Snowshoe Builders Display Their Craft at the Anchorage Museum

May 05, 2011|By Tim Akimoff | KTUU.com

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — George Albert looked up over thick-rimmed glasses to study the threading pattern William McCarty IV was using to create the webbing of a traditional Athabascan snowshoe.

"Yeah, he's doing good," Albert said. "Yesterday he didn't hardly know nothing about this. Today I don't really have to instruct him at all."

Albert, of Ruby, along with master artists Trimble Gilbert, of Arctic Village and George "Butch" Yaska Sr., of Huslia, gave a three-day master artists' workshop on snowshoe buliding hosted by the Anchorage Museum May 3-6.

McCarty, 18, of Ruby, Daniel Tritt, 26, of Anchorage, and Al Yatlin Sr., 60, of Huslia, served as apprentices under the master crafsmen, carrying on a proud tradition producing one of Alaska's most vitally important survival tools.

"Lots of people use them for trapping, racing and just walking," McCarty said, as he threaded a piece of string through a needle and continued making a net pattern on the top of a snowshoe.

McCarty's interest in the craft of snowshoe making was piqued when Albert told him that his grandfather had made hand-crafted snowshoes.

"It's getting to the point where it's almost gone," McCarty said of the craft.

The other men in the room represent the last of only a handful of Athabascan snowshoe craftsmen left in the world.

A long table in the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center at the Anchorage Museum served as a craftsman's work table. There were traditional tools and power drills strewn across it. But the artistry in snowshoe building is all in the heads and hands of the artists to whom it has been passed down generation after generation.

McCarty continued to work the white thread between the sinew lining the curved birch-wood frame and pondered why people his age should learn the art and craft of snowshoes.

"It'll get 'em away from video games," McCarty said. "It got me away from video games."

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