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RADILIH KOE'/FORT GOOD HOPE - Mary Barnaby was born June 18, 1932, in a rundown warehouse in Mayo, Yukon.

Mary Barnaby, left, tans moosehide with her daughter, Judy Lafferty. The two taught moosehide tanning courses from 2001 until this past year. Barnaby died in Inuvik on June 28. - photo courtesy of Kyla Kakfwi Scott

"It was a very interesting part of her life I discovered," said Frank T'seleie, her son-in-law, whom Barnaby treated as one of her own, like so many others she met in her 79 years. "She related her birth story very much like the story about baby Jesus."

The rest of the story was a little different though.

In 1936 Barnaby's parents, Peter and Madeline Mountain, along with a group of other families, followed the trade route to Fort Good Hope with their four-year-old daughter in tow. They were the last to migrate to the Mackenzie Valley from Mayo.

It was soon thereafter that Barnaby's grandfather packed her a suitcase and took her to the shore of the Mackenzie River to board a barge destined for residential school in Aklavik.

She didn't board the ship then, but eventually went years later. Her stay only

lasted two months.

"She regretted she didn't stay long enough to learn how to read and write," T'seleie said, "but that didn't matter to her. She taught all her children the traditional customs and the traditional ways of our people."

In the summer of 1950, she married Charlie Barnaby, and they went on to have eight children.

Barnaby's gift to them was her spirituality, her pride in her people's traditions, her work ethic and her inquisitive nature.

She loved to travel and was a master sewer and beader, but perhaps what she was most well known for was her master moosehide tanning skills - an ability that caught the eye of Denise Kurszewski and Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox.

The two met Barnaby in the early 2000s when she began teaching moosehide tanning through Aurora College. They often went into the bush with her and were amazed at her meticulous work ethic and her patient, empowering style of teaching.

"She was the kind of person where she had such high standards for herself and she produced so amazingly and consistently that, you know, to get a smile out of her if you had done some good work, the compliment was like winning the lottery," said Irlbacher-Fox.

Kurszewski said that even in her 70s, Barnaby could camp with the best of them.

"She was so knowledgeable in the bush, it was unreal. She would work like a man. She was quite elderly but she would go off and come back with poles on her shoulders. She was very independent," she said.

They estimate that Barnaby taught more than 100 students since 2001. One of which was Melaw Nakehk'o, who, last week, helped share that tradition with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

"I have been thinking about Mary and what she would think of these hides," Nakehk'o wrote in an e-mail from Blachford Lake.

"I have many years to perfect this art. Mary's teachings will always remain with me and I am blessed to have known her as a teacher."

T'seleie said Barnaby was a kind and sharing person who put very little value on worldly, material things. She was more interested, he said, in being an artist and a teacher.

"Everything she had, she always didn't wait to share it with others," T'seleie said. "She was a mother to all of us."

Last Tuesday, her funeral at Our Lady of Good Hope Church in Fort Good Hope was so crowded, speakers had to be installed outside to accommodate everybody. Hundreds had gathered, said T'seleie, and they simply couldn't fit everyone inside.

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