The discussion in Chap. 2, ‘The Iban Pua Kumbu Weaving Tradition: Threading the Research Terrain’, explores some of the main debates that have exercised scholars of pua kumbu since the 1980s onwards. The scholarly exchanges have been remarkably disputatious, with arguments of fact and interpretation focusing on issues such as the sources of the weavers’ inspiration and the meaning of the motifs, patterns and designs associated with the cloths. Maintaining the earlier argument, I suggest that the academic study of Iban pua kumbu has suffered from a kind of ‘knowledge extractivism’, commonplace in studies of Indigenous communities around the world. I deal directly with some problematic assumptions, the most contentious being the very narrow interpretation of the motifs contained in the textiles and the claim, made as long ago as the 1990s, that the pua kumbu weaving tradition is a thing of the past. Instead, I create an argument for the continuing salience of the ‘social meanings’ of the textiles, and that the weavers speak eloquently to originality and creativity, demonstrated by a grasp of mythology and spiritual values and the learned ability to spin yarns in compelling ways.