“For me, like, you know, from back then when I was young my grandparents, they used to teach us, the mom how they used to teach us, our parents and now when I see it, it’s different. Those young girls or young guys, they need to go hunting. They need to go with their family, or with someone that goes hunting all the time. They need to tag along and show them how to do hunting and fix the meat and that.

I have a 15 year-old granddaughter. Sometimes I try to teach her but it’s really hard sometimes because when you’re working you can’t stay home all the time. But I keep telling to her about these things. I’ll tell her that, you know, when we were young I used to do all this, like now you need to stay away from cellphones you need to start doing this – make some drymeat with me. So I take a whole bunch of meat out sometimes. I let her sit there and I told her ‘you can listen to music but no cellphone’. So I do that and we’ll make some drymeat, and then sometimes if I ask her to do something like pound the drymeat or stuff like that. So to fix the hide, she helped me a little bit before.

This summer, I told her ‘we’re going to work on the hide together, you’re going to help me because you need to learn’. My mom used to say that ‘whatever I teach you don’t keep it to yourself. Like, pass on your knowledge. Pass it on because I pass it on to you and it’s not yours, and you pass it on to other people who want to learn’.

That’s what I’ve been doing. Like, that’s how we grew up. We didn’t just have the store beside us. We lived in the bush, you know, and as we were growing up, that’s why without traditional food we don’t feel good. Like if you don’t have traditional food, it’s hard to have something to eat from store bought meat all the time. So we need to keep our caribou grow, and so I think that’s what I’m thinking. And I’m open to teach young girls that if they want to do, how to fix the hide and also tan the hide. And if they complete it they can make moccasins or something, like I’m open to teach them.”