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Karen Weavers at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
July 2 - July 7
Our Karen Weaving Circle are participating in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C. from July 2nd through July 7th, 2025.
This year’s theme is Youth and the Future of Culture. Our weavers will be part of the Learning Together exhibit, demonstrating how they pass down the tradition of Karen back-strap weaving to the next generation of Karen youth.
Learning Together
Read the description of the learning together exhibit from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival website:
“If our people are alive, our traditions still need to be alive.”
“It is important to me to keep our family’s traditions going.”
“Young people often find their time structured by the daily and seasonal rhythms of formal school, from pre-K to the end of high school and the beginnings of adulthood. Yet school is hardly the only place that emerging artists and artisans learn.
Family businesses, apprenticeships, camps, and community organizations create spaces for other kinds of learning. Whether in formal programs or through informal meetings with neighbors and family friends, these extracurricular teaching relationships ensure that traditional knowledge and skills are passed from generation to generation.
Making is a way of coming to know things: environments, histories, and ways of living and belonging. In such settings, creative skills are connected with ways of life and enduring values. When people gather together to weave, when ranchers use the tools their loved ones or neighbors have made to earn their living, and when makers and musicians pull sounds out of handcrafted instruments, the stories of families and communities are told and retold.
In the Learning Together area at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, see family and community workshops come to life on the National Mall. Learn how handmade objects—and the skills and stories behind them—contribute to distinctive ways of life and cultural legacies across the United States.”
About Our Karen Weaving Circle
The Karen Weaving Circle is a group of refugee weavers who came together to revive their textile tradition after moving to the United States. Members meet at the East Side Freedom Library in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to weave together and to hold classes for the next generation of Karen artisans. As a program of the Karen Organization of Minnesota, the Weaving Circle enhances community wellbeing and builds bonds between elder and younger generations around culture, language, and craft. The weavers also participate regularly in art fairs and community events as well as presentations in public schools.
Karen (pronounced kuh-REN) people from Burma (Myanmar) in Southeast Asia are a linguistically and culturally diverse people, who are among the refugees displaced due to government suppression of minorities. Around 20,000 Karen people live in Minnesota.
Participants going to D.C.
Htee Hser, weaver
Ku Say, weaver
Mae Ra Paw, weaver
Rosie Say, weaver
Synthia Htoo, presenter
Livestream Presentation from DC about Karen food
Our weavers and staff will be giving a presentation at the festival about how to make Tak Ka Paw, a Karen rice porridge dish. Not in DC? You can watch the livestream of their foodways presentation on Sunday, July 6th at 11:00 am CT/12:00pm ET at this link:
https://www.youtube.com/live/cwzxO-w9wro?si=fH5hSl_6VhPcdoSn
