By day, Merna Lomack Wharton works a nine-to-five office job for the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. But at home, in her little second-floor apartment in Anchorage, she spends hours cleaning and prepping the pelts of arctic ground squirrels for the fancy parkas she’s becoming known for.
On a sunny day in mid-June, there’s a whole box of pelts next to Wharton on a couch in her living room. She sits there, a day after cleaning them with dish soap, rolling and softening the dry and yellowish, papery squirrel skins between her hands. It takes at least 100 squirrel hides to make a parka, and Wharton cleans and tans the hides herself. She is patient and thoughtful, and she says that the investment is worth it. She remembers her very first parka; her mother made it for her.
“If you put on a traditional garment, for the first time for me, when I did that, it was wintertime and I was like, ‘This is mine… this is for me.’ And my mom said, ‘Yeah,’” said Wharton.
The memory makes her smile.
Wharton grew up in Akiachak. Her first language is Yugtun, the Indigenous Yup’ik language spoken widely across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Sometimes she can’t find an English adjective to explain how she feels, like when she describes what it feels like to wear a squirrel skin parka: “Takaryuk is out of respect. And shy.”
Wharton said that every now and then she wore the parka her mother made for her, in particular when she traveled by snowmachine to Bethel.
“And that was the first time I wore it. It was so warm. I didn't want to wear any other layers but a T-shirt,” Wharton laughed.
Wharton first learned to sew as a little kid, both from her mother and also at school in the springtime.
“The sun comes out and you get lazy. And so the school knew that kids are not doing well academically when the weather is nice and the snow is melting. And so they created sewing times in the springtime,” Wharton recalled. “And that's when I learned some words related to sewing.”
“Mingqeq, [to sew], akngirnailitaq, for thimble. Lirqiq means to cut and measure and prepare the material for sewing” Wharton said.
When Wharton first started sewing animal skins, it was with small projects. “At first I used to do a little bit, like fur hats or something small, and I got bored,” she said.
So Wharton turned to the parka her mother had made in the 1990s. “She replicated my great-grandmother's parka. And so I thought, ‘If I have that, I can copy it like a pattern.’ But I didn't have funding. I didn't know where to go,” Wharton said.
Squirrel skin parkas are very expensive to make. In 2017, Wharton applied for a grant to finance a parka she made for one of her two daughters.
“It feels like it's part of my identity. As a Yup’ik woman, you have to keep your family warm. So my goal was to make a parka for my daughter, and to remind her that she is also Yup’ik. She's half Yup’ik, half Caucasian. And I made them both parkas – two different styles,” Wharton explained.
Today, Wharton has a closet full of parkas, running in size from toddler to adult. She heads down the hallway into her little back bedroom where a row of garment bags hangs. She hefts them out and spreads them across the floor. There are other regalia too: a wolfskin hat and piluguqs, or traditional Yup’ik seal skin boots.
Wharton said that her ancestors knew squirrel skin was a great material to use because it’s water resistant, can last for a long time, is durable, and is easy to wear. Now that she’s figured out how to make parkas from the skins, Wharton has started adding her own signature touches using modern materials like beads and colored yarn. But she’s cautious about how much she embellishes the regalia.
“Ten percent is what I slightly change, maybe. I feel like if I go out of tradition then it feels out of place,” Wharton said. She said that she’s not bothered if other designers and artists tweak their own designs. “How they design their things, it's creativity that should be used, you know? Something free that you can do.”
Wharton is also careful about how she presents her work and who wears it. She said that it carries too much history for just anyone to wear it, and she said that the work is invaluable.
“They're more important for me that I don't want to put money on them,” Wharton said. “Yeah, it's art,” she said. “And it's also family passed down designs… [and] whatever you add, it comes from the family.”
Wharton’s work is featured in "The Flying Parka," a book published last year that celebrates parkas just like the ones she makes. Two of her parkas will travel Alaska this summer for display in Homer, Anchorage, and Nome.
This reporting was made possible through the CIRI Foundation’s Journey to What Matters grant program.
*Correction: This story originally reported that Merna Wharton works for the United States Bureau of Land Management. Wharton works for the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs.
