response to the global influenza pandemic. The disease killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide and more than 600,000 in the U.S., including thousands of Native Americans, in 1918 and 1919.”

A century later, hands stitch dresses, they sew, weave, and construct and set an example through an innate obligation to both people and planet. If we are to heal, as we accelerate through this “workplace experiment,” the global workforce will have to do more than pivot or adapt to work that is remote. As these stories of women creators tell, the true example being set by the artisan sector is through their sense of community and connection to the land on which they live. Perhaps this is the overriding message the world, now, needs to hear.