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Women

Women possessed many skills needed for living and travelling on the land. They were foragers, collecting edible plants and berries. While men usually hunted large game, women set a variety of snares for smaller animals such as rabbits. Women handled all the tasks related to food preparation from skinning and butchering meat, to cooking and preservation. They were fabricators: making clothing for their families, stitching birch bark onto canoes, setting up winter and summer shelters with poles and skins, lacing snowshoes with babiche, and making a variety of containers for travelling, cooking, and storage. All the while they were caring for their children and passing on their knowledge.

 

[Link: For more about the lives of women and children, see the TH Interpretive Unit “Women and Children”.]

Drying salmon, 1898. Tappan Adney photographer

Yukon Archives, Tappan Adney fonds, Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections of McGill University Libraries, 81/9 #136

The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in float in the Discovery Day parade, 2002, Freda Roberts in foreground.

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