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Cree elder Louisa Buck was going through the many pieces of moose hide and the countless beads she has accumulated over the years.
They seemed to call out to her, she said.
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Buck, 98 years old, has a special relationship with moose hide, having learned to clean and tan the animal skin as a small child growing up in Treaty 5 territory in northwest Saskatchewan, near Cumberland House Cree Nation. Her mother taught her to make many things, including moccasins, mittens and jackets. She made countless jackets over the years, starting when she was a child. Moose hide is her favourite material to work with.
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For perhaps one more time, she recently completed another piece of work. Buck, who lives in Nipawin, decided in the spring to fashion a special jacket out of her pieces of moose hide, adorning it with traditional frills and elaborate floral beadwork. After working on it for weeks, she finished it in July.
“I made that jacket because I had a bunch of nice coloured beads, and I made up my mind to make that jacket and use them,” she said through her friend Harriet Burns, who translated from Cree.
“My momma taught me how to sew,” she added. “I started sewing at seven years old. As a kid, I would rather bead than go and play.”
Asked through the translator what she recalled about her childhood, she said that although she contracted whooping cough when she was small, she was always healthy and happy.
“I was born in the bush, I don’t know where,” Buck said “I was born on a trapline, somewhere north of Cumberland.”
Growing up, Buck never attended school. As a child, she was to be sent to a residential school in Manitoba, either Lake St. Martin Residential School or Mackay Residential School in The Pas. But the school burned down before she was sent there, she said.
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She added that there was a Catholic school in the town of Cumberland House that accepted Métis children, but did not accept “treaty Indians.”
Buck learned her skills from her family, community and through hard work. The habit of hard work, she said, has never left her. It is what kept her strong and gave her a long life.
“When my mom passed away when I was eight, I took care of my dad from that day on,” she said. “I worked hard washing clothes on a washboard and scrubbing floors.”
While she is not sure she would have the energy to make another jacket — she gets very tired doing the work these days — she is pleased with the way it turned out. She called it an accomplishment, especially given that she is still sewing and beading at nearly 100.
Throughout her life, Buck has had many opportunities to teach a younger generation the beading and sewing skills she knows. Renowned in the northwest for her teaching, she has continued to pass her knowledge on.
“I’m getting tired now,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to retire.”
The jacket, Buck added, is sold.
“I never made anything in my life for myself,” she said. “It was always for somebody else.”
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