Beautiful-smelling caribou hides; or, why my office smells like kippers

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.

Visiting with relatives...in Oxford

Over the past few years, a group of Blackfoot shirts at the Pitt Rivers Museum has been the focus of a remarkable project to enable Blackfoot people to reconnect with and learn from these important heritage objects. The first thing that we learned was that the shirts are not simply 'objects': they are collections of animate spirits. Three of the shirts have hairlocks of human and horse hair, which denote them as sacred. The shirts were collected in 1841 by Edward Hopkins, the secretary to the governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. When he retired in 1870, he moved to England and took the shirts with him. His family transferred them to the Museum in 1893 after his death.

We wanted to make it possible for Blackfoot people to literally reconnect with these ancestors, to actually touch them gently and learn from them directly. We worked with Alison Brown at the University of Aberdeen, who has a long history of working with Blackfoot people, and the Head of Conservation at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Heather Richardson, who did an internship at the National Museum of the American Indian, working on---their Plains shirts exhibition! Heather agreed to come to Alberta with us, Alison organized small group workshops, the Glenbow and the Galt Museums agreed to host us, and we took the ancestors home for a visit.

Wonderful things happened as a result. Ceremonial leaders, elders, artists, teachers, and college and high school students learned and shared so much knowledge with each other. People sang honor songs to the ancestors, brought them gifts, touched them gently, were moved to tears by their beauty and power. Students learned to do hide tanning and a bit of porcupine quillwork in preparation for meeting their ancestors, and one community revived a ceremony that had been dormant for many decades.

We also wanted to make it possible for museum visitors in the UK to learn from the shirts, and about the importance of the shirts to Blackfoot people today. We wanted to communicate about this kind of work, which is becoming such a part of what museums do. This week, we are opening an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum called 'Visiting with the Ancestors,' which features three of the shirts, and images and words from Blackfoot participants in the project. The exhibit tells the story of the project, of what happened when the shirts went home for a visit, of how Blackfoot people feel about the project.

To celebrate the exhibition opening, we are delighted to have Blackfoot guests, an extended family of people who have brought their infant grandson to visit with the ancestors. And to visit with us. It means a lot when relatives visit from overseas.