reconnection, resistance and renewal

the decolonization journey of an annishinaabekwe living in denendeh

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Finished scraping tools. Speedy Sharp was used to create a nice edge. Satisfying to see the shavings of skin roll down the hide when your tools are sharpened correctly and carefully.

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When you're fleshing a hide and you begin to see vein tracks, you know you've hit the jackpot. Another sign that you're fleshing the right way is that your arms will turn to jello, your palms and finger will begin to blister and you'll sometimes feel faint. It's strangely satisfying. Try it! Today a man was biking by and asked if we were fleshing a hide. We explained the process to him and he ended up throwing on some gloves and helping us out. It's always so great to watch others experience the intricacies of hide work for the first time. I am starting to become so confident with my ability to flesh with a knife. It took awhile for this to happen, but it happened nonetheless. I received little help from Kyle with the lifting and the fleshing today and it's validating to see myself make progress independently. Thankful after a day on the hides and an evening on the water, under the northern lights.

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Today Kyle worked on forging welded steel into moosehide scraping tools. There are many different styles of scrapers. These particular ones are almost exact replicas of Kyle’s late Ama’s tools. This is a special process. Tools must be respected. If you are a moosehide tanner who tans your own hides, it is believed that you should not let others touch or handle your tools. This could allow for other people’s negative energy to transfer onto your tools. If negative energy is released onto the tools, which subsequently will come into contact with the hide, then that negative energy is passed onto the hunter who harvested the hide. As the provider and the person who generously shared their harvest with you, it is not a respectful practice to allow negative energy to be passed onto the hunter- hunters must be respected at all times. It is also disrespectful to the animal who gave its life to feed and clothe you. There are other ways of showing respect to the hide. This includes not insulting the smells, feel or look of the hide- to only say positive, thankful things about your hide. It is also disrespectful to swear or speak negatively around your hide. Tanning hides is a blessing and we need to act as if we are lucky to take part in such an ancient, powerful, empowering process. 

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This is a photo of Lucy-Anne Yakeleya’s hide out at Blachford Lake Lodge during a Dechinta visioning & planning retreat in November, 2015. Here, her hide is on the final smoke. This means that the hide has been soaked and rubbed in brain paste and solution and that it has been softened and scraped to satisfaction. After the final smoke the hide is ready to be used as a leather.  This smoking method is called a “flat smoke”. The hide is laid flat over top peeled logs above a smoke pit, as pictured above. Charred or rotten spruce wood, a.k.a “tinchur” in Denesuline or “dah’shaa” in Tlicho, is lit on fire to produce a tiny flame and an abundance of smoke. This rotten, orange wood can be found wherever a spruce tree has fallen and when moss begins to cover the limbs of the tree. Kick the moss off, throw your work gloves on and gather the bits of rotten spruce wood in a bucket. Some people like to use the larger chunks of wood for smoking and other folks prefer to use the tiny little crumbs of wood. Either way is suitable. This smoke is what gives traditional brain-tanned moosehide its’ one-of-a-kind smell and coloring. Smoking the hide also helps it to absorb the brain paste, as explained in a few of my posts below.  

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Disclaimer: I know that in some cultures it is considered disrespectful to take photos of harvested animals, as this is seen as disrespecting their lives which they generously give to us. The folks who I am privileged to travel and hunt with don’t have these customs, and so we often document our hunts. Please understand that this is just my way of doing things, but that I respect other cultures who have different beliefs.  Here are some photos of the moose that I shot on McLean Bay on our way to Fort Reliance last summer. The first photo shows the moose just after we drove up to her on the shoreline and Kyle began to make the straight cut down the stomach after cutting off the head- this is always the first step when you are field dressing big game, as it helps to drain the blood and cool off the meat. The photos below show me helping to skin her out, the community folks coming to take meat from the harvest at the Desnethche gathering site, and Kyle and his daughter Gah fleshing the hide. 

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Here are some photos of Sara Gillis, Mandee McDonald, Jennifer Neyando and I. This is the first hide I ever worked on- the Deh Cho winter bull that I mentioned in my posts below. Here we are working at the Dechinta out-camp site on Blachford Lake in the fall of 2012.  Photos c/o the Northern Journal

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We had to soak our hides last night to get them stretched up on the frames soon for drying, so we decided to try out some fabric softener- a modern alternative to brain water. We mixed the fabric softener with clean water, threw a rock on top and soaked it overnight in the action packer. We'd never tried it before and apparently elders swear by Downy, but we opted for the $2 version. We'll see what happens.

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Tonight we went and found some Sunlight bar soap at the supermarket. This bar soap is a novelty, so I bought 12 bars. In Yellowknife's Independant Grocer it's located in the cleaning isle, next to the Tide Pens. If you can't find any at your local store then Irish Spring will be fine. I grated the bars down into shavings with a cheese grater. The shavings will be mixed with clean lake water, fermented big game brains (caribou, moose, muskox) and butter- an optional (Woods Cree) addition to the brain paste. The ingredients of the brain paste are mixed together over an open fire or air tight heater inside your tent or cabin, assuming you're in the bush. Use a small teapot that you don't plan on using again to concoct the paste. The paste will become thick and have a greyish/pink hue. Some people wring the brain into the soapy water through cheese cloth or a cotton tea towel. This will allow the brain oils to seep through the cloth into the paste, but not all the brain fibres. The Dënesųłiné ladies and elders usually just throw the entire fermented brain into the pot. Either way works. Try both! This thick brain paste will be rubbed into a scraped hide. The hide can be folded up and left to absorb the paste for a couple of days, or it can be immediately put on flat smoke.

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I'm a proud little Annishinaabekwe!

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This is a jar that once contained Del Monte peaches. Now it houses my moose brains. These brains are from a moose that Kyle and I harvested on Murky Channel in March of 2015. It was our first winter moose that we harvested together and I got some crazy frostbite on my back... But it was worth it (obviously)! The moose was a super large, very fat bull. It was Kyle's biggest moose ever. It was funny because when we cracked open the back of the skullcap to access to brain cavity, we discovered that the very large, very fat bull actually had the teeniest, tiniest little brain. We all laughed. Thankful for these brains. They are frozen now but will be left out in the sun to ferment for future brain solution and brain paste.

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This caribou hide is a gift.  I listen to stories all the time about the dwindling caribou populations and the speculation that goes along with the potential destruction of an entire species. My heart is saddened by the ways in which I know this deeply affects my family and my partner's family. The caribou sustained the Indigenous peoples in many northern regions across "Canada". This is a sacred animal- a lifeline. The caribou is a life-giver, just like womankind. The caribou are a cultural matriarch for thousands of tribal people. When we destroy our caribou, or any other animals that Mother Earth provides, we destroy ourselves and put our environment in a vulnerable position of imbalance. What does it say about us humans, that we destroy such a sacred being by our capitalism, consumption and greed?  So, this hide is a gift as I do not know when I will be able to get my hands on a caribou hide ever again. It is precious to me. Marsi.  I am trying a new drying and softening method on my deck today. You have to neatly fold your caribou hide into a thin, straight strip. You wrap the strip of folded hide around a secured steel cord. You pull the hide back and fourth to rub it smoothly over the cord. You just repeat this process until the entire hide is smooth and evenly dry. If you put the hide away or decide not to finish, you must re-soak the entire hide and repeat the whole process over again. You MUST do things right the first time, otherwise you will pay for it (and your muscles will hate you).

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Another funny thing about urban tanning is that when you need to wring out a hide after soaking it overnight, you need to find a place to twist it. There are very few trees in my parents' yard and certainly none that are suitable for the job. Instead, we used the ball hitch on my father's Jeep to wring out the caribou hide. It was a bit rusty so naturally we covered it with a Canadian Tire bag.

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These skinning knives with the yellow handles from Weaver & Devore only cost about $18, but they do the trick really well. I think they even beat the Old Hickory knives. Go pick one up if you do a lot of work with knives as opposed to regular tools, or just enjoy a good knife for a cheap price that holds a good edge. This is my student’s hide from Mildred Hall School and Sir John Highschool. It’s a winter bull and must’ve been harvested by a non-native person, as it still has the genitals on it. Kyle and I fleshed and de-haired the whole hide with these knives. I bought 6 for good measure! It is now soaking in my yard in an action packer container in clean water and fabric softener. It will be strung up on a frame to dry and eventually be folded up and thrown in our school charter to Lutsel K’e for the hide tanning gathering at the end of May. We will spend our time on-site scraping this hide with metal scraping tools that Kyle is making for us out of flat welded steel. Once the hide achieves an even thickness and turns an even color of creamy off-white, then the hide will be ready for a fermented moose brain paste (consisting of fermented brain, Irish Spring or Sunlight bar soap and butter) and a smoke. 

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This is a photo that I took of my old cow moose hide that was harvested last summer on McLean Bay. I left the hide folded up in the back of my father’s truck and when spring arrived and I unraveled the skin, mold was everywhere. The good news is that I began to scrape it and the mold spores didn’t completely penetrate the skin, so it is still a good hide. Although it terrified me to see mold on my first hide that I harvested myself, I learned something new about how hides must be stored and about what to do when you see little black spots covering your beloved skin that you worked so hard on. 

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new season, new blog

The snow has melted and the ice is thawing in Somba K’e, Denendeh (Yellowknife, Northwest Territories) and my moosehide activities have begun for another summer season. I have been anxiously preparing for my 5 day trip to the community of Lutsel K’e, which is a community of about 250-300 people located on the East Arm of Tu Nedhe (Great Slave Lake), about 280 km south-east of Somba K’e. I will be chartering a plane with Yellowknife Education District No. 1 and bringing 6 students and my elder, Shirley Desjarlais along with me for the hide tanning gathering. My partner Kyle and I worked really hard to get the student’s hide ready to be worked on. We wanted to get it to the dry stage, where it is ready for scraping but it can be stored in a cool, dry area and will be preserved- no smell, no rot. We spent last weekend fleshing, punching, shaving, de-hairing the hide. Last night we put it on soak with $2 “FRANK” fabric softener that we found on our (what feels like) daily trip to Canadian Tire. I have never tried any tanning methods that aren’t 100% traditional, but since this is a student hide and since I felt like experimenting with it, we dropped the hose into the action packer, emptied a whole $2 bottle of the fabric softener and dropped a rock on top of the hides to soak overnight. I am soaking three hides in one bin: a corner of a winter bull hide harvested by my friend/mentor’s father from the Deh Cho (the first hide I ever worked on) which is on final smoke, a raw caribou hide with very few warbles and the student’s fall bull hide in scraping stage. They are still on soak now. We are tanning in my parent’s backyard in Old Town, which is also different for me. “Urban tanning” is a funny thing. When you’re in the bush and you need to find a rock to weigh down the hide(s), you don’t need to run around looking everywhere. There’s a ton of rocks for your use in the bush- not in urban tanning spaces though. We had to steal a strategically-placed rock to weigh down our hides from a neighboring garden! Oops!  So, I have many hides surrounding me at the moment which are all in different stages. I learn something new with every hide I come into contact with. This is what I love about tanning... You never know everything, you can always learn more and if you listen and watch, you will absorb the knowledge of those around you. I will never be the expert, but I know enough not to ruin my hides and that’s what matters to me right now.  I remember working on the very first hide I ever helped tan. It was a winter bull hide (the one in soak right now in Old Town) harvested in the Deh Cho region by my mentor Melaw’s father (Jim Antoine) and brother (Tumbah Antoine). It had been frozen for the summer and Melaw recently thawed it out for us to work on. The frame was already built, so I didn’t get to see how to look for the proper poles or how to nail it all together- I learned this later on. Instead, we jumped right into the fleshing. The hide had thawed and was soaking in lake water overnight to loosen up the flesh and meat still on the hide and to loosen the hair follicles to make the hair removal process easier- trying to flesh a dry hide can break your tools! We pulled it out of the water bin and strung it up onto the frame with blue fish line rope. We began to flesh it with moose shin bone tool fleshers. I loved watching Kyle knife flesh. He made it look so easy but it’s actually extremely difficult. Melaw made it look easy too, holding the flesher for hours and punching the hide repeatedly with the sharp end of the shin bone tool. The tools are heavy and after so many hours your arm starts to get sore and your fingers even blister occasionally- but she would keep fleshing. We eventually fleshed the entire hide, after working with headlamps in the darkness and trying out the fleshing post instead of having it strung up on the frame. The fleshing post is basically just a tree, peeled log or scrap lumber post that you drape the hide over. Eventually we strung the hide back up on the frame to stretch and dry for scraping process. We tied a tarp over top of the stretched hide to protect it from rain so that it could fully dry. We left it that way for a couple of days to achieve uniform dryness and took to the hide with our scraping tools which were scrap metal bars forged with a blade on the tip which removes layers of dried skin when pressure is applied to the blade.  This was where I learned the basics of tanning with Melaw Nakehk’o as my mentor. At the time, I was overwhelmed with some studying I was doing at Dechinta and I had become preoccupied to the point that the hide took a backseat. I immediately regretted neglecting the hide after I left the tanning site and returned to the city, but that was before I knew I would end up dating a skilled hunter who would provide an abundance (aka too many) hides for me to work on and learn from over the next few years.  Now, my main hide that I am going to focus on this summer is from a very old summer cow that I shot myself on McLean Bay on my way to Fort Reliance for the Desnethche gathering last summer. My life has changed since the first time I came into contact with a fresh, green hide. A few weeks later at Dechinta, Kyle shot a bull and a cow on a boat outing. I was already overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge and experience that I was gaining on the land, but then to see an actual moose harvested in front of me and to be able to touch it and help haul meat and the head was life-changing. I never expected that hunting and harvesting would become the driving factor in my life and my partnership with Kyle, who was the Dechinta bush hand. Since then, I have traveled thousands of kilometers in every direction of Tu Nedhe to harvest moose, muskox and small game. I have worked on wolverine, beaver, lynx, rabbit, muskox, moose, caribou and even bear hides.  My life has completely shifted since the days when my relationship with meat and animals consisted of removing my ground beef from the plastic wrap, which I would purchase from the local supermarket.  I am grateful. Forever.  Follow along on my new blog and gain some internet-based insight into the world of moosehide tanning through an Urban Annishinaabekwe living as a transplant on Denendeh.  Marsi, Miigwetch, Kici-Mecwec for reading.