Manitoba Museum workshop explores Indigenous dentalium adornment – Winnipeg [Video]

Before teaching her workshop at the Manitoba Museum, Harmony Lynxleg painstakingly measured and filed down enough dentalium for all her students.

“It takes a lot of preparation,” she said. “When I first started, I think to shave down one pair of earrings took me like two hours.”

As her pupils select a set of shells to work with, Lynxleg lays out the rest of the materials; strings of beads, rolls of sinew, and pieces of moose hide. She’s teaching them to make their own dentalium earrings, a medium she’s been working with for the past year.

“I first discovered it when I was on the powwow trail, when I first started dancing when I was about 16 years old. And I was just astonished by it because you could tell that it took a lot of work.”

“I do lots of other various forms of art, like beading and sewing, …