Black Material Geographies

Episode 10

Imagining Regional Fiber Initiatives

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

In this final episode of season one, we examined the question, what would it look like if regional fiber initiatives became the norm? In last week's episode, we started to explore the impact of material supply chains and how to rethink and redesign them. This week, we get a more granular look at regional fiber initiatives and what actually is possible. There are brilliant folks transforming how our clothes are made in a way that benefits our environment and thriving local economies, and luckily I know a few of them.

My name is Teju Adisa-Farrar. Welcome to the last episode of Black Material Geographies. I am speaking to you from Lenapehoking, also known as Brooklyn, New York to support indigenous land back movements, head to landback.org.

The last episode ended with Baily Rose sharing the ethos behind Tailor's Union. Their ultimate goal is to localize supply chains. One of the main reasons why most supply chains are global is because of neoliberal policies instituted in the 1970s. These policies allowed companies to outsource labor wherever in the world it is cheapest. As a result of devalued currency and unequal trade agreements, US and European brands can get cheaper labor from countries in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Propelled by the desperate need for economic development and pressure from Western corporations, these regions decrease environmental regulations and labor laws to incentivize Western companies to go there. The other place companies started going to have their products made more cheaply was domestic prisons, which could have possibly contributed to US prison expansion in the 1980s, even though crime was going down.

The expansion of neoliberal policies suppressed the domestic labor movements, including minimizing unions and regulations for corporations. These policies destroyed regional manufacturing economies, as well as privatized public services, eroding local economies.

All of the above factored into the fashion industry, normalizing global supply chains that are exploitative and degrade our environment. This transformed clothing production and consumption in the US. Whereas in 1960, about 95% of Americans’ clothing was manufactured in the US, now less than three percent of clothing consumed in the US is manufactured here. That means nearly 98% of US clothing production is outsourced to places like Haiti, as heard about in episode five, and other countries we commonly see on clothing tags like Vietnam, Pakistan, and China.

So rebuilding regional supply chains that support climate mitigation is also about supporting thriving bioregional economies that value workers and the land. In order to do this, there can't be cheating. As Baily mentioned, while sharing the work of her friend and mentor Rick Griffiths.

Baily Rose:

I didn't mention before that reimagining and redesigning supply chains for me also really means to decentralize supply chains, which means localizing them. And these larger corporations have a way of saying things like, "Oh, okay, we're going to do this." And I see it as a form of White saviorism, because if you give people the tools and the resources that they need and want, they will do the best for themselves. And that's the only way to do things is to give people agency and the resources and the support they need to do the best for themselves. It will never be an international corporation coming into some sort of community telling them that they think that this is the best way for them.

And so even like that thought process, cheats people out of their freedom and agency, and having to rely on such international supply chains. And so when supply chains are localized, people are able to give themselves the power, the support, and the resources that they truly need, which could be a variety of things that we might not even, and corporations might not ever think of.

And there's also something in there about going back to the capacity for clothing to heal and damage our bodies. And then those supply chains also have the capacity to heal or damage the people and the land. These specifics of how they cheat people, of course, it's by wages, mistreatment. Even I was just talking to a friend, and she's also a fashion designer, and she was saying, "Well, my dream factory would be to have childcare there at the factory." And I said, "You know what? Why don't we just pay them for them to pay their own childcare? And if they want to have maternity leave, then they are paid enough to have maternity leave."

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Creating regional supply chains allows us to address the specific needs of the workers and artisans in that region, be it childcare, culturally relevant resources, flexible hours. Sustainable fashion has to be sustainable for everyone involved, the workers, the artists, the soil, the waterways, the community, all of the things that make up the economy, not just profit. Current supply chains are designed to maximize profits for company executives and investors. The maximizing of profits for a small, wealthy few is made possible through racism, classism, and sexism, which operates at multiple scales.

Baily Rose:

I've metaphorically been fishing in the lake of sustainable fashion with that can of worms ever since, and there was something apparent in that a bunch of people come to Colorado, and it's this very like masculine coming to conquer the mountains, and women's bodies type feeling, which is a bit like disassociative. That disconnection was super apparent to me. It was always really, really hard to do anything. And it was always a struggle. And honestly, until I came back from Berlin and COVID hit, and after I attended Fibershed and listened to your lecture on Black Fiber Systems, all of those systemic things, I was like, "This is why it's been so hard. I've been fighting against racism and sexism."

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Can you talk about some of the challenges you faced? I mean, the first, of course, being that you were doing something out of necessity, which is how sustainability in the course of human history has happened. It's been out of necessity, until now, where it's a trend. So what were some of the challenges you were facing?

Baily Rose:

So people knew me as a designer, because I was making all of these things and having shows, but then I was struggling financially, and I knew that I was up against fast fashion and it was always amazing to me. I'm like, "I don't get how this stuff can be so cheap." And I understood it because it was made in China. And I knew that wages were lower over there, et cetera, et cetera. Even some of the machines that aren't even here in the United States that do some of these techniques on $20 clothing, which with hand techniques, it just takes such a long time.

And so since I was in it and trying to make a living off of it, that was the biggest thing, I wanted to do this, people loved it, but then they also would be like, "Oh, that's really expensive. I'm not paying that price." And I wasn't able to justify it because I was also around a bunch of other poor, broke artists. And so I also never felt super comfortable wanting to charge a lot. But now I know, too, why fashion and clothing has been devalued, because of systemic racism and sexism in the industry, and imperialization, and all these other things. And so now I know a bit what I'm up against, but I mean, that's the biggest thing. And all of my other friends who design clothing and tailor and upcycle, it's still the number one struggle, it's just, it's hard to make a living.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Baily learned about my work through Fibershed, which is an organization I have been working with on a variety of projects and initiatives since 2019. One such project is a Regional Fiber Manufacturing Initiative or RFMI. The RFMI has a vision of supporting and developing a climate beneficial, soil to soil apparel supply chain in the Western region of the United States. Rebecca Burgess is the founder and executive director of Fibershed.

Rebecca Burgess:

We try to build that textile culture and community from, literally, soil up. I learned how to weave actually through the university at first, but was able to kind of carry out some of my weaving practice at the craft center. And I had in my, I think, second year of college, a roommate whose family was from Peru, Liz Fiero, her ability to understand a textile was something that I hadn't been up close and personal with.

She could look at a textile and see the internal structure. I would look at a textile, and I would see its color, or I would see its patterns, or maybe it's drape or how it felt to my skin. But she could understand it from a much deeper architectural level. And I was so excited by that skill, by that level of understanding, and she really inspired me to think more deeply about materialism. And materialism has come to mean something, again, very superficial, but it is not.

Beyond the architecture of a textile, then you get into so many other sets of questions, who architected it? When did they architect it? What was going through their mind? How were they supported or not supported through their labor? And then looking further down that trajectory, what is the fiber that makes this textile? And what is the plant material or other material that makes this color? And the people who are on these farms, how are they engaging with these landscapes?

So you basically, threw a textile, I felt like you could learn about the entire world and the history of the world. And so. To me, it's an avenue for learning about oneself, learning about colonialism, learning about the source of America's so-called wealth. So when I got back to the States and the making culture was very much about like, buy your making materials at this big chain supply store, and then go make things with whatever material.

I just, I could not hang in there. I was like, "No, we need to have a much deeper conversation around ecology and politics and history. And that's what I'm interested in. I don't want to just make textiles for the sake of textiles. I want to make textiles for the sake of having big conversations. So that's kind of how Fibershed has been held up by me, at least, is let textiles be your path to have potent conversations.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Tameka Peoples of Seed 2 Shirt, who we heard from in the last episode is part of Fibershed's network of producers, farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs who believe in regional regenerative economies. Seed 2 Shirt was a central participant and case study for Fibershed's RFMI, which I was an advisor for.

Tameka Peoples:

The power of connection, I think Fibershed found me or vice versa. I realized that the work that they were doing in California and just the work they do in textile regional systems in general. And so the participation in RFMI was really centered around, I had a vision that we could do this in the US. And if we did this in the US, what would that look like?

Obviously, textile production, for those who don't know, is very expensive, very heavy machinery, intense, and it's not something, one, that you can do alone. And so as Rebecca and team explained what RFMI really does, really help you engineer a model that could work for you and your vision around production. And then thinking more concretely about what surrounds us that we could tap into in order to make this vision happen.

I didn't realize that we could actually be able to take kind of the cotton, the carding room, all of these things and have it all in one place, that Seed 2 Shirt could be at the helm of that. We want that. And so what would that look like? So RFMI is really about addressing what is available to you locally? How do we reshore or rethink about textile production in a regional way?

And in California, we're rich in multitude of things, but pima cotton, we are also very rich in that. And so just the process of engineering a model of being able to do that on the Central Coast of California and working with Nick and Rebecca and the RFMI team to address how that can have been? What would be necessary? Has just, it's just been amazing.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

In addition to creating an all black supply chain, Seed 2 Shirt has a goal of being part of a regional supply chain. One where their apparel can be made in a bioregional system, in essence, a fibershed.

Rebecca Burgess:

What defines a fibershed, to me, at the end of the day is the strategic geography is going to be defined by rainfall patterns and soil types. And whatever that land can healthfully in an ongoing sustainable way produce is what you would want to define your fibershed material based by. What is the land easily, generously producing? And then you think about a human population, and that's tricky, because we live in such a high densely populated area. How big of a geography is needed to cloth this population? Is a question.

And so we've been answering that like California grows enough cotton for everyone in California to receive 11 pounds of California grown cotton every year. We grow enough wool in California that everyone could have two ounce item of wool garment per year. Starting with the kind of the largest meta level issue is people actually believing and trusting and having the confidence that their communities could actually have an endemic material culture. Meaning, just that idea that not a bunch of other people from other countries make everything. And then we just import it.

Getting over that mindset has been and continues to be a major hurdle. Beyond mindset, we see the pull of the culture is towards convenience to have things shipped to your door within 24 hours of ordering. There's this drive, in the main, towards faster rates of consumption. And so we're not really slowing down enough to ask ourselves, what are we consuming? And what are the impacts of what we consume after its lifespan with us?

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

As Rebecca mentioned, creating regional fiber initiatives requires a mindset change. We need to redefine convenience away from consuming as much as possible, as fast as possible to having access to products and clothing that are made in your region and support your communities.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy to create regional fibersheds. The neoliberal policies aforementioned, and the capitalistic economy have led to huge gaps and challenges in sustainable regional production. Yet, and still, Fibershed and Seed 2 Shirt are on a mission to try to make it work. Seed 2 Shirt is part of a larger producer community of folks who are using innovative climate beneficial agriculture to develop a regional supply chain.

Tameka Peoples:

First thing, we would want to start out with our organic cotton. So we've been exploring opportunities at some test sites and what would be available to us. There's opportunities, just northeast of us on the other side of Bakersfield, where there's an opportunity to grow organic cotton. And so the cotton sourcing would come from a BIPOC farmer, organic cotton farmer. We could do that, not just locally, but there are opportunities to encourage other black farmers in the region to be a part of the initiative, to think about how they could grow organic cotton and what that would look like. So that's a reinvigorating that type of planting and growing in these Central Valley region.

The second piece of that would be the cleaning of that cotton would certainly have to happen very close. There are some organic cotton gins near and dear to the Central Valley that could be used for cleaning the cotton and getting it to the next level.

Some of the things that we learned from this initiative is we talk about engineering a model, so you're identifying what can be done, locally, what potentially can't be done, and then where does the production piece fit in? Which, that end is the cutting and sewing of the final product. So through the entire engineering model, we have identified that there are certain pieces that are just going to be significant hurdles to address. We can clean it. We can probably even get it to the stage where it's ready to card, but there's going to be some layers that we'll need to partner with those still in California, but probably Northern or Southern California to help finalize and refine that final material. And then we would certainly have to think about that final product line.

So we've been in this stage of engineering the model and what is possible. BIPOC farmers are, of course, included in the model. The idea's, of course, regional fiber manufacturing initiative, so to encourage that regionally. That does not preclude the natural relationships that Seed 2 Shirt has with African American cotton farmers in the Southeastern region, because we've identified that there's potential that we would still have to do some things outside our region and our partners who would want to be a part of it, we could still source the cotton in that way.

So there's portions of the supply chain we've identified that can be BIPOC or African American, but then those that aren't, they're still a part of that initiative. So big vision and a big goal, but I certainly believe with partners like Fibershed and initiatives with other partners, we can definitely get this done. So not too big to not dream and continue to work towards that.

Rebecca Burgess:

When I first started this work, I would drive between the East Bay and San Francisco and farms, and I would literally pick design students up, and I would take them to farms. And say, "Here. Here's material." And I was a taxi cab driver for many years, just making sure people had access to these materials from more urban environments. And then those collaborations between those artists and those farmers would create a beautiful clothing. And in the beginning I had run a Kickstarter campaign to help fund that and help those textiles that were a collaboration of urban and rural young and old become part of a wardrobe that I wore.

So I kind of used my own body as a Guinea pig experiment for, could you make clothes from the land? And could you wear them and even get outside your house? That was all affirmative. Yes, we could. So producer community is great in that way. They are the lifeblood of the making and farming community here.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Indigenous communities around the world filled with artisans, farmers, and producers have been working in fibersheds for centuries, but often we don't have the opportunity to learn about these communities' traditional practices and ways of life. And even when we do hear about them, they are often framed as being less civilized and/or stuck in the past. However, it is wisdom and agricultural knowledge from indigenous ancestors in the past that can help us secure a future beyond climate change. Many years ago, Rebecca was also inspired by some of these indigenous lifeways.

Rebecca Burgess:

Well, it goes back to spending a little bit of that time, which I was so relished, in Indonesia and Northern Thailand and on the Vietnamese border. Between Thailand and Vietnam, there was a really incredible textile community, a Buddhist community there that I learned so much from, left indelible marks on my brain from the use of mango dyes to hand spun silks, raising silk worms in your home. The intergenerational aspects of great grandmothers, working with grandchildren to make one textile. All of the beauty and some of the music, the music culture that was tied in with the making culture. Songs that people sung as they were weaving. Foods that they would prepare in tandem with some of the weaving. So you'd be weaving on a backstrap loom and then be producing food. They would share labor and food production and textile creation.

And what I observed was just something that felt more intact and more intergenerational and more resilient, in that you didn't need to commodify all these outside services. You weren't purchasing childcare services. You weren't purchasing a lot of healthcare services. A lot of things were taken care of in the community. In fact, when I was in one of these communities, the Thai government tried to bring a post office to the Karen tribe. And they put this cinder block post office in the middle of the village, and the village women turned it into a gallery for their art pieces. They were like, "Thanks for the post office. We don't really need mail." And they didn't care. They were like whistling down the path as they were delivering new textiles to refurbish their new gallery.

Just the confidence, and then to go into a village and say, "Well, what is the most impactful thing that I could do to help support the continuation of your way of life?" And the answer was not start a fair trade project, "Here, come buy my textiles." The answer was, "Go home and start taking more responsibility for yourselves." And I could do nothing but agree with that. And it was something that I came home and I was like, "Well, I think we need to take more responsibility for ourselves."

And so in that we have to ask ourselves a whole bunch of questions. What are we growing here? What can we grow here? Who are the manufacturers that are left? Who needs to be uplifted more that wants to do this work? What's the landscape that's here? And what can we do? And so I found though the hardest thing in this work was to come home with that knowledge in my bones and my blood and not be very well understood, by economists, in particular.

I remember giving presentations in beautiful home in Oakland, raising money for my first Kickstarter campaign. And an economist from UC Berkeley. Just immediately was like, "But those are good jobs you'll be taking away from all those people overseas." And I was like, "Have you been there?" "No." "Okay. Well, why don't you go, come back, and tell me if you'd want your daughter working there." And it's like, that's the utterance under the breath of so many people in the West who have this disease, that anything they find they have to make it a franchise. They have to make it big. They have to explode it into something of gargantuan scale. And I'm so tired of it.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Before textiles are a commodity, they are first a human necessity and marker of culture. We don't wear clothes and use blankets to create profit for brands and corporations. We wear clothes to express ourselves, our values, reflect our identity, and protect our body from harsh environments, when necessary. Clothing and textiles are about geography, plants, food systems, community. Fibershed believes creating regional fiber systems can support sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, while establishing healthy ecosystems and reinvigorating textile cultures.

Rebecca Burgess:

The technical issues have been that we have eviscerated a lot of the textile culture. California used to have 12 working mills that were vertically integrated and that made carriage blankets and stockings and men's coats from range lands and wool grazing, which of course had a huge impact over production of wool, is not nothing I advocate for. But to just say, "We did have in California, even 12 working mills," and those mills were put out of business after the transcontinental railway came through. And by 1893, which I think was the beginning of Jim Crow, the Reconstruction era was ending in the South, and imprisoned labor was becoming a very prominent force in the South. And textile goods were being shipped on that railway into California, and our labor could not compete.

It was eviscerated by the same goal of having cheap and convenient and exploited labor. The West, yes, had these little pockets of doing things endemically. But once we became connected to major distribution lines, we just gave up doing things for ourselves. And we did so because it was, people were being exploited in our own region and in our own country, and it was creating these falsified price points and people, again, grabbed hold of those cheap, convenient textiles.

So the West, to rebuild itself, we have to look at our history and we have to stop and say, "We're not going to keep doing this. We can do a really modern, clean, good job of bringing these textile communities and cultures here." There's great, beautiful efficient equipment. It's humanely scaled. It's here if we want to bring it here. And the West, we're producing most of North America's fiber. We're producing the vast majority of wool and all of the country and North America's cotton.

So there's a big powerful move to be made, to add the means of production into these farming communities and to decentralize the industry. We could do many, many things to make the clothing even more affordable from our fibersheds, but we're not investing in enough of the manufacturing systems. And with a slightly more efficient set of manufacturing systems, we could really change the cost of these local clothes and we could empower the growers and the farmers more by giving them the real value in pay for their material.

And textiles are some of the first injurious industry moves that were made in this country. I mean, from the cotton, the transatlantic slave trade, I think it was by 1836, most of the country's GDP was based off of cotton, the communities who were growing that and who knew how to grow it, were not being paid for their labor. And we were building our infrastructure in the United States based on the profits of that crop. So we could say, "We are indebted to all of those who produced those cotton crops, who picked them, who planted them, who tended them. The whole country is indebted."

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

We owe it to ourselves to imagine regional supply chains that honor indigenous history and land stewardship. Supply chains that honor my ancestors who worked on plantations to create wealth for this country. Supply chains that honor the millions of women who sew our clothes. Supply chains that honor the soil, seeds, and animals that provide the fiber. Visions for regional fibersheds are based in all of these layers.

Rebecca Burgess:

The vision for a heterogeneous, equity focused fiber system, where so much of the work of all of our ancestors got kind of blown apart by the colonial projects, and the enclosure of the commons. And I would just love to see that we look back and we say, "Wow, 10,000 years of breeding this plant from the mallow family, or 5,000 years of working with this beautiful bast fiber, flax or hemp or nettle." There's this hope that I have that we look back to move forward and we work with all of those classical breeding ancestors. And we find, instead of creating machinery... because this is how technologies work. Technologies goes from the Western mind, we create technologies, and then we try to modify nature often to fit in those technologies. And when I look at the history of the cotton gin and the history of only using white cotton and white wool for everything we're missing so many of nature's color.

When I say heterogeneity, I mean heterogeneity in the color. I mean heterogeneity in the number of people working in the system and the types of ancestral traditions they bring forward. Again, the technologists coming to the table, but, again, supporting us to do this agroecological material cultural work. And the investors, the last piece, that's such a critical piece. My hope is that the investment community can support communities to build up what they know they can do best, and to invest and to trust in them to do that work. And overall we would see, yeah, my big hope is the decentralization of the industry and some kind of repair for the wounding that has been created in the last big era of colonial mindset, colonial action.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Every single industry has an opportunity to transform towards true sustainability. Scaling down, looking to bioregions, starting from the community up rather than the investors down, learning geographically specific indigenous practices, educating ourselves and shifting the paradigm. We must reckon with history, but rather than feeling guilt, we could focus on collective accountability.

Looking to Black communities to understand our current material realities reminds us that this is about the human condition, because before we are Black, we are human. It's about our grandmothers who sewed our clothes and their grandparents who tended to plants, and our ancestors whose indigenous practices created beautiful products, and also gave back to the earth.

We want to protect our planet's environment, because we all live here and we also want to live well and thrive as humans in communities. If Black people can survive and thrive and create, despite all the violence, exclusion, and displacement, then we can definitely transform our material realities. History does not end in the past. Every day we are simultaneously making choices for our present reality and designing for the future of humanity.

It's time for the final wind down. I invite you to take a deep breath and stretch your body, release tension in your shoulders, your jaw, your neck, your back. Taking a moment to reflect on and process our conversations this season, our conversations with entrepreneurs, scholars, artists, makers, designers, researchers, my dad. We discussed making products differently and thinking critically about the industries that create our material realities.

Let's just take a few moments to reflect on this immense and diverse season, bringing together Black people, materials, and the different geographies impacted. I invite you to take a deep breath and realize that we have an opportunity to transform society in the most beautiful way. Thank you for caring about textile cultures of the past and sustainable fiber systems of the future. Thank you for listening, learning, and experiencing the material geographies that we are all a part of.

You can subscribe to Black Material Geographies anywhere you get your podcasts. Black Material Geographies is part of the Whetstone Radio Collective. This podcast is a team effort. Thank you to the Black Material Geographies team: my producer. Tiffany Rozier, audio editor Ray Royal, composer Philip Kelechi Nnamdi Iroh, researcher Haven Ogbaselase, and intern Kai Stone.

I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective Head of Podcast Céline Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, associate producer Quentin Lebeau, production assistant Amalissa Uytingco, and sound intern Simon Lavender. Thank you to Whetstone art director, Alex Bowman, for the cover art.

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