Traditionally, bear gut was sewn by skin-sewers into parkas, blankets, and even smoke-hole covers in houses. It is thought that a bear-gut parka would likely have been a status item since it would take two or so good sized bears to make one single garment.
To clean the gut, we used traditional ground slate ulus from the museum's teaching collection, which was a unique experience in itself- to have the opportunity to do experimental archaeology with tools from the archaeological record! And now I can say from experience that they worked very well to scrape the gut clean. We also tried unmodified shell as scrapers, which also worked well. The whole process of scraping the gut inside and out took about two and a half hours with six women working at once, talking and bonding over the general experience and the smell. The smell was pungent to say the least, but not at all as bad as you'd think it would be.
The next steps in processing the gut will be to blow air into the ends of the two sections, tie off the ends, put round stoppers in the other to hold the shape, and hang them to dry. Jill Lipka is experimenting with different oils to use as emulsifiers to soften the gut and keep it flexible and durable once it has dried.
This activity is part of a museum effort to apply for a grant for a broader gut sewing project. Hopefully future experimental projects will shed some light on the 'ins' and 'outs' of working with gut and other inner skins such as esophagus.
Scraping the gut clean with ulus, or women's knives. Photo cred: Ashley Weller
Turning the gut inside out, see tray of gut before cleaning on the right. Photo cred: Ashley Weller
Photo: from the publication Alutiit/Sugpiat: A Catalog of the Collections of the Kunstkamera edited by Yuri E. Berezkin
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