The story behind our Werregue collection is beautiful, enigmatic and reflects the soul of each artisan who made the pieces that we bring to you today.
Werregue, a highly resistant and versatile natural palm fiber, is used by the Wounaan indigenous community to make unique pieces entirely by hand using ancient techniques to cultivate the palm, extract its fiber and finally weave the pieces. In this hard work, the women create the thread and design the handicrafts, while the men are the ones who obtain the plant, which is the raw material.
The plant is cultivated during the waning moon, after a ritual to request permission for its extraction, since for the Wounaan the werregue has a mystical origin that is closely related to its origin and its deities.
Next we share the myth about a dispute between "Ewandam" the creator God of the Wounaan and the devil "Dosat" and the creation of this ancient technique.
After God Ewandam created the Wounaan in Chocó, he told them that they did not need to work because he would take care of their well-being. To do this, he created a plant: "El Plátano de Dios", from which he cut the bananas with which he fed his children.
One day, Ewandam went in search of the dress for his children, and during his absence, Dosat (satan) visited the Wounaan to convince them to learn to work with the argument that, in case Ewandam did not return, who would cut bananas for them?
This is how Dosat taught the Wounaan to work and cultivate, he gave them a machete and an ax with which the children of Ewandam felled trees and palms.
When Ewandam returned, he found his children working and after finding out who had given them the tools, he sought to meet Dosat, who, believing himself to be more powerful, proposed a competition: salting the sea water.
To achieve this, Dosat dumped a ship full of salt into the sea, but the waters remained sweet. Ewandam, on the other hand, took a tablespoon of salt, poured it into the sea and it immediately became salty. In his purpose to show who was more powerful, Dosat created platanilla instead of banana and caña brava instead of sugar cane.
This is how the weguer was born. In this contest, Ewandam created the chontaduro palm and Dosat, the weguer palm; that although it does not produce any fruit; it was used by the Wounaan to create pitchers with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures that tell stories of the jungle, of what they see and experience daily.
* Source: myth narrated by Celso Piña, teacher at the Escuela Centro Indígena La Unión de Pichima, on the Litoral del San Juan in Chocó.