Reine Pavlik sorted through a large collection of her latest work. She pointed to a pair of jeans with seal skin flare, a women’s suit made of deer skin and seal hide and several more hand-made pieces of clothing. Many of the pieces had ornate beading.
“Sometimes I feel like beading a straight line is really hard,” she said, holding up a pair of hand-sewn moccasins. “This pair of moccasins is made with deer and moose skin.”
Skin sewing, or hide sewing, and bead work are vital art forms in Southeast Alaska’s Lingít culture. Pavlik, who is from Yakutat, is blending those art forms with contemporary style.
She turned over the hand-sewn moccasins, revealing beadwork on the back.
“I feel like I can see my progress in my beadwork,” she said. The beaded letters read “Land Back” in an Old English typeface. “Behind these moccasins is ‘Land Back,’ which is a message for the world we live in today to hopefully give Indigenous peoples their land and sovereignty and right to stewardship.”
Pavlik said she grew up surrounded by artists.
“That was just always part of our lives is just doing art. It was just part of the activities that we did,” she said.
She first learned from her mother how to sew items like pillowcases and, for a while, she said that was all she knew how to sew. Few members of her family practiced skin sewing on animal hides like sea otter and moose.
But eventually, Pavlik learned skin sewing from her aunt, Jennie Wheeler. Wheeler is a Lingít artist who creates skin-sewing pieces, beadwork and spruce root weavings.
Wheeler taught Pavlik to make moccasins.
“Making moccasins really was a way to connect to my family and my ancestors,” she said. “I feel like it's so ingrained in our family stories.”
Now Pavlik’s community knows her for her beadwork and skin-sewn garments. She said her art weaves together tradition with modernity, and is inspired by her Lingít heritage. That blending of old materials with new designs gives her work meaning and momentum, she said, describing the process as almost spiritual.
“Using the traditional materials and using it in a modern way feels like I’m honoring my ancestors but I'm also modernizing some of the ideas that people have attached to traditional materials,” she said.
Sustainability is another way she connects to the traditional and she tries to only use materials from donations or thrift stores. She said she's aware of the damage fashion causes to the environment and hopes people think twice before buying for convenience.
“I also kind of felt like it's something that our ancestors would do is they’d use what is near us and make things out of what is close by,” she said. “So I felt like that was a good way to honor them.”
But keeping culture alive while making room for personal expression isn’t always easy, and Pavlik acknowledged the pressures facing Indigenous artists today. She said there is a push for Indigenous artists to modernize and step away from tradition. But, she said she is committed to exploring her own voice within the context of Lingít art.
“It just feels like something I’m supposed to do,” she said.
Pavlik said her art practice connects her to ancestral knowledge and traditions. It’s something her father noticed when she started skin sewing.
“There was sort of an excitement there for my dad to see that, like something that his mom knew how to do his daughter knows now how to do as well,” she said.
Pavlik said she wants to explore new ways to pass on her skills to the next generation by teaching others her crafts.
