Learning from moosehide
Donated hide provides new experience for Fort Simpson youth
April Hudson
Northern News Services
Thursday, June 16, 2016
LIIDLII KUE/FORT SIMPSON
Every animal hide tells a story.
Youth from the school worked throughout the morning on the poles that would eventually be used to stretch the moosehide. River Norwegian, left, and Destiny Ekotla helped to scrape the bark from the poles. - photo courtesy of Sharon Allen
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As the hide is skinned, fleshed, stretched and finished, its colour and marks form a blueprint for the experienced eye to read.
That's the lesson students at Thomas Simpson School in Fort Simpson have been learning over the past month. Currently, the youth are working on a moosehide donated to the school by Liidlii Kue First Nation Chief Jerry Antoine.
Under the tutelage of language and culture teacher Sharon Allen, students spent much of June 8 peeling hair from the hide and fleshing it, as well as creating poles that will eventually be used to hang and stretch the hide.
Allen said the process could take weeks from start to finish.
"I'm so grateful for the students to have this experience," she said.
Peeling the hair from the hide was made easier by the fact the hide was covered in a layer of maggots. Despite the ick factor, Allen said, her students - some of whom had never worked on a moosehide before - wasted no time getting their hands dirty.
Fleshing starts in afternoon
The more difficult matter of fleshing the hide began in the afternoon as Allen and her students set about the painstaking task of scraping the hide clean of rotten meat and membrane.
Antoine said he donated the hide after reading a message someone left him at work. The timing couldn't have been better, he said.
Antoine had been asked to take the hide during this past winter. He put it in a shady area on his property and piled snow on top.
"I knew that area was not going to melt right away ... That way I could start working at it the end of May or beginning of June."
As it turned out, Antoine's schedule filled up quickly. Between a spring renewal ceremony and language conference, he did not have the time to work at the hide.
It was then he received the message about Allen's search for a hide.
"I asked her, and the excitement, the tone of her voice - she said, 'I'll be there in 15 minutes,'" he recalled.
"It's good to share."
Antoine has an appreciation for the story behind each moosehide, which developed after a recent hide he worked on was shown to some community elders.
"The way they were talking about it, where the bullet hole was and how that gives you a picture of the character of the hunter," he said.
"They also talked about the character of the skinner."
Vein imprints on the hide showed that the animal had been left overnight instead of immediately skinned.
Meanwhile, the condition of the animal itself told another story.
"They saw there were some chew marks on the hide. This moose was female ... and they also heard this cow moose did not have any calves around. So with teeth marks on the hide, that told them this moose was attacked by a predator," he said.
The predator likely killed her calf.
"All of this was just while they were working on that hide. I didn't know anything about that until I was sitting with them," he said.
Allen said she plans to have some of the community's younger students participate in the hide preparation as well.
