Report of a recording made with Tite McKenzie, Lazar André and a woman. They’re butchering a caribou.

Woman

With this, you can make several dishes. You can boil it a little. You can make meat pies, stews too. But this one, you boil it. Caribou meat is all good... It's all good.

Tite McKenzie

Our ancestors kept everything. Everything. No waste.

Woman

You can make anything... You can make sausages too.

Interviewer

Oh! You keep everything, everything, everything, eh?

Lazar André

Usually, we even keep the skin as well.

Tite McKenzie

Like wolves. A wolf, when it kills his game, do you think it will leave food? It will eat everything and keep it all to himself. It's the same principle for the Innu.

Woman

When I prepare caribou meat, I prepare a bannock. There must always be a bannock.

Interviewer

So now, you're going to keep the hide too?

Woman

Yes!

Tite McKenzie

We're going to boil it!

Woman

No, the women do that.

Lazar André

Tanning the hide takes a long time. One of my aunts does traditional tanning.

Woman

You have to dry the hide. After that, you have to remove the meat that's there. From what I’ve seen with my aunt, it takes time. In the past, you see the blood that’s there, our ancestors used to take the blood and boil it.

Tite McKenzie

They’d do that... The blood at the bottom of the spine there, that blood was hot. We’d fight against the cold. We’d fight against the cold with it. They drank the caribou’s warm blood. And then, with the blood underneath, they’d put their hands there so they wouldn't freeze. Warm meat and blood protected against frostbite. In the past, our ancestors didn’t have knives. They would rip here. They followed the length of the leg. They took all this for hide. They didn't want to break the hide.

Lazar André

They used to make clothing with this.

Woman

I’ve already seen a hand-made hide. It was a child's suit. They made clothes out of it.

Interviewer

With caribou hide?

Woman

Yeah. There was a little suit.

[…]

Interviewer

We don't eat the lungs...

Tite McKenzie

No, the lungs were used for a mixture of brains mixed with lungs and blood to tan caribou hide and to soften caribou hide to make clothes.

Interviewer

To make it flexible.

Woman

During the summer, I saw it. I saw my aunt drying the hide and tanning it and softening it.

Tite McKenzie

Around 300, 400 years ago, there were no ovens, there were no microwaves. How do you think the Innu ate? Around a fire; to cook and boil fish, caribou, meat, partridges.... They boiled everything. From time to time they fried, but more often than not, they boiled the fish and they also drank the broth. Fish broth is fat, Omega-3. It’s meant to give you strength. Well, they used to drink the broth... it gave them plenty of energy! That's why they survived.

You don't waste anything. In the woods, you're afraid of running out of resources, so you keep everything, the bones too, especially the bones, it's very important.

Have you seen the amount of meat we get from caribou? Well, 500 years ago, our ancestors would never have tolerated it. Did you notice what we throw away?

Woman

I'll give some to my grandchildren, my grand-daughters, because we're a big family, because I have 5 children and 11 grandchildren. I’ll distribute among the family. Because the children, they like caribou. Because they eat fondue. They haven't eaten it in a long time. They're looking forward to it, and us too.

Report of an interview with elders from Pikogan. The elders speak Anishinabe, and a woman translates their words.

She says, “In the past, there was nothing. Everything is different now. We go into the woods, we have our Ski-Doo. Before, there weren’t any Ski-Doos. There’s a chainsaw to cut wood. In those days, there weren’t any chainsaws... Everything... changes. It's easier to go into the woods nowadays, but in the past, it wasn’t the same.” She says, “In the past, we had dogsleds, and that was our means of transportation.”

Everything used in the woods in the past, the tools they used... All the tools from the past were made of moose bones. The tools, such as those for tannery. The moose hide for our moccasins and the moose hide for our mittens.

She said, “In the fall, let's say, we would collect all our moose hide for tanning, to prepare for the sewing done in winter. Even for snowshoes, we used moose sinew, moose hide was used to make sinews, to make our snowshoes.” [...] To weave snowshoes... they didn’t use any tools to make snowshoes. They only used rawhide. For connections, that too, was sinew. And also, for toboggans. In Maniwaki, we call that a wild sled. For the sleds, they took sinew to connect, for the assembly, and to tie things to the sleds... All of this with sinew.

When we made blankets, we used hare skin. The coat... We can make coats with hare skin. We make strips, and curl them. They become somewhat like a cord and then it’s like knitting.

Hare skin has to be frozen, completely frozen, all winter long, outside. And that's when they start making strips and making kinds of cords for blankets. They start making coats. It also became ropes to connect mittens. That’s what she just said. […] There’re really warm. I personally had socks made of hare skin and mittens made of hare skin when I was young.

[…]

The technique of making items with hare skins is no longer practiced these days, we don't use these things anymore because we don't stay in the woods long enough nowadays... With Ski-Doos, it goes quite fast!

[…]

It could take between 200 and 300 hares to make a blanket, depending on the size of the blanket; perhaps 300 for a large blanket for two people. There were a lot of hares back then. I've never made one, but I saw my mother do it. She used a wooden frame to weave patches of hare skins.

[…]

She said, “Personally, when I raised my babies... My children, when they were born... I never used Pampers.” Swompe. We would gather swompe, moss. It was gathered in the fall so it could be frozen during winter. We had bags, nine bags weighing 75 pounds each, potatoes bag eh. We needed nine for the year. You had to remove all the little pieces of wood. We didn’t just take any kind of swompe. You really needed to know the right kind, because if you didn't have the right kind, the baby would become irritated and irritable. There’s so much to share.... She said, “There's so much knowledge.” We also made baby powder from rotten wood. There’s so much to share, so much knowledge, that we could talk about life in the woods for the whole week.

When I went into the woods, there was nothing, there weren’t any diapers. To wash the clothes, there was no washing machine. She said that in those days, there was nothing... Nothing that could bother me. When people lived in the woods, it wasn't that difficult. There were techniques... It was a way of life.

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