CCG Year of Engagement Podcast #2: Warp and Weft of Yap’s Outer Islands

The Community Collections Grants from the American Folklife Center support contemporary cultural field research within diverse communities. Through this grant program, the Center offered fellowships to individuals and organizations to work within their communities to produce ethnographic cultural documentation, such as oral history interviews and audio-visual recordings of cultural activity, from the community perspective. Since 2022, the Center has awarded twenty-nine of these grants. As we move into 2025, many of these grantees are working with AFC staff liaisons and archivists to prepare these collections for going public as digital collections on the Library’s website. This year will also see a number of public programs showcasing these grantees, their communities, and their finished collections, for a celebration we are calling the CCG Year of Engagement.

As part of the CCG Year of Engagement, the Center has produced a subseries of the Folklife Today podcast focused on interviews with the project teams behind these wonderful community documentation projects. In this second episode, we interview Neil Mellen and Modesta Yangmog, the project team that led the documentation for the Warp and Weft of Yap’s Outer Islands: Backstrap Weaving in Micronesia CCG project.

Download the full episode here.

The collection includes photographs of and interviews with 20 master lavalava weavers – a textile still regularly worn throughout Micronesia, especially for ceremonies and special events, and carries great importance. Asked about the importance of lavalava cloth, Modesta explained its many uses in a place like Ulithi Atoll. “It’s something that you, besides wearing, you use for peacemaking,” she began. “You use it for buying lamps. You use it for funerals.” Lavalava cloth is often used as a dowry, to secure marriages.

“It’s very important to our culture,” Modesta explained. “We have to have lavalava. It’s something you have to teach your daughters. They must know. It’s something that you must know how to make.”

Lavalava’s great importance to the Outer Islands was at the heart of why Modesta and Neil worked on the project. With more and more people moving away from the islands for work, there is a risk for knowledge around weaving lavalava to disappear. “When you have a cultural practice that’s so defining, but that at any given time, if that link between a mother or aunts and the daughter or niece is broken, then the practice is one generation away from being gone,” Neil shared. “And so this is a great way to reach out to that audience and help them because they can’t walk across the village to another older woman and ask her a question, but they have all these resources now where they can learn more.”

Because of the unique relationship between the Federated States of Micronesia and the United States, organizations in Micronesia are able to apply for federal grants. Neil credits the Library of Congress for being so willing to work with the Habele Outer Island Education Fund on the project:

“I think the match between what the community wanted to do and valued and the grant itself was exceptional. And I think it’s also worth noting that Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall [Islands], as Freely Associated States – on paper, they should have eligibility for virtually every domestic federal grant. But the reality is, a lot of federal agencies don’t realize that. And when we reached out to the Library of Congress, we got a ‘Oh, we can do this!’ response. And when we’ve reached out to the other federal agencies, sometimes in the past, there has been some confusion about what the Freely Associated States are or some unwillingness or more of an attitude of ‘you prove to us that this place is eligible for grants’ instead of a ‘let’s make this work’ attitude of the sort that we got from the Folklife Center. And that was thrilling.”

In order to secure the funding, the team had to show that they had the approval of the community itself to do the documentation. Modesta explained the process:

“In our islands, we don’t just go out and do things. We talk. We meet and listen. So everyone in the islands or the village understands what may be happening and what it may be. Why it may be happening and how it could happen. And that really helped when I finally sat down with the women, they really understand the what, and the how, and the why. They really felt part of what I was asking them, what we were doing. Something important – great and important.”

For the complete interview with Modesta and Neil, visit the Folklife Today podcast page or click here for the full episode.

For more about the Warp and Weft of Yap’s Outer Islands: Backstrap Weaving in Micronesia CCG project, visit the complete digital collection.

[Note: The intro/outro music for this episode comes from another CCG project – Sonidos de Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene. The clip features an instrumental medley performed by Avizo during an open-air concert documented in the course of the CCG project.]

Other Resources

Visit habele.org to learn more about the Habele Outer Island Education Fund

Check out these other blog posts by AFC Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce about the Warp and Weft CCG project, from the Library’s Folklife Today and Of the People: Widening the Path blogs:

• Community Collections Grants Recipients: Warp and Weft of the Remathau: Traditional Weaving on the Ulithi Atoll (July 27, 2022) – Of the People: Widening the Path
• AFC’s Community Collections Grants Recipients: Habele Outer Island Education Fund, Federated States of Micronesia (July 29, 2022) – Folklife Today
• First Community Collections Grant Project Goes Online!: Traditional Weaving in Micronesia (August 16, 2024) – Folklife Today
• First Community Collections Grant Project Goes Online! Traditional Weaving in Micronesia (August 21, 2024) – Of the People: Widening the Path