Keeping Alive the Textile Traditions of Timor Leste

In 2012, Jill Forshee, a cultural anthropologist at Colombia College in Chicago, made a trip to Timor Leste to learn more about the country’s textiles. Forshee took photographs of East Timorese cloths (tais) from the collection of the UCLA Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, Germany, and other collections, hoping to confirm the origin of these cloths. To her surprise, she actually found the weavers who had made two of the tais in the photographs and the daughter of a weaver who had made a third. 

One of the weavers that Forshee found was Arestina dos Santos, who told Forshee that she wove the tais in Forshee’s photograph in 1995, and it had been her finest piece. She had never had the time to weave another one like it. Dos Santos, who lost her husband in 1979 and was left alone with four children, sold her masterpiece in 1999 for US$150 in order to pay school fees for her children; it eventually found its way to the Fowler Museum.

Marobo weaving is among the most ancient in Timor Leste.

By the time the UN Peacekeepers arrived in 1999, the practice of handweaving in Timor Leste had been devastated. Many heirloom textiles had been stolen or burnt; the only textile from the National Collection in Dili that survived was a bark cloth tubular skirt. However, peace did not end the devastation. Women who had desperately carried their family heirlooms into the mountains when they fled the soldiers and militias or buried them before they left their homes were forced to part with these treasures after the war in order to feed their families or meet other household expenses. The tais were sold to peacekeepers or foreigners who arrived with the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor; some of the very best pieces ended up in museum collections around the world.

Bunak weavers excel in the supplementary weft technique.