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THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
Lawrence Cheezie was never taught how to make traditional snowshoes – he learned by observing.

Lawrence Cheezie, who lives just outside Fort Smith on the south side of the Alberta/NWT border, hopes to keep alive the traditional knowledge for snowshoe-making. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

When he was a child, his late father, Louison Cheezie, made snowshoes – at least one pair and sometimes two a year – to hunt and trap.

"It was part of your lifestyle to have snowshoes," Cheezie said. "If you wanted to be a good hunter and be able to hunt moose, you had to have a good pair of snowshoes. And when my Dad wanted a pair, he couldn't go to the store and buy one. He just went out in the bush and selected a birch tree. I went with him."

Cheezie said snowshoes were needed for hunting because they don't make any noise compared to walking in moccasins and stepping on branches in the snow.

His father, who only used birch trees to make snowshoes, never showed him how to make snowshoes.

"He just sat down and made them, and I just watched him," Cheezie said.

His mother, the late Helen Cheezie, was also involved in the snowshoe-making process.

After his father shaped the frame with a little axe, made holes in it and tied loops, his mother would lace the snowshoes with strips of caribou hide called babiche.

From his mother, Cheezie learned little tricks for lacing snowshoes. That includes dipping the babiche in ash so when they are tied together they will do not come loose.

These days, Cheezie still makes snowshoes in the traditional way, but sometimes runs out of babiche and improvises with string.

It was not until he was in his mid-20s – after his father died in 1969 – that he made his first pair of snowshoes. They were about five or six feet long, but were not properly balanced, meaning the fronts would dig into the snow.

"The first try was pretty rough-looking snowshoes," he said with a laugh.

It took about a year of trial and error before he could make a good pair of snowshoes, and he has been making them ever since.

Cheezie learned how to make snowshoes despite spending a decade in residential school in Fort Chipewyan until he was 14 or 15.

Despite his time in residential school, he said he always wanted to become a trapper, adding he and other students would look out the window and see trappers passing by with dog teams.

"And we'd tell stories of how good life was in the bush," he recalled.

Cheezie, who is of Cree and Chipewyan heritage and a member of Smith's Landing First Nation (SLFN), was born in the bush near Fort Chipewyan, and his family moved to Fort Smith in about 1959.

When he grew up, he became a trapper and a carpenter. Today, he is a part-time trapper and a carpentry instructor at Aurora College in Fort Smith, and lives just on the other side of the Alberta/NWT border on SLFN reserve land.

In November, he began teaching a night-time course on snowshoe-making for students in the teacher education program at the college. Only once before – at Joseph Burr Tyrrell School in 1985 – had he instructed others in snowshoe-making.

The college-funded class, which is to conclude in a couple of weeks, began with a half-dozen students, but the numbers dwindled as people found it hard to make three-hour sessions twice a week.

Now, there is only one student – Mary Beth MacDonald of Tulita – remaining in the course.

Cheezie, 65, explained he continues on with the course because traditional culture is hard to keep alive and it's important for people to learn, even one person.

"It's going to die if somebody doesn't keep it going," he said.

Cheezie said he would be interested in offering the course again next fall, and hopes it will be open to anyone in the community.

"I think it's important to pass on tradition to interested people," he said, adding he loves teaching.

While teaching the evening course, Cheezie incorporates the history of native people and storytelling, including the legend of how snowshoes came to be.

"That's our invention," he said. "That's our contribution to the world."

Cheezie said according to legends told to him by his mother, native people learned how to make snowshoes with help from animals.

"They asked for help," he said. "So the ptarmigan came there and they showed them how to weave those snowshoes."

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