TALENTED in art and craft, native American Indian Karen Shankaran visited Fiji in 1986 and aroused the curiosity of people who were fascinated by the glass beads braided into her hair.
An article in The Fiji Times on July 3, that year, read Karen came to Fiji from San Diego for a vacation and to showcase new hair styles. She said adorning the crowning glory was not new in America.
“Beading hair is not new, not a fad that comes and goes,” Karen said.
“Headbands, feathers, and beads were part of personal adornments of the Native Indians before they met Europeans.”
During her three-month holiday with her husband and one-year-old son, Karen set up a shop selling beads and feather articles from the United States.
Karen said her husband, Christopher, who left Fiji for the US with his parents when he was a baby, was a versatile singer and dancer.
“He impersonated Michael Jackson and Prince Elvis Presley.” She said there were about 300 different tribes of native Americans living in North and South America. “My grandfather was from South America and came from the Choctaws tribe.” Karen left college to work as a telephone operator.
“At that time, any women who were not white were given posts of telephone operators first because that was the lowest paid job in the telephone company.” While working as a telephone operator she learnt to climb telephone poles. She put in a transfer application and obtained a job as telephone installer.
“This meant dressing in trousers, jacket and helmet and climbing telephone poles just like any man.”
Karen then learnt to repair telephones.
“Then I put in another transfer for the posts of communication technician, and so from the lowest paid job I worked my way up to the highest paid job in a telephone company.” Artistic Karen designed, sewed, painted, and worked with feathers and beads.
She said she always kept one or two business on the side. Karen and Christopher married in 1983 and she left the telephone company when their son Shankaran was born. She designed and sewed an elegant bib and successfully she sewed, packaged, and marketed them all over the US.
“Americans who dined in restaurants with their babies like to buy classy bibs and paid anything up to $15,” she said. Karen felt her artistic talents was a natural trait inherited from her native American Indian ancestors who were characteristically serious, proud, and brave people.
“Before the contact with Europeans, the American Indians had reached a high level of civilisation and were employed in systematic agriculture. “Their hunting was done by ingenious snares, nets, spears, bows and arrows, harpoons and clubs which displayed intricate handwork and imagination.”
Sledges and skin boats (cora les) were the main means of transport because they lived near the water.
“Arts and crafts were developed to a high degree. Spinning and weaving were practised with great skill. Glass beads and shells were strung in patterns with or without porcupine quills. Gold, silver, and iron were worked into utensils and various articles for personal use.”
Painting too had reached considerable development and adorned articles made from skin, bone, and pottery. Music echoed in every phase of Indian life. “There was gruesome war music, wild dance music, sweet love music, thrilling hunting music, and music for see-time and harvest.
“The chief instruments known to the Native American Indians before the advent of the white man were drums, flutes, and rattles.”
Karen said she had not been on a native settlement — called a “reservation” for a long time.
“Once you leave the reservation and go to the white men’s land, you are not really wanted back. It is like betraying one’s culture and heritage. The Native Americans want to keep their culture.”
Karen spent two weeks on Taveuni meeting her husband’s relatives, and was impressed with the peace, beauty, and nature of the people on the island more so than in Suva.
- Compiled by: Pekai Kotoisuva
