Each week, North House Folk School is transformed by the sights, sounds, and smells of the many traditional crafts taking place. One week, the steady pounding of black ash logs and the scent of freshly baked sourdough wafts through campus. The next week, the classrooms hum with the noise of chain mortisers and the smell of white pine timbers. This past week, the campus was filled with the distinctive sounds and smells of hide tanning as some of the finest natural tanners in the world gathered for Hide Week to learn, teach, and share about the ancient craft of turning animal skin into durable leather.
At this year’s Hide Week, North House hosted eight courses with many talented regional instructors in tanning and leatherwork, including Marcie McIntire of Grand Portage, Jean Marshall of Fort Williams First Nation, Nate Johnson of Bemidji, and Jeff Harper of Leech Lake. Students from Alaska to Germany to many First Nations territories in Canada and sovereign Native nations in the US, as well as neighbors from just down the road, all gathered on campus for a full week spent exploring these skills together. They fleshed, scraped, smoked, and sewed everything from moose hides to beaver tails, fish skins to cow, deer, sheep, and goat skins. With so many curious learners and teachers present, classes were immersive, and conversations stretched over long coffee breaks and into the evenings.
North House was honored to welcome a special group of first-time guest instructors from three distinctly different traditions to share and learn from one another. Karl Karlsson of Sweden brought alive European-style bark tanning on fish skins and beaver tails. Matt Richards of Traditional Tanners in Oregon, the only certified organic tannery in the US, shared his extensive knowledge of tanning through a deep understanding of the chemical processes at work. Darla Campbell, Kevin Lewis, and their mother, Mathilda Lewis, traveled from Ministikwan Lake Cree Nation to share their skill and knowledge of moose hide tanning, a once-common practice in this area.
Hide Week brought several opportunities for local folks to participate. Evening presentations on fur and leather sewing and cultural revitalization efforts were well attended, and many visitors to campus for an afternoon of demonstrations observed several moose hides at various stages of the tanning process. Local 5th-grade students from Sawtooth Elementary School even got to try their hands at scraping hides on a visit to the campus, where they heard songs and stories from the Cree culture.
This unique week was made possible through support from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and the North House staff, instructors, and community of supporters.
