This post is part of a series entitled “Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education.” You can find the introduction here.
This post and series discuss Indian residential and day schools. Please take care as you read. If you are a Survivor or intergenerational Survivor of residential or day school and you need help, there’s a free 24-hour support line. Call 1-866-925-4419. Additional resources are available here.
Melaw Nakehk’o was one of five artists selected for the Unsettling Conservation Collective’s Reworldings exhibit at the Art Gallery of Guelph. “Reworldings explores how art can repair relationships while imagining new and lasting ones” through installation, video, audio, and material-based pieces grounded in protected area landscapes across Canada. We spoke to Melaw from her home in Yellowknife in November 2025. This is a transcript of our conversation. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you start by introducing yourself and telling me a little bit about who you are, who your family is, where you come from?
My name is Melaw Nakehk’o. I’m Dehcho Dene and Dënesųłıné from Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation. My dad is Jim Antoine and my mom is Celine.
I was raised in Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́, but my mom is originally is from Łutsël K’é, so I’m also from Łutsël K’é.
I’m a mom; I have three kids. I’m a moosehide tanner, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist.
How have residential and day schools impacted your lands, family, community, and way of life?
Residential and day schools have impacted all Indigenous people in pretty much the same way. They were put in place to remove us from our lands and have more control over our people.
We’re lucky living in the North because we haven’t been displaced from our land for a long time like in other areas. If you go further east, they’ve had contact much longer than we have here.
Both of my parents were born in the bush, so that connection to our traditional territories is not that far removed from me and my family. I have visited the places my parents were born. We have very strong spiritual connections to both of those areas in my family.
“We have such close relationships to our land, but there are still practices that we have to work to bring back into our communities and our families like hide tanning.”
We have such close relationships to our land, but there are still practices that we have to work to bring back into our communities and our families like hide tanning. Everyone in my family, all my aunties and uncles, everybody who would’ve taught me how to tan hides went to residential school, they didn’t learn how to tan hides.
It has taken quite a long time to regain and reclaim that knowledge for my family.
Can you talk a little bit about that journey of reclamation?
I was lucky to have a very close relationship with my grandmother, Judith Buggins, when I was younger. She was my first art teacher. She showed me how to draw flowers and bead when I was eight or nine. She also taught me how to use a sewing machine, one of the old hand crank ones. I was able to travel with her quite a bit to Desnéthcheé (Fort Reliance).
When I was 12 or 13, she was in Fort Simpson visiting us and she was tanning a couple of hides. I was into playing sports and hanging out with my friends. She would say, “Come and help me do this,” so I would flesh or scrape moose hide with her. But my grandma liked to work on really ripe, really strong-smelling hides and I was 12 years old and like, “Ugh, I have to go to soccer practice smelling this way.”
Looking back, I really regret having other priorities and not spending that time with my grandmother. But I did do a lot of work on the hides with her.
After high school, I went to art school. I lived far away for a long time. And during that time, my grandma passed away, I wasn’t able to come home for that.
When I did return home, I was a single mom with two small kids. I was taking lots of different contracts to make ends meet. One of the contracts was working with Joachim Bonnetrouge in Fort Providence to organize sharing circles for residential school Survivors to come together and do their healing work.
They invited me into their sharing circle. I knew our family stories of residential school and how difficult it was for my aunties and uncles, but it was my first time hearing the stories of other people in my community. It was really hard to hear them, but I also had this great feeling of love for my people and how resilient they are and so much more empathy and understanding for our people that struggle.
As a single mom, I really had to hustle. In addition to the contract work, I was selling as many moccasins or bags or paintings as I could make. I needed hide and I thought, “I’m going to just tan more moose hides, so I can keep making and selling moccasins.”
My grandmother had passed away, but I had inherited all of her tools and I kind of remembered working on hides with her, so I figured I could do it. I quickly found out that I had no idea what I was doing. None of my aunties knew how to tan hides so I tried to find other opportunities to learn, like workshops.
Then I got a grant to travel to Sambaa K’e to spend time with my auntie Margaret Jumbo. She learned how to tan hides from my grandmother. We had our first hide tanning camp in Sambaa K’e with Margaret in her yard. It was so beautiful.
I also learned from Elders in Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́, Fort Nelson (BC), Jean Marie River, Yellowknife, and Fort Good Hope, people like Louisa Moreau, Judy Lafferty, Mary Barnaby. It was really interesting to piece together everything that I needed to know.
It took me five months to tan my first hide. Immediately after people asked me to start teaching hide tanning. I didn’t feel ready, but my Elders said, “You do it. If you have any questions, just call us.” I was put in the position of teaching before I was comfortable, but I did it.
“Moose hide tanning taught me what it means to be Dene.”
In hide tanning, there are all of these different teachings that you get from different people about our relationship with the moose and living by Dene laws.
Before I started hide tanning, I took courses and read books about decolonization and self-determination, these big academic catchphrases. I realized that when we tan hides or do any land-based practice where we’re in community or we’re learning from someone or we’re teaching someone, that is decolonization and self-determination. When we’re Dene doing Dene things, we are practicing our inherent rights, we are in reciprocal relationship with land, we are spiritually grounded.
Moose hide tanning taught me what it means to be Dene.
You currently have a mixed-media installation on display at the Art Gallery of Guelph as part of Reworldings exhibit. Can you tell us about that piece and your inspiration?
Dene Nahjo was approached to see if anyone was interested in being a part of this Indigenous conservation project. I saw the invitation and thought I might do something about Edéhzhíe Protected Area, where my dad’s family is from, but then I got thinking about my grandma and the time I spent with her at Desnéthcheé, which is part of Thaıdene Nëné Indigenous Protected Area now. So I talked to a few people in Łutsël K’é and they told me about the different things they were planning.
My son and I went to hide camp in June, Desnéthcheé in August, and a community gathering on Artillery Lake in September. At first I was trying to be all serious and do “research,” but then I realized that it was just about being in community and being on the land and saying yes to as many things as we could: berry picking, getting wood, going for walks, going with the kids to the swimming hole, visiting old community sites, hanging out with relatives and older people, and listening to different stories about who lived where and where people travelled.
Wherever we went, everybody would set up their camp with canvas tents and wood stoves and spruce boughs and tarps. Nobody puts up a tarp the same way and they can be really elaborate. And there’s always gathering tents or gathering areas. These are all of the elements that make a cozy, comfortable place, a welcoming place.
My mom was born on the land—she was the youngest—and for their whole lives, they just traveled from one place to another because my grandfather was a trapper. Sometimes he would travel up onto the tundra for Arctic fox and he would just leave my grandmother in a tent in the treeline with all the kids. She would be there by herself for weeks and she would have to hunt for herself and take care of everything.
Knowing that’s what my grandmother did and so many other women did is a part of me, who I am.
Being able to go to Artillery Lake and see the old camp rings and the caribou blinds where they would hunt caribou, and seeing that all of these rocks have moss on them. These things are hundreds of years old. You can see that we’ve been using these places for so long. It was also cool to see the tent rings and realize that people had their tents set up very close together, just like we did.
“The installation is trying to capture what it means for us to be on the land. Our land. It is a really beautiful feeling to be Dënesųłıné with my relatives in the most beautiful place in the world.”
The installation is trying to capture what it means for us to be on the land. Our land. It is a really beautiful feeling to be Dënesųłıné with my relatives in the most beautiful place in the world. I was trying to communicate that through the piece, bring that feeling but also the sense of welcoming into the gallery space.
The installation is also trying to capture the importance of the protected area. Thaıdene Nëné is always going to be here for us so we can come and do this. We can have these relationships with the land and be out here in community like this.
I had wanted to build a canvas tent in the gallery, but there was no way that I could send all those poles to Ontario, so instead I used the same materials—canvas, tarp, blue rope, birch poles—to create a representation of a tent or a shelter.
I gathered the materials that I needed from the land. I made frames from spruce. I got a grommet press so I could lace the panels of canvas and tarp that I sewed, just like a moose hide. Two of the panels are suspended from the ceiling. The other three panels are standing. Together, they make the shape of a tent.
While I was at Artillery, I took video on my iPhone and then I asked other people at camp to send me their videos. I edited them all together so people can see all of the different things we did while we were there. You can hear the wind and the water and the sound of the tarps and the sound of people murmuring.
So the installation is all these different elements of what it’s like to be in camp projected onto the tent structure. Visitors can walk into the tent.
I want it to feel like you are welcomed, you’re welcomed onto the land and you’re welcomed into camp.
This is an art piece about Indigenous conservation. Why is Indigenous conservation important?
There are so many things that are missing from western science. Like Western science looks at one aspect of something, but Indigenous perspectives consider the whole area. Indigenous peoples also have generational knowledge that helps us read the land and read the water.
Our languages are really important. There’s a lot of knowledge in our place names. They tell us where the river narrows, which is where moose or caribou like to cross, or they tell us where the berries are.
One of my favorite place names is from these rapids on Willow River. They’re big rapids and people would go down them in a moose skin boat and they would be like, “Here comes Gotthele gozhıet’ó,” which means Pucker Up Your Asshole Rapids in English. And everybody would tighten up and get ready. That name is thousands of years old. It’s like a thousand-year-old joke, but the name also contains important information for people travelling on the river.
We need to travel on the land to learn, to hear the stories, to know our land. We have to be travelling on the land and we need to be taking our kids and other kids who don’t have opportunities to go on the land with us, so we know the names of places, we know the stories of places, and we can continue this close relationship that we have with the land.
I was so emotional when they signed the establishment agreements for Thaıdene Nëné, and also for Edéhzhíe. These are both such important areas. They have such spiritual significance for our people. These places are also home to different animals and plants.
It is so important to us as Dene that these places are going to be protected no matter what. No matter how negotiations are going for our land claims, these places are protected and there for us to use forever. They’re never going to be developed.
When Thaıdene Nëné became a protected area, there was a gathering in Łutsël K’é and everybody was celebrating. It made me so proud and happy, but there was also a sense of relief. I think all Indigenous people feel like that: at any moment everything can just be taken away from us because we lived through that. Everything has already been taken away from us and we know that they could just keep taking things away from us like. There’s no security. But when Thaıdene Nëné was established, it was like, these things are recognized, these things are protected, they can’t take this away from us.
Is there anything else that you would like to share?
In art school, you’re taught that something isn’t art unless it’s for leisure. But a lot of Indigenous art is utilitarian, so it’s not really classified as “art.”
From a Dene perspective, when we talk about things that are beautiful and human made, one of the most respected art forms for Dene people is a beautifully tanned moose hide. The most aesthetically beautiful thing that a human being can make is a tanned moose hide. It’s also said that the Creator thinks the moose hides are the most beautiful thing.
“Traditional hide tanning is an art practice; a tanned hide is a foundational Dene art form.”
Traditional hide tanning is an art practice; a tanned hide is a foundational Dene art form. A moose hide becomes our moccasins, our jackets, the clothes we wear that identify us as Dene. Still today, when you go to hand games or a drum dance, you’ll see people wearing their beautifully beaded vests and their moccasins and their gauntlets and their gloves.
So hide tanning is the basis of a lot of our culture and our identity.
Feature Image: Watercolour by Melaw Nakehk’o.
Melaw Nakehk’o
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