In A Reindeer Career, Rushton features Davaajav, a reindeer herder who lives in Mongolia.
He gives the following prompts to accompany this video:
“Try to imagine at least five possible futures for Davaajav and his family. What is in the video, or in other research you do on reindeer (also called caribou) that supports each idea for a possible future path?
Are there jobs in your community that seem to have fewer and fewer people doing them? Do jobs have life spans?”
I found this video interesting because I’ve never heard of a reindeer herder. Students would find this intriguing also. I didn’t know there was anyone who did that kind of work. I wonder if some of their future jobs could be to sell reindeer fiber and reindeer milk (what healthy qualities does reindeer milk have?).
Since I like to knit and spin yarn, I am very interested in animal fiber. I know that people spin muskox and bison fiber and I’ve spun yarn from yak and camel but I wasn’t sure about reindeer so I did some research. I found an etsy shop that sells reindeer yarn: Alaska Natural Fibers.
Here is their description of reindeer fiber and yarn:
“But, you say, isn’t reindeer hair thick and stiff? Not all of it.
The down is fine and soft but difficult to extract and delicate to handle. We separate the hollow hair from the fine down and what is left is beautiful.
Reindeer are 90% covered with hollow, stiff, white hairs. Snuggled in-between that floatation and heat-trapping layer is a very fine springy and short down fiber. In a similar way that the muskoxen grow and shed a winter undercoat of qivuit, the reindeer grow an entire winter protection layer and shed it in the spring. Reindeer shed everything down to the skin - naked! Muskoxen don’t shed their long protective fibers.
Since reindeer shed their coat entirely every spring, this makes gathering the fiber from a herd quite arduous as handlers are picking it up off the ground and out of fields.
By micron count, the reindeer undercoat is as fine as qivuit but grows in kinky inch long spirals and is an extremely soft down. Magnified the fibers resemble a tightly coiled spring nestled between long, rigid toothpicks.
Reindeer processes into a lighter and airier fiber, yet, at 100% it’s sticky like Velcro so needs blending to calm it down and get it through our milling machines.
We consider carefully when adding another animal wool to smooth the reindeer for processing. This blend has merino from Unalaska, Alaska on the Aleutian chain.
With handling and wear a reindeer garment just gets lovelier for it keeps its integrity and with time and handling, it blooms a halo of fine mist.”
Please check out the video and think of other prompts you might come up with. Please share.
“But, you say, isn’t reindeer hair thick and stiff? Not all of it.
The down is fine and soft but difficult to extract and delicate to handle. We separate the hollow hair from the fine down and what is left is beautiful.
Reindeer are 90% covered with hollow, stiff, white hairs. Snuggled in-between that floatation and heat-trapping layer is a very fine springy and short down fiber. In a similar way that the muskoxen grow and shed a winter undercoat of qivuit, the reindeer grow an entire winter protection layer and shed it in the spring. Reindeer shed everything down to the skin - naked! Muskoxen don’t shed their long protective fibers.
Since reindeer shed their coat entirely every spring, this makes gathering the fiber from a herd quite arduous as handlers are picking it up off the ground and out of fields.
By micron count, the reindeer undercoat is as fine as qivuit but grows in kinky inch long spirals and is an extremely soft down. Magnified the fibers resemble a tightly coiled spring nestled between long, rigid toothpicks.
Reindeer processes into a lighter and airier fiber, yet, at 100% it’s sticky like Velcro so needs blending to calm it down and get it through our milling machines.
We consider carefully when adding another animal wool to smooth the reindeer for processing. This blend has merino from Unalaska, Alaska on the Aleutian chain.
With handling and wear a reindeer garment just gets lovelier for it keeps its integrity and with time and handling, it blooms a halo of fine mist.”
Please check out the video and think of other prompts you might come up with. Please share.
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