Medicine pouch teachings help keep traditions alive

Lac Seul’s Susan Kakepetum recently shared her medicine pouch teachings with youth and adults at the Lake Superior Art Gallery in Thunder Bay.
“We carry the medicine pouches with us so we can have our medicines close to us,” said the Lac Seul artist and heritage programmer during her Nov. 3 Community Arts and Heritage Education Project workshop. “We try to carry it close to our body so that if in a rush or panic we need to have them, then they are close to us.”
A stone is also carried in the pouch for rubbing, Kakepetum said, as a grounding method.
“Today we use them as first aid kits; the old version was the medicines of the ground,” Kakepetum said, explaining that people used to carry the traditional medicines with them because they were not always readily available wherever they travelled.
“Up north you won’t find cedar, so you bring cedar from this area. And you won’t find sweetgrass way up north, so you bring it from the west.”
Kakepetum showed the workshop participants how to make the medicine pouches out of moosehide and deerhide.
“The process for making the moosehide and deerhide is to soak the hide and scrape them,” Kakepetum said. “And then use the brain of the animal on the hide. That makes it soft.”
Kakepetum said the pieces of hide are punched with leather punches and stitched together with strips of sinew.
“Before we would use the bones to poke holes,” Kakepetum said.
Once the pouches are stitched together, feathers and beads are attached as decorations.
Kakepetum said she is looking to “retain some of our history and some of our methods of carrying our sacred items” by passing on her medicine pouch teachings. She was taught by her mother as a child how to do beadwork and sew clothing and has since been making traditional crafts with her mother over the past 20 years.
CAHEP executive director Pam Cain said the workshop is part of the Grand Others project, which aims to bring together Grand-Others friends, relatives and neighbours to learn more about each other and to create together.
“We’re promoting people partaking in traditional crafts and learning about our local cultures,” Cain said.
“We’ve had good attendance and (the Grand Others project) is sort of developing a following. As we do each one, we get more people involved and more people aware of what is going on.”
The next two CAHEP workshops are both by James Wilkinson, who is presenting song creation workshops on Dec. 1 and 8.