CLKB Article: Hide tanning to younger generations

North Slave Métis Alliance teaches hide tanning to younger generations

The weekend event will be followed by smaller workshops throughout the rest of the week

The Bushkids Hide Tanning Camp from the North Slave Metis Alliance (Connor Pitre/CKLB)

Posted By: Connor Pitre July 14, 2025

Over the weekend, the North Slave Métis Alliance (NSMA) launched a weeklong educational workshop in Yellowknife to help share some traditional Indigenous knowledge with a new generation.

Nestled into the Bushkids site behind the Yellowknife Fieldhouse, Indigenous fur harvesters, Robert and Chloe of Bebaski, guided the attendees in all of the traditional methods that go into the full practice of tanning an animal hide, from soaking, to properly suspending the hide above the ground, and removing the excess meat.

The Bushkids Hide Tanning Camp from the North Slave Metis Alliance (Connor Pitre/CKLB)

This workshop is something that the NSMA has been looking to set up for some time, and over the last few years, members of the group have been increasingly voicing their interest in such an idea. Orna Phelan, a wildlife biologist with the NSMA and the Coordinator for the Guardianship Program, shared some more of how the workshop came to be.

“It’s hard to find people with the skills who still have them. A lot of people have lost their skills or have lost the people who taught them the skills, and so it’s something we’ve always wanted to do. But Chloe Dragon Smith is here with her partner, Rob.

“Chloe is an NSMA member, and she lives off grid in the bush outside Fort Smith. She’s actually in Yellowknife for a month, and so when I heard she was coming to town, I reached out to her to see if she would be interested in doing something with NSMA members if I could find the funding.”

Phelan added that Chloe and Rob have plenty of traditional skills and knowledge between the two of them, and that Chloe was one of the founders of the Bushkids group, all of which made her the best person to ask to help put the event together.

The Bushkids Hide Tanning Camp from the North Slave Metis Alliance (Connor Pitre/CKLB)

While the workshop doesn’t have the resources to go through the full process of tanning a hide (which can take up to a full week), Chloe and Rob were able to whip up a condensed version of the process. To be able to demonstrate the full tanning process, Chloe and Rob have brought along multiple hides, each at different stages.

While sharing the knowledge of hide tanning remains the main goal of the workshop, Phelan shared that there were additional benefits relating to her scientific background.

“Many of our research based programs and all of our scientific programs have a very strong traditional knowledge aspect to them. First of all, most of them are community based monitoring programs, and so we have the indigenous community members going out, being trained in the field work, doing the field work, collecting the data, and then bringing it back to me. By having them do the data collection, there’s always traditional knowledge weaved through.

“Often they tell me, like, where they think the best place to set a camera trap would be, where they see good trails if we go fishing or fish sampling, a lot of members will give us some input about the health of the fish from what they have seen in the past versus what we see now. We run a caribou winter program where members will use kind of traditional knowledge index and matrices to talk about the health of the caribou and their distribution and how they’re doing. So we have done a lot of different kind of things, but this is pretty unique, because it’s one of the larger workshops we’ve done.”

While the weekend is now over, the workshop isn’t quite done yet. Chloe and Rob will be holding up to ten additional workshops throughout the rest of the week to share the remaining process of tanning. Some of the other skills that will be taught include frame building and tool prep, fleshing, scraping, wringing, softening, and smoking.