Episode - 2 Women’s Traditional Teachings

All SeriesMy Grandparents Tell Me Stories

Jan 26

Air Date: January 26, 2026

Summary

This story, written by Brandon Kyikavichik, is written as though he was an elder lady who is speaking to her Gwitch’in people, including her grandchild, who is recording the story. The story includes information and teachings about women’s traditional practices.

The story is set in old times when people travelled on foot across their territory and returned in spring to an ancient village near Old Crow called Grass Mound, where many groups gathered each spring. Brandon describes women’s strength and endurance as they pulled their belongings on toboggans made from caribou leg skins, sometimes while carrying babies, running up steep embankments—showing how physically fit women were.

As spring breakup begins, the women clean and refresh the camp: cutting grass, piling it, and burning it so the camp is tidy and beautiful. As warmer weather comes, women make fish-trap baskets, while men prepare for hunting by making spears, arrows, canoes, and gathering firewood. The story names places around Old Crow and explains their meanings, especially river mouths and confluences where fishing is strong and where communal fish traps are set year after year.

When caribou migrate, many people gather and a large harvest happens. Brandon emphasizes that women work at the kill site: they skin and butcher, clean the area, hang meat on poles for smoking, prepare hides, tan them, make dry-meat bundles, and store food in rock cellars for summer. Skilled women also teach girls at a specific training place (a girls’ training ground), where girls learn practical skills like tanning, making sinew and snares, sewing, drying meat, making grease, dyeing porcupine quills, and other responsibilities tied to women’s roles and community survival.

The story then shifts to danger and conflict: a group from a far-off country attacks during harvest time, trying to kill men and capture women and girls. Even though the people have been watchful, using guard dogs and protective structures, the attackers’ medicine man disables the dogs so they don’t warn the camp. A highly skilled woman is taken, but her niece escapes with two clever dogs.

In captivity, the woman’s skill and intelligence are recognized, and she becomes a “trophy wife” for a good provider. Over time, she forms relationships: a woman her age befriends her and plans to help her, and the man she is given to begins to feel sad for her.. He secretly helps her escape by returning her sewing kit and giving her a fire-making set (including items like a striker/flint and birch fungus/chaga) in a small soft-hide bag. He tells her to travel without stopping for days, and says her friend will guide her past the captors’ warning system—peregrine falcons used as alarms.

When she reaches her homeland, far upriver near the Porcupine River headwaters, she builds a small raft tied with willows, and floats downriver. In the fall harvesting season she makes smoke signals from the hills so her relatives will find her. They come for her and bring her back. She reunites with her niece, now grown and orphaned, and takes her in to raise her. Brandon closes by saying he told the story the way it was taught to him.