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.

Member FDIC.

Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm producer-director Scott Knutson.

In this first of a two-part series Alethea Kenney and Linda Johnson-Morke share with us the cultural significance of a gar, otherwise known as a yurt.

My name is Alethea Kenney.

I'm the Chairman of the Board of the Sustainable Sheep and Fiber Community of Northern Minnesota which is an organization that is involved with bringing fiber producers like shepherds, other animal producers and plant fiber producers together with consumers and helping to educate the community about the importance of fiber, the uses of fiber, the potential art that can be used for fiber and in the process of doing that I met Linda Johnson-Morke and she has Karakul sheep.

She's a fiber artist and also a scientist and just does a fantastic job with wool and that's kind of her passion is wool fibers particularly the primitive breeds and we got to talking and it turns out she had gone to Mongolia and other places across northern Europe learning about traditional felting techniques and the more we talked the more I found out that she was really passionate about Mongolian culture.

She had even gone and learned how to make a yurt in the traditional felting method that the peoples in Mongolia would have used and our organization at the time had been saying gosh, yurts they're so cool.

If only we knew someone who did yurts.

Wouldn't that be cool!

I wonder how hard it would be to do that and I came back to the board and I said, you know, Linda knows about this.

Linda went and learned about this.

Could we do something with that and we talked about it and said well yeah it would cost money and where could we get money and it turns out Region Two Arts Council has grants and a fantastic staff to help you out when you're applying for grants and so we applied for the process to get a grant through them.

We worked with Linda as our Artist in Residence and she also did work with Deborah McQueen-Coder who is also an artist down around the Twin Cities who can convert art to mural sizes and we needed that because what we wanted to do was to teach people the importance of sheep to the Mongolian culture, the importance of wool and the techniques needed to be able to take sheep and make it into shelter but we wanted to do more than that.

We wanted to present it as art so that future generations could look at what we did and have a mural portraying the process of taking that wool off of the sheep, humanely and processing that as necessary in a primitive manner in order to make huge felt walls that would cover a traditional framework of a yurt which then becomes their shelter to keep them safe from the elements, through all of the seasons in the Mongolian steps and that's what we did.

We were able to get a grant, thankfully and we put on a workshop to bring that to the public.

My name is Linda Johnson-Morke and I have had an interest in wool and felting pretty much for almost my whole adult life and I've always been interested in cultures where wool and felt is important to their survival and one of the key cultures is Mongolia.

That's almost like the felt mecca of the world and so in Mongolia people have flocks and herds and have been nomadic for thousands of years and their homes have been gars or what we know as yurts.

I was so fortunate to have Alethea as the head of this yurt grant project because even though I don't, I'm not certain that she knew what she was getting herself in for but she kept it going.

She was able to take care of the paperwork and we were able to gather the community around and get people to come and even in our own group, understand how this is done and I think it was an opportunity that could not have happened without Alethea's leadership.

We started out by thinking, okay, I know I did a little internet research thinking where am I going to get a framework for a yurt because part of this yurt is a skeleton framework.

You have roof beams, you know, you have rafters, you have walls and this is all a very mobile house.

So, this is a nomadic people in Mongolia.

They live in a very dry, basically a mountainous desert and so in order to raise something like sheep, they have to move them often because if you use up the pasture space, it's not going to regenerate like, you know, most years we have here where you're going to go through and then you're going to be able to cycle through and graze a field more than once a year.

They can't do that.

They have to move and they have to follow the pastures and they have to follow the sheep and that was part of the beauty of their house, this Mongolian yurt.

I think it's traditionally called a gar but they're fine with it being called a yurt since Americans know it that way.

So, we did some research trying to understand where could we get this framework?

We wanted it to be traditional.

Can we get this from Mongolia and we found a place called Groovy Yurts in Ontario and this is what they do.

They work with a family or families in Mongolia who make the yurt frameworks in a traditional fashion.

They paint them, they hand paint them using the traditional Buddhist symbols and they ship those to North America and then they deliver them all over North America once or twice a year.

They make trips.

There were a couple of companies that provided yurt frames but Groovy Yurts, we reached out to them because they actually made their frames in Mongolia and we were able to support people living in Mongolia and this is what they do for a living.

And, I contacted them and they were fantastic to work with.

They were really excited about our project.

They were willing to help us out, give us a deal if they could, work with us in any way we needed and they were able to provide us with a traditional Mongolian yurt framework that's hand- carved and hand-painted from Mongolia.

You know, that was one thing I found, I found kind of the the Walmart equivalent of a place to order yurt frameworks online and I sent the link to Linda and she said yeah, that's okay but I was looking at this other place and it was Groovy Yurts and once I started talking to the owner Eve, you know, he was so in line with everything that we're believing in, supporting local economies, helping bring people together, helping educate, helping support families and that's his passion.

He had gone to Mongolia and I'm sure his story is online much better than I can tell it but you know he had kind of fallen in love, which I think Linda did as well, with the people there, the culture there and he wanted to bring that to North America and to the rest of the world but also in the same way he wanted to make sure that he supported them, that he didn't just bring their culture here like an appropriation, that he also brought us to them and said hey, you know, we want to learn about you.

We want to support you and you can in turn support us by educating us about your culture.

Groovy Yurts is a company in Canada, however, they go over and deal with the people in Mongolia and place the orders and then when they have a container full of yurts they ship it over to Canada and then he has his own semi that delivers the yurts to individuals and tells people how to set them up.

So, once we were able to order the yurt, which took a while, it was able to be delivered and now we had our yurt frame.

Bellet Nagar was the delivery person.

I hope I haven't mutilated his last name, sorry Eve.

You know, very knowledgeable.

He has been to Mongolia numerous times.

He's passionate about the people and the culture there and about philanthropy and being able to support families.

So that, you know, it's like a fair trade deal where he's supporting families.

It's not supporting corporations or something like that.

This is, it's a family that he networks with.

He knows them by name, you know, they're all employed.

They get good wages for what they produce.

So, it was in line with what we wanted to do and what we wanted to present.

I threw it.

It's one wall felt.

When we first pulled this together and we, of course, this was right in the beginning of COVID and oh, oh, are we going to be able to get this to work?

Are they, they closed the border.

He's coming from Ontario.

He usually does this huge thing where he comes all through the United States and I think even down into maybe Mexico and further and then around he does huge loops and it was like is this going to work?

Is this going to work?

Yes, it is.

It's still open for commerce.

They can get across and then finally it was like okay we need enough people here to help put together a yurt because it's not really a one-person job.

Plus people are excited, you know, this is really fairly new.

I had never seen a yurt.

I didn't have any idea and Eve pulls up in this huge truck.

He's got it all tricked out with all of his, you know, logo and everything from Groovy Yurts and he had to leave the big trailer behind with all the cool fancy artwork on it because he had to go back across the border but he, you know, he pulls up.

He's got these yurts.

He's got a friend with him.

We've got Linda with us and some friends and neighbors that are excited to help out and he's pulling up our driveway and it's like, yes, it's working.

I mean I think until that point it was like, I kept thinking something could still go wrong.

We won't be able to get the framework, everything's it's just not going to come together you know and you see it pull up, it's like this is it, this is it.

We're doing it.

We're really doing it and it was just amazing to see and they start unloading the yurt and you're looking at this framework and it's hand painted.

It is stunning.

I can't even describe it.

You really have to see it and you really have to see it in person because the artwork is amazing.

The colors just pop.

You had choices for color for the framework - blue, orange, I want to say red and blue symbolizes the eternal sky and the connection between the sky and the Earth.

It was a very special symbolism that Linda wanted because when she was in Mongolia, you know, you think Montana's Big Sky country so you get out there and it's the sky that dominates everything and she wanted that connection between the sky and the Earth because when you're looking at a yurt in Mongolia it's not, you know, we have foundations and basements.

They don't do that.

The only thing holding this yurt to the ground is there's a center rope that comes down and you'll tie that to maybe a rock or something heavy in case the framework, the form of the yurt itself is very resistant to wind.

It wants to stay on the ground and it's circular so the wind can go around it.

It can go over it easily but just in case you can take a rock and you tie that center rope to the rock in the middle and that further holds it down.

So, there's nothing about this that makes a footprint on the earth.

You know this is very sustainable.

Their culture is very sustainable in that way because this is made from wool and wood sustainably harvested, renewable and completely biodegradable.

If you leave a yurt and you do nothing with it for a few years, you have soil.

It's just going to turn into nothing and so there's this connection, a spiritual connection between the sky, the Earth, the sheep, the people and it all comes together in the yurt.

The most important part of a yurt and I noticed this when on my trip to Mongolia, is that people in Mongolia have lived sustainably for thousands of years, literally thousands of years.

Everything in the yurt is actually biodegradable.

So, the frame is made from wood that they carefully take care of and will last for generations.

The actual walls that extend have hinges that are made of rawhide.

The ropes are actually made from the mane of the horse.

So, we have horse hair ropes and then of course, we were going to make the felts which were going to be made from Minnesota wool.

And this part was very important because of the whole aspect of sustainability and how we too could live sustainably if we choose to do so.

And community because like I said it's not a one-person thing, you know, one person doesn't put up a yurt.

You have to have more than one person.

It is a community.

You don't make a yurt by yourself.

You don't put a yurt up by yourself.

It's not about you.

It's about us and all of that pulls together and it becomes about us living here.

So, what I guess we're waiting for your friend who's coming?

Linda Johnson-Morke.

She's the artist.

So, there's no rush.

What we'll do, we'll just prepare a few little things.

So, when you enter a yurt, you do it with the right foot first.

It's a tradition.

So, it's so important for the Mongols, because they are a nomadic culture.

They move from place to place with their flocks and herds because they need fresh pastures and so Mongolia is a pretty arid country meaning they don't get a lot of rain.

So, they're able to move even in the winter up the valleys where the grass doesn't necessarily grow but because they have this home that they're able to pack up and put on a yak cart and move with them, they can go from place to place and set it up in a new location where they can be close to their flocks and herds.

This is camel rawhide and the quality of a good yurt is to have a good wave is that it's split by hand still following the wood vein.

See it's only regular, that's making it all that much stronger.

So, those walls are actually very strong.

What kind of wood is that?

So, this is Tamarack, Tamarack.

So, the roof rafters and the walls are made of Tamarack.

The rest of the the woodwork parts are made of Siberian Pine which is the white pine.

The first thing we're going to put the center rope.

It's the fertility rope and also the the anchoring rope and I'll explain this once the yurt is up.

So, the yurt has been shaped by this extremely windy climate.

So, it is actually already aerodynamic and again it's not anchored to the ground.

The wind will press it down until a certain wind speed where the wind creates a depression on top and tends to suck the yurt in the air.

That's the same phenomenon that carries the airplane.

So, Mongolians will attach a big stone to this rope or an old engine block today or something, something heavy.

Incorporating the Mongolian culture was very important to this project.

In that, when they were underneath control of the USSR in the area around the capitol, the people had kind of lost the technique of making and being sustainable because they were more dependent on the government.

When they brought a person from the center of the country, who's still a master felt maker, who understood how to do this, many people came from around Ulaanbaatar to see this happen as well.

This was very important to me as it shows how easily we can lose the tribal knowledge that's important to any culture.

So, that's why it was important to actually put the steps in pictures on the outside of the yurt of how the Mongols would make felt to continue their sustainable living.

The way they have had for thousands of years.

You know we live in an age where we think we have everything right at our fingertips because we have the internet.

We can just Google Mongolia and you can come up with all these websites and Wikipedia has a really nice little blurb on that and you think gosh I know everything about Mongolia.

You know I can tell you all about that, but the nice thing about meeting Eve and Linda and particularly Eve at that point was you're meeting someone who went there and it's different.

It's like the storytellers of old, you know, you're meeting someone who met them.

You're not reading about it second and third and fourth hand and seeing a picture.

You're meeting someone who says I was there.

I can describe this to you.

I can talk about the people that I met.

This is, they're very spiritual in their yurt and he was very careful to explain some of the symbolism.

I mentioned earlier about this open fire in the yurt that seemed to have had a waterproofing effect and I don't know if you can confirm that and then they were, they changed to stoves in the yurt about 100 years ago and I still met the old Mongolians that told me it's the best Improvement in 2,000 years.

But that smoke had a waterproofing effect.

So, you remove that smoke then they had to put the canvas.

So, your breath is a little less.

So, if you change one thing something else gives.

So, it's I'm extremely respectful at the beginning.

I wanted to change this and that and so I and now everything we change we start offering windows and I don't really promote them because it's anyways but it's the demand that people have.

We have now three years experience with the windows and about 3,000 with the yurt itself.

So, I'm more confident without the windows.

Now in Mongolia the back half of the tunnel is always covered.

So, let's imagine the tunnel is like this.

The yurt, they think of as a living being and I can understand that because after you get it together, you know, it takes on a life of its own.

It becomes a living entity in your mind.

May I ask you to bring the tunnel, or the bagans, the walls.

They have a very symbolic things that they do and that they feel are important about their yurt and so he explained that when you show up at the yurt, of course one of the first things you have to do is you have to holler "tie the dogs up" because the dogs just run and they help drive off predators and help protect the sheep.

So, you want to get the dogs tied up but they're very open.

There's no lock on a yurt door.

You come on in but when you come in you have to be careful because the framework of the door is, you know, a rectangle and it has a threshold and you don't step on the threshold.

As you're stepping in, you step with your right foot over the threshold.

They believe that the threshold is like the head, that's the head where the spirit of the earth resides and to step on it that would be an insult.

You're you're stepping on the head of a being that's in, you know, their home and so that's an insult to them and an insult to the yurt and so if you do that then you need to step back out apologize and start over and of course the practicality of that is that you're not continually stepping on the wood and damaging it.

Once you step into this yurt, you'll see that as it's put together you have walls.

You have a threshold and door and as you step in you have something that has to hold that roof up and the rafters which aren't called rafters go to a circular tunnel in the middle and that is held up in turn by two pillars or beams in the center and I think they're called bagana and in between those, traditionally that would be where you had your fire pit or more recently now of course, they would use a wood cook stove and practically you won't want to walk through that area.

You don't want to teach your children to walk through that area because you're going to have a hot fire there.

It's not going to be safe.

So, traditionally what they said is these these baganas symbolize the husband and wife and you don't want to walk through there because you're coming between them.

You're breaking up the family by doing that.

It's very disrespectful and you want to walk in a clockwise direction around that center because this is a circular thing.

So, you're going to walk around the center in a clockwise direction.

So, you know all of this was very symbolic.

It was very connected to their belief system, also to the Earth and then to the understanding that this yurt, it symbolizes life.

You know if you didn't have a yurt, you didn't have your sheep to make your yurt, you don't have a home.

You don't have life and talking to Eve, it was, you know, it was just amazing to hear him talk about all of this, to go over all of this with us, to make sure we understood it.

You know, whether we respected that later which I think most of us do and find it completely fascinating.

You hear someone talk about that with such passion because he hears the people that he knows.

They don't just talk about it, they live it.

This is their life and it's very important to them.

When I was in Mongolia, it became obvious that while they were under the control of the USSR, every government doesn't like nomadic people and they look for ways to control them.

The way the government controlled the Mongol people was they required them to sell all of their fibers to the government.

So, therefore they took away their ability to be sustainable.

They had to be dependent upon the government.

Hearing Eve and Linda talk about Mongolia and both of them reiterated the same thing.

Mongolians are a truly welcoming, happy people and you come into Mongolia and here's the people who could feel repressed but instead they're joyful.

If you see pictures and I know if you go on Groovy Yurt's site and look at some of the pictures of the traditional families that they work with, there's not a frown anywhere on a face.

They're just so happy to be doing what they're doing, to bring their culture to another country so that you can understand and learn about them.

They're just thrilled that people would be interested.

They love what they're doing.

Sustainability is so important.

I think this is just the first step to understand what can be done.

We can all live a more sustainable future by wearing wool, using wool socks, wool blankets can last many lifetimes.

So, we should all think about how we can be more sustainable in our own lives.

They live in a place where it looks, well it's a desert, you know, it's a mountainous desert area.

It looks bleak in some ways.

It's beautiful but it's not, you know, it's not lush in any way.

Their life can be harsh and hard.

If they're truly living the nomadic lifestyle, it's a hard life.

They have with them only what they can carry on horseback or behind the horses.

It's not opulent from our perspective lifestyle and yet they're happy.

They're not happy, they're at peace and you look at that and you think, you know, there's something to that.

There's really something to that.

They are water resistant but not waterproof.

Thank you so much for watching.

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