Manitoba Museum workshop explores Indigenous dentalium adornment

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.”

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“I do lots of other various forms of art, like beading and sewing, but I’ve always drawn back towards it.”

Dentalium is a type of mollusk shell that was used by North American Indigenous peoples for thousands of years as currency and to decorate clothing and jewelry. It is harvested in coastal waters, and was traded across the continent. The thin shells are hollow and tapered at one end.

The Manitoba Museum has a small collection of dentalium pieces. A cape covered in dentalium sits in the gallery, and earrings and hair ties are stored in the museum’s Hudson’s Bay Collection. The earrings and hair ties are over 100 years old, says Museum Head of Indigenous Programming and Development Tashina Houle-Schlup, who brought out the stored pieces for Lynxleg’s workshop participants to see.

“It was like a symbol of status because they were so expensive and hard to get,” she said. “There have been dentalium that have been found around the Forks, so right here in Winnipeg, and that is quite a distance. I just think of those husbands that brought back a lot of them, trading them, for their wives or daughters to cover their dresses with. It was…to show how valued they were in their community.”

Many of the steps in making the earrings at the workshop are easier than they were when the items in the collection were crafted; Lynxleg buys the dentalium from suppliers, and the sinew comes ready to use on a spool. But it’s not lost on her the amount of work and time the art form takes.

“I think it’s also a great representation of self-love when you make it for yourself, because it’s hard to get it. It’s expensive. It takes a lot of work. Just from harvesting it, to preparing it, to putting it together. You need a lot of patience.”

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