Specific Features

Jean-Baptiste Bellefleur - I always make a mark to indicate the top of my snowshoe. It has a top and a bottom. On the bottom, the side of the frame is rounded so as not to damage the rawhide lacing. Also, the frame is larger on the bottom than on top, like claws.
Narrator - There are two ways of tying snowshoes. This is the traditional way.
Jean-Baptiste Bellefleur - And this is how Whites do it.
Narrator - If you look at the opening of the snowshoe, you'll see that it's not symmetrical from the centre. There's a left and a right side. This allows the snowshoe to incline slightly from the interior towards the exterior, keeping it from touching the other snowshoe.
Jean-Baptiste Bellefleur - By placing the snowshoes this way when I go out, I ensure their help as I move around. I'm telling them that they must go somewhere, and then come back.
Kanikuen Gabriel - The Innu were all great travelers. They met all over Québec, in a land without borders. We went to places where we knew there was caribou or to lakes where we knew trout was bountiful. If these places were familiar to us, they were also familiar to many other Indians: Innu, Cree, Naskapi. And we worked together to fish, hunt and share. That was our way of life on the land.
Narrator - In winter, snowshoes were a necessity for everyone. We couldn't get around without them. They enabled the hunters to walk in the forest out of the wind, to cross a lake directly without having to go around it, and especially to catch up to a caribou which had been delayed by sinking into the snow.
Music - Rodrigue Fontaine, Bill St-Onge, Luc Bacon

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