That is a pretty fond memory for to think about. Those times when my mom was preparing these different foods or seeing my grandmother prepare different foods. That is something that I really enjoy. Not just thinking about but carrying on and thinking about the ways I’m going to teach my children to do the same thing. It is a lot of hard work to simply go out and pull a root out of the ground. This is a tuukas. A long time ago they were made from wood and antler but nowadays we have the advantage of steel. This right here I believe comes from farm machinery. The old ladies they used to really watch some of the farm machinery that was out in the fields and when they would see something that would catch their eye often times it was the steel that they would have fashioned into a digging stick because this is very sturdy and it’s smaller and it is something that is a little bit easier to use than the wooden ones as I understand it. That is indigenous people taking advantage of technology and this one has a little axe handle top on it.

The motion is along the lines of a lever and you put the tuukas into the ground. You figure the ground is like this, you put the tuukas in at an angle like that and then your root is right about there and then you pop up around it. Then eventually that softens up the soil. Then you reach down in there and you pull the bulb or the root out or whatever it is you are digging for. The important thing to remember is to always cover that back up because that makes it easier for the soil to recover. That is a really important rule. There are rules all around this stuff and you hear some of the old ladies say that you always take the skins that are peeled from your roots back to root digging ground. You put it back to where it was. That is just like the salmon deal that we were talking about yesterday where the salmon asked that they return to the place they were born so they can feed their youth and thus provide a future for their coming generations. It is the same thing with the roots. You don’t bring them home, peel them and then just throw the peels in the garbage. You are supposed to take it back out and return it back to its soil.