Barbara Bergman’s studio is full of colorful Peruvian textiles and bags of wool, fond mementoes of the years her family spent in that country. They are also part of her current efforts to help Shipibo Indian women preserve their traditional handcrafts while earning a living. When her oldest son proposed a family vacation in Peru this past spring, she was happy to see her four-year old granddaughter introduced to foreign travel, particularly to the country in which her family had spent so much time.

She and her husband, Roland, a geography professor at Shepherd University, have always been interested in travel and other cultures. Originally from Minnesota, they met in their senior year at college. Both had studied Spanish, and she had spent three months in Mexico on an American Friends service project. That same year, he had attended a language school in Cuernavaca, Mexico. They found they had a lot in common, married, and went to Madison, Wisconsin, where he attended graduate school.

His graduate studies took them to Mexico, Costa Rica, and eventually to Peru where he had a Fulbright Scholarship to work with Shipibo Indians. By then the Bergmans had a five-month-old baby.

“He picked a village easy to live in,” Bergman laughed. “It was only five hours by river to a town with a hospital. And there was a missionary base he could affiliate with so he could call in a float plane if necessary.”

Bergman was comfortable as a young mother living with the Shipibos. “Living as the wife of a grad student in Madison was harder,” she said. “There were no other young mothers, and the baby cried a lot! It was always a struggle to keep the baby quiet and out of the way.”

In the Shipibo village, babies were part of the community. Bergman became interested in traditional weaving and textiles. “The women spent seven or eight hours a day doing handcrafts. They would rock their babies in hammocks, tie a cord to their big toe and rock the hammock while they worked.”

When she went back to visit years later, they remembered her. They even remembered the song she sang as she rocked her baby.

The Shipibos have their own language, but they have been speaking Spanish for about 100 years. Bergman learned Shipibo. “It is an easy language to learn,” she said. “It doesn’t have any complicated grammar structure.”

At that time of her stay, the people were mostly hunter-gatherers, picking tree fruits that ripened at different times. They did some farming, growing bananas, corn, tomatoes, and watermelons to sell in Pucallpa, the nearest town. She described the children as very healthy, with plenty of protein in their diets because the people were adept at fishing. “They’d stand up in log canoes and use harpoons or bows and arrows to fish,” she recalled.

A second Fulbright later returned the Bergmans to Peru, where they lived in Puna on Lake Titicaca for two years. By this time, they had three children. Their youngest was three, in nursery school; their middle child was six and in grade school; and their oldest son was 14 and went to high school. There were more amen-ities in Puna, and Bergman had an opportunity to help out in a crafts program in a children’s library.

After a 16-year absence, Bergman visited Peru in 2001 and found the village where they had lived was still there, but the teens were not learning to spin and weave. “I bought cotton thread and told the girls that if they went to their grandmothers and learned to make traditional woven bracelets, I would sell them in the U.S. and send them money. The grandmothers were so happy to pass on the weaving tradition.”

“Thirty years ago, women were proud of their traditional clothing,” she said. “The girls don’t wear it any more. Shipibo teens wear western clothes, although they might have a set of traditional clothes for special events, but babies and small children don’t have any traditional clothes at all.”

This year, the Bergmans visited Puna. She had found the Shipibos to be very artistic people, but, says Berman, it is harder now to find traditional spinning and weaving. When we give used clothes to charities, much of it is sent to developing countries where it is sold as used clothing. Bergman believes that has a destabilizing effect on the makers of traditional clothing. “They can’t compete with the cheap T-shirts from the U.S. It’s changed the dress habits of people. Thirty years ago, women didn’t wear shorts, short sleeves, or low necks.”

The Shipibos had a tradition in which grandparents took the first child of each of their children to raise. This bonded families of generations together. The children raised by grandparents learned traditional skills needed for living in the rainforest, like climbing trees, fishing, and using a bow and arrows.

Much of traditional culture is quickly being lost as people move out of villages, primarily for education. Educated people must go where they can find employment—so many never return to their villages.

Bergman sees people at a crossroad, trying to figure out who they want to be. “Many don’t just want to be known as Indians,” she said. “They are proud of their traditions but want manufactured clothes, sneakers, makeup. There’s a difference between throwing away all traditions and deciding what you want to keep.”

The Bergmans have lived in West Virginia since 1973. They were always looking for ways to use the traditional skills they learned in their travels, so they decided to build their own adobe house like those in Peru and Mexico. They used 12,000 adobe bricks made from the red clay of their property, adding only some sand.

Their walls, says Bergman, are about 12 inches thick, made with one layer of bricks. “Adobe is a wonderful building material,” she said. “It’s efficient in hot and cold weather. It absorbs heat slowly during the day and releases it slowly at night over about 12 hours. It’s good as long as the roof keeps the rain, especially freezing rain, off the walls.”

Barbara Bergman studied biology and sociology, and now works part-time at Fountain Rock Nature Center near Frederick, Md., as a naturalist. She also works on the family’s small farm where they raise their vegetables and keep a cow and goats for milk and cheese.

Bergman is in a national weaving group, Weave A Real Peace (WARP). They hope that if people come together in valuing beautiful things made by hand it will develop respect for all people and human rights.