II. It is clear that the costs of producing these hand-woven garments vary whether they are bought directly from the women weavers or from commercial companies. If bought directly from the indigenous women weavers themselves, there is a loving relationship to their work, a care, a meaning to their making, which can be of value to whoever buys it, but they are nevertheless seen as having less monetary value. Conversely, clothing or fashion companies do not have this direct connection with their products and their central purpose is to generate profits, and so these garments will be sold at a far higher price than any paid directly to the women who made them. There is thus, little or no recognition or profit for the authors of these fabrics. Knowing this, how much would you pay for a garment made by hand by these women weavers? Would you try to pay more, to increase the cost, if the price you were offered seemed very low? How do you value their work, these clothes they spend many hours making by hand? What value (symbolic or economic or otherwise) do you give to the work of women weavers?
III. a) Economic extractivism can be seen as one form of colonization. What other forms of colonization do you identify from the ways that images and things created by and of indigenous groups are ‘plagiarised’ and co-opted by global capitalism?
b) What local impacts do international markets have for indigenous communities?
c) In what ways could the extraction of indigenous textiles for international fashion retailers, blouses, originally embroidered with ancestral meanings, modified and displayed on cat walks across the industrialised world, change global perceptions of indigenous peoples, or change the perceptions of indigenous peoples of themselves?