Inuvik grandma and granddaughters skin polar bear together, passing on traditional skills

The first time Beverly Ann Esau cleaned a polar bear hide, she was 12 years old. 

"As I was growing up in Sach's Harbour, I always helped my mom do traditional stuff [like] cleaning the polar bears," said Esau. 

Now she's passing on this traditional knowledge to her two granddaughters in Inuvik, N.W.T.

"It's a cultural connection with their past. I like to show them and do stuff with them the traditional way," said Esau

Recently, Esau got a call from a friend from Tuktoyaktuk. His son had caught a polar bear and wanted Esau to "flesh it." 

"That means take all the fat off," explains Esau. "I was gonna go to Tuk, but I was busy so he sent it to me. I did it here in Inuvik." 

It's a lot of work, says Esau. 

"You have to take all the fat off first of all, and skin the feet, do the mouth, and the head really delicately because if it's going to be sold to a customer, they might want to make a rug with the shape of the head."

It took the trio 12 hours to skin the roughly seven-foot-long bear hide. 

The girls aren't strangers to the sharp ulu — a traditional short, crescent-shaped knife, says Esau. "If I cut up some meat at home, they got those ulus, and they're right there helping me." 

But this was the girls' first time working on a polar bear. 

"It was a challenge for the girls, because they didn't know how to hold an ulu, how to hold a hide. And so I had to teach them those things," said Esau. 

Esau said she used her own mother's ulu to do traditional work like this.

Esau reminisced about the memories of being out on the land with her mom and dad, hunting polar bear. 

"The first time I ever went out hunting polar bear, my daddy, he took me. We went with a skidoo. And we saw this big bear, oh he was so beautiful. Oh my goodness. And so we chased it," she recalled.

"I really miss that."