Mekoryuk crafters keep seal gut raincoat alive

MARY LOCHNER

October 30, 2008 at 12:45PM AKST

Neatly folded at Edna Mathlaw’s arts and crafts table lies a treasure that is rare, not just here among the skillfully formed objects at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention, but in the entire state of Alaska and the world.

The perfectly worked seams of the seal gut raincoat were hand-sewn by Mathlaw just this past summer. The dried gut comes from bearded seals that were caught by subsistence hunters on Mathlaw’s home island of Mekoryuk this past spring.

For a traditional skill that is still practiced by only a small handful of Yup’ik and Cup’ik women today, a seal gut raincoat that was made this year is a rare thing indeed.

“Young people now, they can’t do nothing no more today,” Mathlaw said in explaining why so few people still make seal gut raincoats.

To make the raincoat requires great skill, hard work and a willingness to get one’s hands dirty.

Mathlaw explained the process. Hunters catch bearded seal in the spring, which is used for its meat and oil for food. Women take the intestines and separate the meat, which is used for food, from the part that is used for making raincoats.

They use a big spoon to scrape the intestines. Then they wash the gut clean of blood. This is done using about two gallons of human urine. The washing process takes four days.

Then three days of rinsing the gut in salt water clears it of the urine and prepares it for the next step, which is blowing the gut so that it is like a long balloon and tying it at its ends. Then it is hung and dried until it is ready to be cut into strips.

The strips are measured and cut after a pattern to fit an individual person, and sewn together with sinew. Dried grass is sewn into the seams.

The result of all this hard work is a custom raincoat that is fitted to the individual by the crafter. The seal gut, properly processed, is a waterproof material, and the seams with dry grass swell when in contact with water to make a tight seal.

Mathlaw, a Cup’ik woman who lives in Mekoryuk, said she learned to make the raincoats by watching her grandmother.

Viva Smith, also of Mekoryuk, had the only other seal gut raincoat at AFN that was made this summer. She made it with help from her mother, Ida Wesley, and was learning the craft for the first time.

“This is a dying art,” Smith’s sister, Jennie Mendez said. “She wants to keep this alive, so she’s learning to make the rain gear out of seal gut.”

Smith has three daughters: one who is 26 and two who are 19. She hopes that by learning how to make seal gut raincoats from her mother, who is in her late 80s, she will be able to pass the craft on to her daughters and keep it alive.

Mendez spoke sometimes for Smith, who said she was exhausted from hours of explaining the seal gut raincoat to curious convention goers.