WATCH: Educating the community through traditional practices

• Hide tanning spotlight at Okanagan Heritage Museum
• Interactive program aims to teach about traditional sylix practices

Once a week on Sunday afternoons, the Okanagan Heritage Museum hosts a spotlight on a traditional Indigenous practice or topic relating to syilx culture.

This month, the focus is hide tanning, and shows the community about what goes into the process of it.

“It’s intended to help foster appreciation, and understanding of syilx traditions, and history, and culture,” Indigenous Programming Intern, Alana Firedancer, told Kelowna10.

The program showcases traditional syilx items such as furs and mocassins, as well as a “build your own keychain” station.

Containing small lengths of leather, beads, as well as wooden disks, the workstation table allows visitors to take part in a hands-on experience.

“I teach visitors about the traditional methods of hide tanning, and then they get to do a little supplementary activity where they actually make a little keychain, with a leather string and some wooden beads,” she said.

The leather that is used to create the keychain is essentially made out of tanned hide.

“Here at the museum, we take truth and reconciliation very seriously. We work very closely with a lot of syilx partners… and over the years they’ve shared with us some cultural knowledge,” Firedancer said.

With that cultural knowledge, the museum supplements their exhibits and programs with the idea that they’re going to respectfully and accurately represent syilx culture and traditions.

“I think it’s incredibly important, as a museum, to offer that learning experience to museum visitors,” Firedancer added. She has Cree and Métis ancestry, and is passionate about teaching people about Indigenous cultures.

“I really like having that opportunity to educate others, and to foster that appreciation of the beautifully rich and complex syilx culture.”

The hide tanning topic will run until April 3 at the museum, and starting April 10, the topic will switch to learning about local Indigenous plants.