A few years
ago, a friend was going to a northern Cree village on Hudson’s Bay where I had
done my first fieldwork, decades ago. I had a hankering for some home-tanned
caribou hides to have as educational, handling material for the museum, so I
sent some money with her and asked her to post me some if she was able to get
any. Not many people tan hides any more: it’s a messy business requiring a lot
of skill and strength. Properly done, though, the process produces golden,
smooth, beautiful hide for mittens, moccasins, jackets, baby clothing—it’s
gorgeous stuff. It’s also a way of honoring the beings who give their lives to
human relatives to sustain them.
My friend posted
me some hides. She dutifully labeled the package as caribou hide, and so
DEFRA—the English environmental agency—promptly confiscated the package.
Traditional Cree brain-tanned hide doesn’t conform to EU regulations for
leather processing, and despite strenuous arguments and detailed descriptions
of the Cree tanning process, the DEFRA vet was convinced that the hides would
have anthrax. He was working on evidence which is based on completely untanned,
raw hide from Africa used as drum heads, which have indeed sometimes had
anthrax spores, and not processing the information I gave him on traditional
Aboriginal tanning, which has never been linked to anthrax. So I had to get a
license to import the hides, and am forbidden to use them with the public.
Fine, I said; I’ll add them to the Museum’s collections, and we can use them to
talk about relationships between humans and animal-beings.
When I
presented the hides to my colleagues in Collections Management, though, they
said: those hides stink! No, I said: they smell lovely, like the smoky fire
over which they were hung to finish the tanning process. They smell beautiful!
It’s true, the lady who tanned them may have decided that because they were
going to Oxford, they should be properly smoked. Three years on, they
still smell nice and smoky.
They smell
like kippers, my colleagues said. The smell will contaminate other objects. We
don’t want them in collections storage, because then everything will smell like
kippers.
So I took
the poor rejected, lovely hides into my office. On nice days I hang them out on
the railing of the balcony outside my office. Cree ladies do this to air the
hides and allow some of the smoky smell to dissipate. It’s a nice reminder that
we work in an ethnographic museum, too: visitors coming in to the research
centre door are sometimes greeted by the sight of my caribou hides. There
aren’t many nice days in England, though, so they spend most of their time in a
black garbage bag in my office. Students coming in for tutorials sniff a bit at
first, and look puzzled. It’s ok, I tell them: I’ve got a license to have
caribou hides in my office.