From the mid-seventies I think. Check out the beaver skinning technique at 36 minutes.

I watch this a few times a year. There's a number of other similar docs on youtube.

You might also like this one

Nice videos.

The video I posted came up on my "recommended videos." After I opened it I saw there was a whole series of them. I'll likely end up watching them all eventually.

I recently read The Last Gentleman Adventurer, an autobiography by Edward Beauclerk Maurice describing his time with the Cree and Inuit and working with the Hudson Bay Company in the same area around the 1930's. This sort of ties in with that but fifty-some years later.

That was great to start my morning, went well with coffee. I would have liked to spent time with them when I was a young man. How did they get on the beaver run with all the snow at around 29 minutes? Fascinating!

^^

Very interesting to watch video. Enjoyed the dragging of the beaver out by a stick stuck through the nostrils then attached to a line for dragging. Skinning was excellently done by the women of the camp as well. Very interesting that three family groups stayed for 6 months at a time in a one room cabin.

Chris

I was surprised they were dragging the beaver, thought it could potentially damage the fur, but they would know better than me! My beaver never look that good!

When they first started building frame houses for the cree in the villages up on the coast,the first thing they did was remove all the inside walls making one big room.
Not too hard to locate the entrance runs by tapping on the ice even under the snow.The air bubbles in the run between the ice and the water make a different sound when you tap the ice.

We get a channel up here called FNX(First Nation Network), lots of these documentaries on there. Fascinating stuff. On the flip side there are lots of documentaries showing Canada’s destruction of their environment and way of life. One I watched was on one of the last rivers to have a major dam built on it...it in turn flooded thousands of acres of hunting and trapping grounds. Prince Rupert river maybe? Hard to tell I’ve watch so many of them.

That would be the Rupert River another like the George shown in the video by hydro Quebec.
The James bay Cree in Quebec now have ownership in those huge moneymaking hydro electric projects.
On a sidenote,when Beaver were on the verge of extinction it was the Cree who set aside the Rupert beaver reserve where the beaver re-populated from.

Boco I’m sure it went down similarly to how it happened in the us... not trying to pic a fight with Canada. Sad on the coast where I’m from they are mostly casino natives now. Regardless of what happened it just seems to me that we pounded out wilderness in the name of turning on the boob tube and lighting every work place on the continent. Just wish we could have found a happy medium.
At a hospital I used to work at there were pictures of the Columbia river not long after they popped the rail through...they showed the train stopped so the natives could give the engineers some hefty salmon. I never did find an explination of what was happening there but I took it as the start of the end of a great wild place.
Sad to see it all go. Sometimes I feel like I was brought into this world at the wrong time...then again it’s been a constant change since we came along.

The James Bay Cree are running the show in Northern Quebec,basically their own soverign nation now.And they have the capital from all the hydroelectric power they own to run their government.
There are huge monetary funds available to trappers thru the eeyou istchee government.

Interesting the Innu here (first cousins to the James/Hudson's Bay Cree) did the same thing here to the new houses they had back in the '60's - beat out the partitions. No contact between them and the Cree so they both independently did the same thing with the first houses.

Ya someone else commented on dragging out the beaver with the stick thru the nostrils. We do that here and u can hook them up one behind the other tail to nose and real slick over the snow. No worries about pelt damage if enough snow and of course u are dragging out with the flow of the fur. How we used to pull out caribou and now moose with skidoos except rope around head and snout. Oldest boy pulled (on google earth measurement) out a gutted "bald head"* moose this winter 50 miles like that and no damage to hide let alone meat.

The white canvas tents identical in configuration and set up to the ones we use here too. An art how to live comfortable in thin wall tent like that too at -30 (and a small wood stove only) and if you do not know it then you suffer bad. Tricks to everything.

* bald head - what we call a bull moose or caribou that has dropped its antlers