Yeenoo dài' k'è'tr'ijilkai' ganagwaandaii/Long Ago Sewing We Will Remember: The Story of the Gwich'in Traditional Caribou Skin Clothing Project by Judy Thompson and Ingrid Kritsch

Ottawa : Canadian Museum of Civilization , 2005 . 61 pp. This short 60-page monograph reports on the revival among the Canadian Gwich'in of the knowledge and technique of sewing “traditional”—pre-20th century—men's caribou-skin summer clothing. It is divided into two parts: history and revival. Because of its brevity and the understandable focus on what is called “the project” (the revival effort), which is the unique contribution of this monograph, the first part is surely not meant to be (and is not) an exhaustive analysis of the wealth of archival and other material that bears on the history of Gwich'in clothing and its inseparable connection with trade beads, dentalium shells, and other materials used to decorate clothing and other items. Up until the last decades of the 19th century, the Canadian and Alaskan Gwich'in impressed all who encountered them not only with their explosive locution, forceful nature, mercantilism, and dancing, but with their smart, fashion-conscious summer clothing and with their great desire for the beads and dentalium shells that decorated clothing and became, for a short time, general-purpose money. These people first appeared in the European imagination in the period 1789–1820, when explorers and traders remarked on their intense desire for blue and white beads (especially large ones), their demanding ways, and their refusal, at times, to trade furs unless traders had beads of the right size and color in exchange. In 1805 came a report of men using beads on strings to tie back their long greased hair and to decorate summertime caribou-skin moccasin-trousers; some twenty years later, outsiders noted beads on fringes, chests, and shoulders of tunics whose lower edges were pointed in front and behind. The desire for beads built steadily into a compelling need as the first half of the 19th century went on. By the 1840s–50s, when they were imaged unforgettably in lithographs in Sir John Richardson's Arctic Searching Expedition (based on sketches by the trader Alexander Hunter Murray), Gwich'in men decorated clothing, hair, headbands, quivers, guns, and other objects heavily with beads. The men's preferred colors had expanded to include red and black. Men evidently wore more highly ornamented dress clothing (literally heavy with beads) when visiting posts and one another and when dancing. For western bands this period marked a peak of mercantilist activity when, through trading, the Gwich'in acquired considerable wealth in the form of long strings of beads used to mark status, pay shamans and other specialists, gain prestige through distribution, and so on. The beads arrived with people of European descent in the 18th century, but there is no reason to doubt that the basic summer clothing—moccasin-trousers (in one piece) and tunics—are more ancient. For one thing, in 1789, Alexander Mackenzie described the clothing (including differences between men's and women's) in some detail. Nineteenth-century Gwich'in men and women who were poor and could not afford beads or dentalia wore it: tunics pointed in front and behind and moccasin-trousers, with seams colored with red ochre and ornamented with fringes of silverberry seeds and with geometrically patterned porcupine-quills dyed with pigments rendered from cranberries, rotted willow wood, willow cambrium, and other natural products. This distinctive clothing started to disappear in the mid-19th century, first among eastern bands and then among western groups of Gwich'in. First blankets, and next, calico and fringed hunting shirts caught the eye of the Gwich'in. By 1865, beads were no longer popular, and the taste for woolen goods grew apace. In the next decade, tweeds, shirts, and silk handkerchiefs became available and proved popular. By 1880, traditional caribou-skin clothing was in broad decline to obsolescence, with the exception of clothing made expressly for sale to gold-seekers, the odd tourist, and traders or missionaries collecting for themselves or institutions back home. With the occasional exception, the era of the manufacture of caribou-skin clothing for one's own family's summer or winter wear had come to an end by the turn of the 20th century.1 1. The preceding paragraphs are based in part on Shepard Krech III, “The Early Fur Trade in the Northwestern Subarctic: The Kutchin and the Trade in Beads,” in “Le Castor Fait Tout”: Selected Papers of the Fifth North American Fur Trade Conference. Bruce Trigger, Toby Morantz, Louise Dechene, eds. (Montreal: Lake St. Louis Historical Society, 1987), 237–288. Against this background, Judy Thompson (Curator of Western Subarctic Ethnology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization [CMC]) and Ingrid Kritsch (Research Director of the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute) provide the real contribution of this work: the “project” to revive the knowledge and technique of making caribou-skin summer clothing among the Gwich'in one hundred years after it was last made. In 2000, with funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Government of the Northwest Territories, Department of Education, Culture and Employment, and the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute, the latter partnered with the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Center and the CMC in order to make six caribou-skin summer outfits destined for five northern Mackenzie drainage communities where Gwich'in reside and for the collections of the Northern Heritage Center. This was one of several initiatives by the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute to promote Gwich'in “culture, language, traditional knowledge, and values.”2 2. For the work of the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute see their website at http://www.gwichin.ca/AboutGSCI/aboutGSCI.html, accessed October 6, 2008. Over the next three years, key participants in the project visited the CMC and Smithsonian Institution to see 19th-century clothing (and learn about the roughly two dozen outfits in various European and North American collections). With the aid of vast knowledge of northern clothing and museum collections possessed by Judy Thompson, Ingrid Kritsch, and others, pattern drawings, mock-up versions, lots of thought and work, and the financial backing of heritage institutions, a core of eight seamstresses (and total of 40) and others grew to understand how to meet the structural and sewing challenges presented by clothing that neither they, their mothers, nor their grand-mothers had seen firsthand. They acquired raw materials from caribou-skins to porcupine quills, silverberry seeds to sinew. Dyes from willow, lichen, and blueberries were unfortunately judged too pale and fell away in favor of commercial dyes—unfortunate because the natural dyes have their own quite wonderful aesthetic on extant Northern Athabaskan garments. In sewing and quilling workshops, consensus built on how to proceed (and some corners were cut due to schedule pressures), the seamstresses produced five outfits with “impressive” results. In March 2003, five young Gwich'in men representing five communities modeled them in the auditorium of the Northern Heritage Center. Yeenoo dài' k'è'tr'ijilkai' ganagwaandaii/Long Ago Sewing We Will Remember documents the project nicely in an accessible text with over 40 photographs, drawings, and other illustrations. The hope, as expressed by Chief Peter Ross in Tsiigehtchic, Northwest Territories in March 2005, is that the effort has resulted in a garment that “extends far beyond the work as a piece of art and culture. It speaks to the wisdom, pride, ingenuity and skill of our forefathers and mothers … The same traits,” he continued, “that protected, fed and clothed our ancient peoples still lead and guide us today. Our ability to recognize and remember our past will lead out children into a secure and strong tomorrow” (p. 56). May it be so. Shepard Krech III is Director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and a Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. He is the author or editor of numerous works including: The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (W.W. Norton, 1999), (with Barbara Hail), Collecting Native America, 1870–1960 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999) (with John McNeill and Carolyn Merchant), The Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (Routledge, 2004), and Spirits of the Air: Birds and American Indians in the South (University of Georgia Press, 2009).

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