Capote making workshop revisits history, resourcefulness and reclaims culture

Karen Shmon thinks it's important not just for the Métis population, but all Canadians, to look back on history and learn about something they might not know a lot about.

Shmon is the director of publishing at the Gabriel Dumont Institute and she organized a capote-making workshop this weekend.

A capote is a wrap-around coat made from blankets and tied together with a sash, predominantly used by Métis people during the time of the fur trade.

Shmon said she believes the capotes came to be from a combination of histories and roots of the Indigenous and European people.

"The Métis took the European styling of coats and used the blankets to make that styling so it became a unique coat," Shmon said.

The capote could be used all year long, which made them valuable to survival, she said. 

"There has been a great deal of Canadian history that has been absent or missed," she said. 

The workshop is part of cultural renewal and reclamation, which will help fill in the gaps in history for the people there, she said. 

She hopes people will come to appreciate the resourcefulness of the people who lived during the fur trade through the workshop. 

"When you think about making do with what you have at hand and then to come up with [making a coat with what you have], I think that's an important concept about the resourcefulness," she said. 

"But also the importance of beauty, making things that are beautiful so you have pride in what you're wearing."