Tukuuludaa awarded Movement fund grant from Native Movement

Tukuuludaa has been awarded $18,000 for the revitalization of reindeer crafting and hybrid fur seal-reindeer crafting on St. Paul Island from Native Movement’s Movement Fund. We appreciate the generosity of Native Movement and we are honored to work with then over the course of this year!

This October we submitted a grant application to Native Movement's movement fund to go to Sápmi for a cultural and educational exchange with Sámi Indigenous and Norwegian artists and crafters specializing in reindeer skin and fur. We learned yesterday that our application was approved for the full-funding we requested.

We are planning to implement what we learn from this educational and artistic training trip in a reindeer and seal fur crafting culture camp and community fashion show on St. Paul Island. When we finalized the idea for a reindeer and seal fur crafting culture camp and community fashion show, we published a survey on our Tukuuludax̂ facebook page to see what interest existed, we were floored to see over 20 expressions of interested from our community members in this culture camp and fashion show. Through partnering with the Alaska Native Language Center's Sámi language program, we have seen over 15 expressions of interest in remote crafting courses using natural reindeer materials locally sourced from St. Paul.

Our long term goal is to create a curriculum and set of designs with instructions based on the outcomes of our reindeer culture camp and what we learned during our research and Indigenous knowledge exchange trip to Sápmi that we will share with other parts of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands chain as well as and Western Alaska.