THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

In summer they wore tunics of watertight fish skin which hang in the museum cabinets, with a grinder for scraping off the scales exhibited below. In winter they went in dog or reindeer skin, in birchbark leggings and deerskin shoes stuffed with grasses. Their world was full of deities – the Amur was itself a spirit – embodied in toy-like wooden idols that now stand labelled and disenchanted, and they kept a special reverence for bears. In their myths, and sometimes in belief, their women had sex with bears, and children were born from them.

Thubron/Amur