I love my new moccasins. I love them so much I haven’t even worn them yet. I’m saving that moment for when I move into a new place and I begin a new chapter in my life. For now, though, I am not through admiring them. I remove the pair from a triple-plastic bag and the scent of poplar smoke fills my nose. Their dark brown hide feels soft, yet strong. This hide, after all, once protected a moose.
The beadwork on my moccasins creates a light blue bird with a yellow wing, perched on a burgundy branch with forest green leaves. The dark beaver fur around the edges adds elegance. My moccasins are precious works of art.
Home-tanning of moose, deer, beaver and other hides is a traditional practice that has changed little over the generations. It requires great strength, patience and skill on the part of the tanner. It is a hard labour job. The age-old process asks the tanner to become humble, to grow a little more beholden to his or her surroundings – the sun, the sky, the land, the forest, the water and the fire – and to recognize once again the place of the weather, of the elements, in determining the success or the failure of the tan.
I was honoured to be invited into Flora and Alan Beardy’s home in Muskrat Dam to have them take me step by step through the home-tanning process. Their son Gary and daughter-in-law Cherlyn translated their Oji-Cree for me. Their granddaughters, Nicole and Deandra, joined in as well.
The first step, as I knew before getting into this, is to kill a moose. Lucky for me that step had been done. At 66, Alan still hunts moose and deer, still traps beaver and fishes, as he has all his life, as he was shown the traditional ways of the land by his father. He also makes paddles.
Flora, 58, learned to tan moosehide from her mother. She’s been home-tanning for more than 40 years. She prefers to use a cow’s hide rather than a bull’s “because it’s the right thickness for her,” says Cherlyn. The bull’s is thicker.
Step 1:
Cut the excess meat off the hide. (2 days)
Step 2: Scraping
Scrape the fur off. With a knife, cut the excess meat off. (2 hours)
Step 3: Soaking
Place the hide in the water. While in the water, Flora says she cuts holes where she will run the rope. (2 hours)
Step 4: Stretching
Find four poles, approximately six feet high, to span the size of the hide. Arrange them in a square and tie them together. String the hide up through the holes. Stretch the moosehide tightly. Let it stretch overnight.
“You have to guard your moosehide,” Gary says. “There’s dogs outside. When the stretching starts, the dogs know they really want to eat it, so you have to protect it at all times.”
“It has to be as cool as possible,” explains Cherlyn. “She can’t really do it if it’s too warm.” The stretching can be done in the summer, but only if it’s cool. (1 hour with helpers overnight)
Step 5: Scraping
Scrape the hide with a shovel. Send your kids and your grandkids out to go and bang on it to take off any dry meat. Scrape both sides. (3 hours)
Step 6: Coating
Bring the hide inside. Place it in warm water. Grate a bar of soap into a mixture with oats, water and baking powder, which thickens it. In the old times women used to use moose brain for the mixture. “There’s just some practices that change over time,” Gary translates his father’s words.
Boil the mixture until it turns into a yellow syrup. Smear it all over the hide. (3 hours)
Step 7: Drying
Place the hide outside for a week to dry the mixture off. (1 week)
Step 8: Soaking
Bring the hide inside your house. Hang it inside. Soak it in water for one week. (1 week)
Step 9: Draining
Twist the hide up. Wrap it around two sticks. Twist the sticks to drain the water. (2 hours)
Step 10: Stretching
With rope, stretch the hide again on the square of sticks. Make a little fire underneath. Burn evergreens. “Because of the flat needles to smoke it, it’s really heavy smoke,” says Flora.
The hide absorbs the smoke and dries it. (2 hours)
Step 11: Scraping
Use a spade to scrape the hide for at least three days. You have to watch you don’t make holes. “The more you hit it, the more the hide thickens,” says Flora.
“When we were kids, we used to do this. We didn’t like it,” recalls Gary. “That’s all you do in the summertime.” His grandmother would come over and check to see if it was done and say “No, scrape it some more.”
You can’t use the sun to dry the hide because if you do it will get really hard, Flora tells me. “You have to do it with the flame and with the shovel.” (3 days)
Step 12: Smoking
Cut the rope holes out. Sew the hide into a tube. Use a thicker sewing needle, one with a flat head. Sew an old rag around it so the hide does not touch the ground and get dirty. Hang the tube from a tree branch. Place an enamel bucket at the base and tuck the bottom of the tube around the bucket.
Burn chips of dry poplar, “since it smokes and does not burn,” says Flora.
Turn the hide inside out and smoke it again. This smoking process gives the hide a wonderful scent and a dark brown colour.
Nevertheless, this step is one of the most dangerous. You are at the mercy of the fire in your bucket and the wind in the trees.
“It has to be a nice day to smoke it in the fire. If it’s too windy you could burn your moosehide,” says Flora. “If it’s overcast and raining, it doesn’t turn out right. It gets spotty.”
One time Flora burned her finished product. “It was windy and it exploded,” she says.
“You have to keep an eye on it at all times. You have to keep an eye on the bucket, if flames come out. If that happens, if it’s burning, you grab it right away and you stick it in the water to save your hide.” (4 hours)
Step 13: Cutting and Sewing
If you’ve saved your hide, you may now cut your hide. You may sew it into whatever you wish. (1 hour)
“The whole process,” says Cherlyn, “if somebody’s really fast, takes about five weeks – if everything goes well.”
Flora tans moose year-round, since if she only did it in the summertime, she would run out of material. Her children are grown up, so she now does most of the work herself.
“Most of the time it’s only my dad now that helps her,” says Gary.
At times she makes garments with commercially produced moosehide. “What they’ve noticed is that it gets dirty faster,” says Gary. “You can’t really clean it.”
Just brush the moccasins free of dirt, he tells me, and don’t worry if they get wet. They’ll dry.
Flora’s customers come back. “They like the home-tan because it doesn’t make holes,” says Gary. She gets a lot of business in the winter, since many people wear mukluks in the cold. “If we were going to go from here to Bearskin on a skidoo, I would ask to borrow my dad’s mukluks instead of big ski boots, because they’re warmer.”
The home-tanning process is in danger. “A lot of the Elders have died off. There’s only four in the community that do home tan now,” says Cherlyn. “I don’t know how long my mom will be able to do it, because it’s a lot of work, eh.”
Cherlyn herself says she can’t do a home-tan. “It takes so much work. It’s sometimes overwhelming to think that I could dedicate two months of my life to do that. It’s hard just to scrape it.
“A lot of young people want to learn how to do this, but they haven’t been taught yet,” says Cherlyn. “We have to save it by teaching them.”
Several times a year Muskrat Dam holds two weeklong workshops in which Elders teach the youth the traditional ways. “They teach them how to sew, they teach them how to make fish, how to get ducks,” says Cherlyn. The community plans to teach home-tanning in a future workshop and Flora’s granddaughter Nicole says she hopes to help her grandmother do home-tanning sometime soon.
Gary can tell I’m astonished at all I’ve learned.
“Now you know, eh. Every inch is so much work.”
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