Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground.

Brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

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Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm producer director Scott Knudson.

In this season 13 premiere, we begin a special three-part mini series as Nate Johnson tans hides.

I'm Nate Johnson and I've got a collection of deer hides that I'm going to tan and some beaver that I'm going to turn into leather with the hope of making my own pair of pants.

I'm using a modern pattern old pair of pants to make my new ones so the hope is they won't look too different from any other pair of pants you'd see walking around.

One thing that's important to know is while this now seems perhaps unusual to some people, this of course would be one of the most normal things in the world to make your own clothing from the materials you that are around you.

I think historically this is kind of no big deal.

It's an undertaking at least it has been for me.

Today, I've got some new leather pants I want to make so I've got a pair of old pants.

I had them for eight years.

They're just worn out.

Growing up and even as in my twenties, I don't know that I even knew you could tan a hide with brains to take the deer.

I mean I didn't hunt.

I didn't trap.

I didn't really participate in my food and yeah so the idea of skinning a deer and and taking its brains out and scraping the hair off and using smoke and and the fat in the brains to tan a hide and then make clothing.

Well, I just didn't know you could even do that.

So, I've got some hides I need to tan.

Today, I've got a couple beaver hides specifically that I'd like to turn into leather so I'm actually going to be slipping the fur off of them and using bark or a tannin solution to tan them.

So, these are a couple beavers I trapped this spring and there's a big hole here.

This beaver was a male.

In the spring they disperse and roam around and they fight with each other and so you got some holes from fighting.

That's from being bitten up and I stretch them a little different.

If you're a trapper normally you keep the leg holes inside the hide and stretch around them.

If you're not, that doesn't make any sense to you, that's okay.

But this I just eliminate the holes and it's a little better for home tanning.

Anyway, so I've got this leaf spring scraper from an automobile and I just forged it out and and sharpened the end.

I just want to clean up any remaining fat and dried.

There's a membrane on every hide and we have to get that membrane off so that this the tanning solution can go into the hide and so this is the best way I know how with beaver hides, is to to dry them out and then scrape them.

So, you can see it's obviously taking off shavings of skin and that's good because a beaver has a really thick skin, particularly an older animal like any animal, older ones have thicker skin.

Along the spine, particularly the skin is much thicker on most animals.

So, I also want to thin this out a little bit because the beaver is very difficult to tan for for whatever reason.

All animals, the fiber structure of the skin is composed slightly different and beaver has really tight, the fibers interlock mesh of fibers and beavers are really tight.

This is my understanding and it's really hard to get soft.

It's got a really tough skin.

It's really hard to soften and if I thin it out that helps me out.

I'm just going to scrape the whole thing to get the membrane off and clean it up but then also concentrate some extra scraping right down the center of the hide here to make it a little bit thinner and that'll just make it easier for me to tan and work with.

I've seen people try to tan a deer hide without any mentorship or having never seen it or no one to help them and it usually doesn't work and so I was lucky I sought out teachers.

I, because I tried that, I, someone said "oh you do this, you do this" and I tried it and it was, it turned into this kind of sticky mess.

It was bad but that's an important part of learning.

So, I learned from a woman out west.

Linkswell is her name and I took a five-day class and learned a bunch of different tanning methods and since then I've picked up a lot of things from just a wide range of people from the tanning community and I've learned some things from some Cree elders up in northern Quebec.

Different ways they work with skins and yeah.

So if you wanted to, you could and I have saved all these shavings and you can make glue- - hide glue.

So violin makers still use hide glue today, fine instrument makers and there's not much of a market for it anymore but it is an ancient glue and the collagens and proteins in the skin can be slowly cooked out.

But, we don't have to this whole thing.

I've got another beaver that I've already finished scraping.

So, we'll move along to the next step.

We gotta mix up a wood ash solution.

We're gonna add water and hardwood ash and this is the same thing I do with deer hides.

Some people call it bucking.

So your bucking hide and the wood ash in water or you can use any alkaline solution.

It's the alkalinity we're after here.

It loosens the fur which is one of the primary reasons I'm doing this beaver because I'm actually going to tan this without the fur to make leather.

So, here we are the blue barrel tannery.

So, this is where I get a bunch of different barrels going of tannin solution and of different strengths.

So, I've usually got three barrels going of that with weakest to strongest.

And then over here, I have my wood ash barrel that we're going to soak this hide in and anything else I want to slip the fur in.

So, I just used a hardwood ash from our wood stove, just save it all winter.

It needs to be hardwood and I think the problem with conifers is they don't make a strong enough solution.

They're not alkaline enough and maybe it has to do with the density of the wood or I'm not sure but yeah they just don't get quite alkaline enough.

And, I'll just add water and I use rain water I collect at this rain barrel here.

Our well water's pretty hard.

It's got some iron in it that'll interfere with some of the processes.

So, soft water, good soft water is pretty important.

So, I'm just stirring in water.

Yeah, I'm just getting it all mixed up, going for kind of a maybe a thin pancake batter.

I'm getting the charcoal chunks out because the charcoal being black could potentially stain the hide.

But, I'm going to get some gloves so I can get my hand in there without burning my hand.

Some rubber gloves and an egg and then we'll do a test.

So, I hear a home-grown egg is actually preferred.

I don't know if this is true or not but I stopped buying food and so all I've got is this store egg from my neighbor.

I've been just eating food we grow and gather here and hence I have a lot of beaver hides because I've been eating a lot of beaver lately.

So, I'm just going to get rid of some of the last of this charcoal.

So, we're going to test the PH using the egg.

It's maybe it's just testing the density of the solution and that's what's making the egg float to a certain level but it correlates enough to the PH strength that it seems to work.

So, I just drop it in here and it should float and about a size of a quarter should be sticking up up out of the water.

If it's not floating at all, you can't see any of the egg, I need to add more wood ash.

If it's floating up and you see more than a quarter then it's a little bit too strong and you add a little more water.

There's the egg and I have quite a bit showing.

It's going to be too strong.

the solution which could potentially dissolve the hide which we don't want.

So, I'm going to add a little water.

I guess if you buy a PH strip, it's not nearly as accurate as floating an egg.

Give it a stir.

Let the water incorporate.

As I told you with the scrapings or so you can make glue out of them.

So, the alkaline solution also helps break down some of those glue substances.

We want to get a lot of that stuff out so that we can put the tannins back where those were or if we were using brains we'd be doing the same thing.

We're kind of taking some of the glues out of the hide and replacing it with what we want to be in there.

So in this for this hide I'm going to use tannins.

For another hide, a deer hide, I might use brains or any sort of fat emulsion, eggs and egg yolks and dish soap are common.

It has to be an emulsified fat for brain tanning and brains happen to be an emulsified fat which is to say the fats go into a solution with water.

And, egg yolks also are emulsified fat.

They have Lecithin in them which you see in chocolate which helps emulsify that.

So, that works equally well on brain tanning hides as egg yolks.

A lot of people use that.

Ivory soap and mayonnaise.

I mean there's, people come up with all sorts of stuff.

In Canada they're big on they're big on Sunlight dish soap.

So, whatever works.

I prefer brains.

They just seem to work really well and there they are, they're in the animal.

So, like with a beaver, I'll often cut the beaver brains out and we eat the rest of the animal.

We eat a lot of beaver sausage and the tail is good.

You render the fat out of the tail and use the tail for knife sheaths and the tail leather.

So, yeah there's a lot of uses for the beaver.

Usually, I save this egg and try to put it in the shade and then I can have my PH egg for all year.

So far the raccoons haven't found it.

So this one's gonna go in and since this hide was totally dry, I'm just going to add a little extra water just because it's going to soak up a lot of liquid.

Something like that.

And, then I'll just come out and stir it once a day and it should take probably three days.

The weather's pretty warm so probably three days and I've got a weight I'll put on top of it.

A rock to keep it submerged.

So I'll come out every day and stir it just to kind of keep it evenly soaking and should take three days maybe four.

It goes faster when it's warmer.

So I'll just come check on him as soon as the fur starts to slip out then it's ready.

I used to boil all my tannins in a five gallon pot and then I got tired of spending all day boiling.

It takes a lot of tannins to tan a hide.

So then I thought about my maple syrup pan and it seemed like the perfect way to go.

I'm gonna use for this one, even though I call it bark tanning I'm going to use sumac leaves here.

Most commonly people do use tree bark.

Around here willow has a lot of tannins in it good bark, oak.

Oaks hard to come by.

So mostly I tend to use willow bark because there's lots of ditch willows and then sumac leaves also happen to have a really high percentage of tannin and you pick them in the fall when they start to turn red and they're about to fall off anyway.

So, you're not harming the plant at all.

You can just go back and pick from the same patch year after year and once they're dried down, they're very tannin rich.

They're actually a really good source of that.

There's a little bit of willow bark mixed in here.

Yeah, I was peeling some willow sticks for some reason and I threw them in.

I usually mix whatever I have on hand.

And, bark tanning, in my understanding is it's a little more European or at least not as much from this area the origin of it but it definitely produces a different kind of leather than brain tanning.

With brain tanning we're going for a soft stretchy fluffy leather and with bark tanning it's more analogous to what your boots or belts are made out of.

It's it's a stiffer leather or firmer leather i guess you would say.

A little less stretch and we leave the grain on the hide.

Now, that's if you've maybe seen grain on leather, that's that shiny layer.

So, the word for that is the grain and it's a skin layer right under the the hair.

And for bark tanning, we're leaving that on.

For buckskin, we're scraping that off.

It's a little theoretical but we'll get into more of that later.

So now I'm going to add water.

So, again this is rain water.

I usually put the same amount of water as I do sumac leaves here.

So, I'm probably going to add a little more water to this.

I want all the leaves to be covered and fully absorbed and then I'll put a cover on it.

And, yeah, I'm gonna need I'm gonna need five more gallons of water.

And today's really dry.

It's been, we've got severe fire danger so I'm not gonna light a fire.

It's supposed to rain in a couple days.

But I'll just let this soak because those tannins will start to leach out, just cold soaking.

So, I'll let this soak.

I'll probably add a little more water and then once the fire danger passes, I'll let it simmer for two or three hours.

I'll bring it up to a boil, let it simmer for two or three hours and then let it cool down overnight and then we'll draw off the, they call it liquor, so the bark liquor tannin liquor which will be a rich kind of brown reddish brown and you know it's good when you you taste it and it makes your makes your lips pucker.

You feel that it's like your eating an acorn.

You get that astringent quality.

Well, tannins are astringent.

They're tightening.

So, a little taste and if it really really makes you pucker, you know you did you got a good solution.

I usually boil this three times actually.

So, I'll do a first boil and that's the strongest solution.

The second boil is medium and third boil's the weakest of course, but with hides you always start with a weak solution.

So, I'll extract every little bit of tannins from the leaves in different gradations.

So, that's why I have three barrels of tannin going on.

I'll start hides in a weak solution and then slowly move their way up.

If you start them in the strongest solution and they're somewhat thick hide, they have, there's the potential of what they call case hardening.

This is getting technical.

But that's the tannins just hardening the outside of the skin and preventing tannins from getting into the center of the skin so it won't ever tan all the way through.

So, we start with a weak solution, work our way up to a strong solution.

There it is.

So, I guess it's been a long process for me of learning and it started with my interest in making clothing actually.

I started to read and think about where our clothing comes from and what goes into the basics we consider necessary and don't really think about their origins and so I started reading about clothing manufacturing overseas specifically in places like China and Bangladesh and it turns out a lot of our clothing is made by very young girls, women in those countries that are paid virtually nothing.

So, we're going to go cook up cook up some deer brains here on the the cook stove.

And, people know this story by now I think it's out there and I wanted to actually do something concrete about the things I was wearing.

To me it didn't seem like a good way to spend my money to support that system.

It's brain time.

But I didn't know where to begin.

How do you make clothing?

I, how do you make the fabric and along the way so I learned about tanning.

So, I've got a deer brain saved in the freezer from last fall hunting and you can pressure can deer brains.

You can dehydrate them in the bed of sphagnum moss but I have a freezer.

That's what I used and I'm gonna just put a little water in there and bring it to bring it to a boil and that's gonna help sterilize the brains.

You don't necessarily have to and in fact, some traditions want you just to let the brains start to rot a little bit.

They say the stinky brains are the best brains but I didn't learn that.

I learned to boil them and so yeah there's all kinds of way to do your brains, so this is what I do.

But, we're just going to bring them up to a boil to sterilize them and then I'm going to let it cool and mash them up with my hands and then we'll get ready to tan our deer hide.

One thing I learned, no one taught me but I had to learn the hard way, if you want to boil a pot make a big fire.

So, that's been my journey with tanning is to make something that I could feel really good about wearing and of course it's been an unbelievable undertaking to try to figure out it.

Yeah and I'm still learning a ton and still doing a lot of experiments.

Well, you just don't want to be here all day waiting for a pot to boil.

I have found that clothing that I've made out of buckskin and bark tanning is super durable, super useful.

It works well.

It feels really good to wear.

Yeah, it just sticks around too.

Yeah, it's been a really good ancient history.

The craft is ancient.

It's been so interesting to try to pull that back up and bring it into my life.

The only thing I'll add about the brains is that we do use deer brains and we feel pretty confident that there's not chronic wasting disease up here.

We're in the woods.

Yeah, I'm just stirring it around, make sure it all gets cooked.

There's no known cases.

Northern Itasca County, you know, we're not hunting near southeast Minnesota Wisconsin.

That's where there's a lot of chronic wasting disease with deer which is mostly found in the brain and spinal tissue and things like that.

So, we feel safe using our brains from up here but if you were living in a spot where there was chronic wasting disease or you're concerned about it then you know you can buy pig brains from somebody raises pigs or some meat markets can specially order it.

You can use egg yolks.

You can use other things but yeah we feel okay here.

Just give it a second to sterilize.

Probably good.

I'm just gonna get my little, my little hand blender.

Going old school here.

This is all I got.

This is about as technologically advanced as the kitchen appliances have gotten here.

I mean that's a pretty big deal.

I'd have a hard time making that.

I mean if you have an immersion blender of course that's the ideal thing which is just this with a motor I guess.

But I don't have one so I'm gonna mix my blended brain up here with half to three quarters of a gallon of water.

This should be hot enough now that it'll be kind of at a good warm temperature.

You don't want it too warm.

If it burns your hand, it'll burn the hide because they're both skin.

So nice and warm that helps the hide soak up the brains.

So, I'll get this mixed up and then we'll start soaking the hide.

Okay, we have a couple deer hides here.

So, this one has actually been soaked in brain solution already so it's kind of half softened.

I'm gonna go just a half gallon of water.

Oh, I might have gone a little too far.

Check the temperature.

It's still warm.

That's good.

I can put my hand in there.

I'm just gonna kind of mash up any any brain chunks I find.

We'll let that sit for maybe 20 minutes until the hide is fully soaked in the solution.

Maybe I'll stretch it a little bit every couple minutes just to kind of start to get it start to get it absorbing.

It doesn't take that long.

We're just getting it rehydrated fully.

I've got stiff edges here and and if you pull on the on the stiff spots it helps them helps loosen them up and helps them soak in the solution.

Yeah, this will be just ready in a couple minutes.

It's soaking it right up.

I mean, there's a lot of people are grossed out by this idea of working with brains but I guess that's just a cultural thing.

I mean, they're considered food in a lot of different parts of the world and I've eaten plenty of brains and they're kind of weird because I didn't grow up eating them but they're not bad, you know.

So, we'll take this and now we're gonna we gotta squeeze out squeeze out this brain solution.

So, we'll head over to the ringing pole.

Yep not the no high technology here, just got a pole and some rope.

i'm just going to squeeze it out by hand and we'll reuse that brain solution for future hides.

Yeah, you can freeze it.

If I'm going to be tanning a lot of hides, every morning I'll put it in a pot and I'll reboil it.

Just bring it back up to a simmer just to keep it from getting funky.You know, eventually, eventually you soak it all up and you use up all the fatty acids and all the fats in there.

So, this this must be a deer that I shot probably two years ago or maybe it was yeah two years ago.

Finally, finally catching up to it.

It should be big enough for pants.

It's not too thick which is good but thick enough.

Thanks so much for watching.

Join us on the next episode for part two of three of Nate Johnson Hide Tanning.

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Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji.

Continuing their second century of service to the community.

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