Getting Started with Skin-on-Frame:
A friend of mine, Rob MacDonald, invited my wife and me over to dinner. Down in the basement, Rob had a Kodiak kayak that he was building from a book - a museum catalogue illustration. I went down into the basement, and there was just this incredible, beautiful skeleton of flowing lines. You could see all of the mass, and all of the space in it at the same time; it was just gorgeous. I talked with Rob for a few minutes, and instantly came up with the idea that we should be teaching this at Britannia. I asked him, and he said, 'No, I don't want to teach because I've never taught boatbuilding.' And I was full of myself, as an instructor who could learn something and then teach it five minutes later. So I said, 'Well, I can do that, so why don't we team up?' Which we did. We rented a one-car garage, and presumed to teach people how to build Aleut baidarkas.

	The two students,Shona Lalonde and Jake Haro, work with the basic boatbuilder's tool, a knife, carving the Uhuruks, or stem pieces, of their kayaks. This is boatbuilding at its most elemental level.

We did a lot of research, and a lot of building, and a lot of asking for advice. And talking to the boatbuilders that were helping, and asking people who I knew understood hull shape, who understood materials. And if I ran into a problem, asking. Every time you build a boat, you learn something. There's an experiment in every boat I build. If it's with a student, the motion is a tiny increment. When I build a boat for myself, I can do some daring things. And usually the boats I build for myself have some problems with them, but I learn from those problems.

Now, building with students, obviously I can't afford a real failure. So what I do is, I start with something that's been developed over several thousand years. In the case of the Aleut baidarkas, we've got at least 9,000 years. One of the Aleutian Islands has been continuously inhabited by people who have obviously had umiaks and/or kayaks. You know, just to get there they had to have had a vessel. So they've had that technology for a longer span than any other place in North America has been occupied. It's the oldest continuously-occupied spot in North America. Very stable culture. We're working with technology that's evolved to do the right thing and my experiments involve tweaking from there, not moving great distances from there. I stand on a broad and firm foundation when I do my experiments.

	Mark Reuten consults with the elders (clockwise) Otto Apaltaung, Josie Angutinglinirk and Gino Akka. We were using the model to help write a crib sheet of Netsilik kayak terminology.

Getting called North to Work with the Elders:
I was very interested in going north. Eventually, I got a phone message that said 'Would you like to come up to the Arctic and build boats with the Elders?' I thought it was somebody just having some fun with me, but I was so desperate to go up, that I decided to return the call and see what happened. It turned out there was an economic development project that was happening in the town of Kugaaruk. I was told that the Elders wanted to make money with kayaks. They would bring tourists up, and teach them how to build traditional boats out on the land. I believe that the deeper agenda was that the Elders wanted to keep kayak-building knowledge alive in their community. The administrative officer in the town said 'Okay, that's going to take money. Where can I find money?' She found the Economic Development Program. The Elders said 'Well, okay. If that's the way it has to happen, that's way it has to happen.' Over the course of three years, they remembered and rebuilt their kayak knowledge. That knowledge got passed on to the next generation, and so it was mission accomplished.

My shopmate Mark and I flew up to Kugaaruk. We were introduced around the Council Chambers. In my speech, I said that we were very honored to be there and we were very excited by the program. I wanted to be very clear that, right from the beginning, I didn't want them to think that I thought we were there to teach the elders how to build kayaks. We were here to learn, and we were here to assist them with whatever they were trying to do. But we were not here to show them, or to tell them to do anything. Whatever knowledge that they had, we would be very honored to acquire whatever they wanted to share with us. Anything we had that could help them, they were welcome to.

I said, 'You guys are the experts on building kayaks, and we're the experts in teaching white people how to build kayaks.' I said, 'I have built a couple of hundred of these skin-on-frame kayaks but I have not been told by an Elder the proper way to do it, and that's what I'm really hoping to learn now.'
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