2024

Learning to make fish leather offers healing and connection

Arsaniq Deer says working with her hands is a form of healing. Well-known as a traditional tattoo artist, she also has been helping teach workshops in the art of fish skin tanning in Nunavik communities.

“I love working with my hands and its very healing to be a part of it because we don’t just tan and dye,” she says of the process. “We also share a lot with each other. So, it’s like a two-week-long therapy using our hands.”

Her experience with fish leather began back in October 2022 when she attended a Grief and Healing Workshop in Montreal. Vancouver-based artist and educator Janey Chang was there to teach fish skin tanning as part of the healing component. Arsaniq fully embraced the process and now shadows Janey when she teaches in Nunavik. The workshops are offered as part of the Ilurqusitigut | ᐃᓗᕐᖁᓯᑎᒍᑦ program, an initiative of Kativik Ilisarniliriniq (KI) Adult Education and Vocational Training department. The program is a cultural initiative focused on community and collaborative resources and support, with the main goal of strengthening Inuit values, language, and culture. It can even be used for high school credit. Janey says Arsaniq helps with communication as she speaks Inuktitut and has incorporated some of her tattooing alongside the tanning.

“It’s just such a beautiful blend of two different skills. Hopefully one day she’ll be teaching (the fish skin tanning) as well, but we really work well together in just sort of providing different facets of the experience,” Janey says. “That’s another beautiful piece of it.”

Fish leather isn’t well known in the North, and while Arsaniq says she has heard of it being used in Nunavut in the form of a fish skin pouch, she and Janey are introducing it to Nunavik.

“Inuit have always been creative, and this would be another addition to it, and they’ve already started creating beautiful things.”

Relearning lost traditional practices from elsewhere can mean more than acquiring a new skill. Mary Saunders, KI’s Pedagogical Consultant, says cultural practices and tradition serve many purposes. “Often these traditions not only help define a community, but they also create a community,” she says. “They also have healing properties in that they help us make connections within ourselves, to feel a sense of belonging and to strengthen one’s sense of identity and purpose.”

Janey and Arsaniq have been welcomed into the communities they have visited, although sometimes it takes a while for people to become engaged. “So much of my work is about building relationships. The fish skin tanning is sort of secondary, it’s the relationships first,” Janey says. She has no pre-determined agenda for teaching, she simply bring the fish skins and supplies and lets the class unfold based on where students want to go with it.

“For me, it’s putting it back in the hands of fish people – people who rely on fish for food and survival of culture. It is so meaningful for me to be able to share fish skin tanning with Inuit.” She admits that her work motivates her on a personal level “especially when I witness them on their journey of learning more about who they are, what they’ve lost, and the land they come from through the experience of working with their hands. For me, it makes me question even more who I am and where my ancestors come from.”

When in the North she tries to use local tannins and fats, like beluga fat, fish roe, and locally harvested willow. “The fish are the connector because we’re fish people working with different fish and then just exploring different tannins from different land bases.”

Creating the leather isn’t easy and can take up to a week. The fish must be skinned, scraped, and well washed before a decision is made about which tannins are used to turn it into leather. For the workshops Janey brings frozen salmon skins that come as waste from a fish processing plant in Vancouver. She recalls that for the first workshops the shipped skins didn’t make it to Nunavik in time, so she says, “it was BYOF (Bring Your Own Fish).” Now she travels with fish skins in her luggage, which can elicit strange looks from airport security, but ensures she has skins to work with.

She also brings dyes from other parts of the world in powder form, like hibiscus, onion skins, cochineal bugs, and indigo so workshop participants can explore colouring the leather. The Nunavik courses have been too short to spend much time exploring local dye sources like berries, willow, and lichens yet, but the colouring is the part of the process that Arsaniq says she likes the most.

“I think I love dyeing it all sorts of beautiful colours and they’re all natural dyes. That’s my favourite part, and the fish vertebrae that we can clean and use as jewelry.” Along with jewelry made from the leather and vertebrae, she has also made slippers, but the options are endless, limited only by the participants’ imaginations.

Over the last year, the fish skin tanning workshop was offered in communities on both the Hudson and Ungava coasts, including Akulivik, Puvirnituq, Kuujjuaq and, in October 2023, Kangiqsujuaq. Arsaniq says while there are no immediate plans for future workshops, she is looking forward to more learning and teaching, and the chance to offer healing and connection through hand work to even more Nunavik communities soon.