Nancy Hager – Yukon Traditional Art

Nancy has been learning about Native Traditional art since growing up with her grandmother Mary Hager who taught her to sew  in early teens. Nancy watched her grandmother for year how she did her moose tanning at her home. Then watched her use the final moose skin to do mukluks , slippers, vests, baby belts, and  parkas. Her grandfather used moosehair for his dog team harnesses.

Nancy stayed home with her children when she lived in Faro mining town. She did really well with her crafts there. She made vest, slippers, mukluks, and noticed moosehair tuftings at that time. Looked at some pictures and figured out how to do it and started to work on it. Lots of hunters would throw out their skin. Nancy would collect hair from them, wash  and started using  it for her pictures. She has never stopped since. Her trademark  would be the faces as no one ever done that before. This came out of one of her creative streaks. The Chief head is the first one she did for a class of students showing colors. Long ago the use of colors would be from lichens, gin pills for blue, berries, lipstick plant, and crepe paper. Now that is replaced with Rit dye  for clothes and bingo dabber colors. Nancy likes to use traditional organic material like hair, quills, scales from animals like traditional times long ago. As First Nations would use the animal for food or or whatever use, they would pray to God thanking for the food. This is done for all animals, any living thing like trees  as well. This is practised in all First Nations areas.