THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
A group of students at Aurora College in Fort Smith is helping keep a tradition alive: making snowshoes.
Debbie Dillon of Inuvik displays a snowshoe she is creating in an Aurora College extracurricular class in Fort Smith. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo
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Since January, several students have been gathering three times a week in the late afternoon for an extracurricular class taught by Lawrence Cheezie, a carpentry instructor at the college and a maker of traditional snowshoes.
On March 5, the students were nearing the end of the course and putting the finishing touches on their snowshoes.
"It kind of gets in touch with my native side," said Yellowknife's Daylen Weber, who is originally from Calgary but is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation.
Weber, who is a carpentry student at Aurora College, said it is the first time he has ever made snowshoes.
In fact, the 23-year-old has never even walked on snow using snowshoes, although he did walk on snowshoes – on pavement – during the games for Aurora College Week in mid-February.
Now, he will have 1.4-metre-long traditional snowshoes that he made himself, and is looking forward to trying them out.
"I'm excited. Just getting this far to completion, I'm stoked," he said with a laugh.
The students are learning how to weave the rawhide strips onto wooden frames, which are made by Cheezie.
"I made the frames because they need a lot of skills to make the frame," said the instructor, noting the course is about tying the snowshoes with strips of elk hide and other commercially-available rawhide.
Peter Jellema, a carpentry student from Inuvik, said he snowshoes all the time with his family, but he uses modern snowshoes with aluminum frames.
"I've always wanted to learn how to make my own snowshoes and this is a great first step," he said. "The next time I come down, I hope I can learn how to do the frames. That way, it's everything all in one."
Jellema, who joined the class in early February, said just weaving the snowshoes is more difficult than he expected.
"It wasn't that hard once you got the rhythm of it, but when it came to actually doing the weaving, it was impossible to begin with, because you have to get this diamond design and I couldn't get how to do the diamond design," he said. "Everything turned into Hs instead of diamonds. So I was just constantly having to back up."
The 33-year-old is looking forward to snowshoeing on something he made.
"It will be awesome," he said of actually walking on the 1.2-metre-long snowshoes. "I can't wait to get on a traditional pair and see what it's like."
Inuvik's Debbie Dillon, a business administration student at the college, is also making her first traditional snowshoes.
"My dad used to make snowshoes a long time ago," she said.
However, Dillon, who is of Inuvialuit heritage, has never tried snowshoeing before.
"I just thought it's a tradition and not a lot of people know how to make snowshoes, so I just figured it was something I'd get to learn," she said. "It doesn't cost me anything. I might as well join."
In November of 2011, Cheezie began teaching a night-time course on snowshoe-making for students in the Teacher Education Program. The college-funded class began with a half-dozen students, but the numbers dwindled as people found it hard to attend and only one person finished.
This time around, more people are finishing.
Cheezie said it's important to keep alive the traditional skill of snowshoe-making and the afterschool class will help.
"It's for the college and they want to keep the native tradition alive, and this is one way of doing it," he said.
The current class will wrap up in mid-March. This is the second time Cheezie has offered snowshoe-making at the college.
Now, Cheezie is looking forward to starting another class in late March with different students.
The instructor is offering the class as part of his employment at Aurora College, but the students are not earning any credits from their involvement.
Cheezie, who is a member of Smith's Landing First Nation, learned to make snowshoes from his late mother and father.
