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So some notes on appearance: Vairë shifts form multiple times as you may notice, each one significant in either 1) weaving as an art or 2) history and recordkeeping.
She first appears as a Modoc weaver (California native) who is weaving the story of arda into the rim of a great flat rush basket (basket art often did tell a story, and a person might make so many baskets in their life that they could do it even as their sight failed). In subsequent order, she appears as: a Vietnamese woman with a great back strap loom weaving some detailed brocade (Vietnamese textile art is renowned across the world); as an industrial textile worker who uses punch cards for her loom; an English woman whipping and beating flax to turn it into rope; a Greek woman with a drop spindle; and a computer scientist who is threading the copper for a rope core memory board by hand (the first and last core of this kind was used in the first Apollo mission).
I thought some atypical portrayals would be really interesting, particularly the rope core memory board, because textile workers were employed to create those memory cores for NASA as they were the only ones skilled enough to do so. NASA owes a lot of early innovation (and more importantly, success) to garment workers, actually. I wanted to push the boundary of what a weaver looks like and what different systems of memory, tradition, and history keeping look like.
A note on baskets: this is as close as I could get with some dedicated research time into PNW basket materials. This is slightly more applicable to southern Oregon Native TEK, but the same plants grow in Northern California too. To clarify fir root: it's highly absorbent, so a tightly woven (sometimes in two layers) fir root basket was often used for cooking because adding water to the basket would cause the fibers to swell thereby sealing the basket. I highly recommend my former professor's blog "NDN history research" for PNW Native History, and "Tending the Wild" by Kat Anderson for PNW/California Native TEK and Native history.