Back when the missionaries came converting everyone to Christianity
everyone attended... started attending school, you know, to learn Western
Western culture and you know I've seen a big shift in that though. There's so many
people that are immersing themselves back into their culture trying to
relearn things that were lost. What I do is I take custom orders for mukluks.
These are my cold-weather mukluks. I wore these in 30 below. I sewed all
the fur together by hand. Trimmed with caribou fur on the inside.
I used moose hide trimming right here. They are super comfortable you can just tell by
all the crinkles in them.
The skins are a lot to work on. First, you have to harvest the seal. Then you have
to flesh the seal, clean the seal. Stretch dry... you seen my skins out there. There's two
of them. So that's the first process of the sole. This here is probably the next
step. Where I'm patterning the mukluk, sewing those together.
My grandma Lena Sours, great-grandma. She did a lot of sewing for people. Oh, right here!
These are the mukluks that she made. Well I started sewing when I was a little girl
off and on with my mom. After I had my grandson, that's when something clicked
and I knew I had to sew for him.
There was a family of people that were coming back from Kotzebue after a race;
and there was some open water. And there was an auntie
a father and mother and their niece that passed away. Yeah.
And the little girl she was like our daughter. She came to our house
pretty much all the time...slept over... her and my daughter were best friends.
I made her a pair of mukluks. Her mom requested a pair of mukluks for her burial
and they turned out really beautiful and they fit her just right.
I've done that for quite a few people.
It's our culture to share. Share and pass on, you know? It will keep the culture
alive and keep it thriving.
And your first pair might not be perfect.
I started teaching because I wanted people to learn also you know? Long ago everyone
passed on their different styles their different ways of doing things from
mother to daughter and somewhere along the way that that gap was, you know,
broken to where families were not doing that anymore.
So I just want everybody to get back into their culture and learn more about
it and keep it alive. So that's most important. So I try to do everything as
traditionally as possible. I did a custom pattern on their sole and we went ahead and
traced their patterns on the ugruk, the bearded seal hard bottom. So right now
they are removing the hair. You work with the sand, is what we've been using, it
really helps kind of quickly get the hair off. So I'm going to make a complete
pair of mukluks eventually with seal skin and the hard bottoms.
Once the hair is removed we're gonna prep them and get them ready to crimp.
Well a long time ago before we got these tools, the way they made the soles is
they chewed them. They chewed the crimps with their teeth. That's why they're so
perfect! You see how tiny they are?
I've been sewing since I was very young my mother would sew projects with me and
and she passed actually about four years ago and I have a pair of her mukluks and
I always looked at them and I always thought that this was unattainable for
me but to be able to be given this opportunity with Mary, it's just... it's
a real honor to be a part of. That's so fun. It's so exciting to see their faces
light up when they learn something new and they're just so in awe
that they're doing it and I'm like, you know, that's what it's all about.
You know, I the way I look at it the more people that are doing it the
better... better chances of keeping our traditions and our cultures alive.
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