A Minnesota School Teaches Apocalypse-Proof Crafts and Cooking

A Minnesota School Teaches Apocalypse-Proof Crafts and Cooking

Concerns about climate change, food safety, and a need to connect with traditional crafts entice students to this small school in Grand Marais.

Over the past two decades there’s been a steady rise in popularity of homesteading and learning how to make food from scratch — a trend that could be attributed to locavore movement, growing awareness and fears concerning climate change, or even the rise of tradwife influencers making chewing gum from scratch in pressed linen dresses. Whatever the reason, North House’s culinary classes — ranging from apple cider craft to Baltic cooking — appeal to those people looking to uplevel their traditional foodways.

Program director Jessa Frost says the artisan bread-making classes are among the most popular, as well as classes in whole-animal butchering. “There’s a million YouTube videos and you can buy all of the cookbooks, but there’s a difference between watching and having a really skilled person watch you and give you feedback,” Frost says. “That is the reason that people come to this little town at the end of the road to spend time learning here.”

Scott Graden says he feels that people are trying to go back to a time when working outdoors was normal. “North House is in that retractive zone where people are starting to prize what I loosely coined ‘apocalyptic skills,’” he says.

Apocalyptic skills were what attracted me to North House. I’m slightly consumed with the end of our world, and more importantly, how we’ll feed and clothe ourselves when that happens. I left with a host of new skills and a greater confidence in my ability to survive.

As the name suggests, the school focuses on northern cultures, which in the context of Minnesota, can imply Scandinavian — traditions from countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. And to be fair, at North House, the dominant culture is northern European and U.S. folk schools generally seem to be overwhelmingly white in both leadership and attendance, begging the question of just how accessible these survival skills are for the Black and brown people who are most threatened by environmental change. At North House, there is some diversity and conversation about what it means to be a northern culture across borders and ethnicity, resulting in a circumpolar approach that includes northern Japanese cultural traditions like koji fermentation, baking and art from Russia, and leather, basketmaking, and beading traditions from the Ojibwe and Cree people to whom the land North House sits on belongs. “Every country has a North, right?” says Frost. “So we focus on the connection to material and to cultures that have existed in the landscape that we associate with the North.”

Marcie McIntire, of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, learned beadwork from her mother and teaches Anishinaabe-style moccasin and mitten sewing and beading classes at North House. “It’s utilitarian art,” McIntire says. “We live in a really cold climate. Back in the day, we used to have six months of winter. And even the summers here can be cold. So, I’m teaching life-saving skills to protect ourselves from the climate.”

Within that ecosystem, I began to understand the importance of craft in northern environments. Everything slowed down for me, even though the days were filled with the hard, stinking labor of dealing with sheep flesh. I spent my days immersed in hands-on learning, my afternoons crocheting and gazing out onto Lake Superior or going with classmates to the Fisherman’s Daughter to get fish and chips, and my evenings cooking in the cabin I’d rented for the week, tending to the fire.

McIntire says the intensity of the projects and the slowness they require to complete them is part of the beauty. “You work for hours and hours, and then you only have a small object to show for it. But what motivates you to keep going is seeing that finished product, and getting satisfaction from doing something you like to do.”

A Mini Guide to Grand Marais

Instructor Kim Ode, former baking columnist at the Star Tribune and author of Rhubarb Renaissance, feels some of the interest in baking classes — lamination is another highly sought after course — is due to a loss of traditional skills. “There’s been talk over the years of this lost generation of bakers that appeared when more women began working outside of the home, [and] convenience foods became available,” she says. “So I think people are rediscovering skills, but sometimes those influences have also contributed to a sense of anxiety about baking.” Her classes, she says, aim to soothe that anxiety with in-person, tactile, multi-day immersion.

We had a lot of downtime as we went through the different steps of hide tanning, and we’d often walk around the school, picking up smaller skills as we went — carving spoons, crocheting, and basketmaking. We did side projects, using natural dyes on the leather we’d made, spinning and wet-felting raw wool, and making fish leather.

A couple times a week, we had fika — a Swedish tradition where everyone takes a break in the middle of the day for coffee with pastries provided by local Crosby Bakery. “In Sweden, when I’ve been there, it’s like a sacred moment during the day,” says Frost. “You pause what you’re doing and walk away from your work. The Swedes always emphasize that you’re not supposed to be talking about work — you’re supposed to just be chatting about your lives. It’s how they build a rich social fabric.”

At North House, fika is a time to meet other instructors and students, hear about their projects and lives, and feel in general more incorporated into the community of the folk school and the town of Grand Marais. With a population of 1,321 people, everyone here knows everyone, for better or for worse. Fika for me was a time of overhearing town and school gossip, and at one moment, a hushed conversation about grabbing some raw milk after class, in the tone of conspirators organizing a drug deal.

Ode says students “really want to know that they had a hand in what they’re gonna eat or serve their family.” Frost says she believes growing distrust of the food systems and climate anxiety pushes some students to come to North House. “I think of people’s grief around the way that our lives are changing in Minnesota, where there isn’t snow like there once was or it doesn’t get as cold as it used to. People are reckoning with that and feel a desire to build community and be connected through skills and artistic practices that have sustained us through centuries.”

But at North House, the desire to know about every step of the process stems as much from joy as it does from anxiety — and I’d venture to say it’s more joyous than not, a celebration of ingredients and processes.

Frost says many North House students are also interested in the classes that delve deep into one ingredient, like chef Scott Graden’s wildly popular All Things Cardamom class. Graden, the chef behind Scandinavian American New Scenic Café in Duluth, uses the class as an opportunity to delve into the history of cardamom — a South Asian spice that, due to colonial trade, has a heavy presence in Scandinavian, and Central and Eastern European cuisines. There are some theories that posit the spices became common in Scandinavian countries due to the Vikings or the rule of the Moors in Southern Europe, as Graden explained when I ask his thoughts on the spice’s history. However, what’s certain is that cardamom was a luxury spice in Europe by the Middle Ages and became even more common by the Renaissance and the colonial period with popularity peaking when prices dropped after the Dutch gained colonial control of the spice trade in South Asia.

Students spend an entire weekend with Graden amid the smell of cardamom, making cake, muffins, and bread, shortbread cookies, and kardemummabullar, knotted Swedish cardamom buns topped with lots of sugar, but do not learn how to make cardamom in any South Asian dishes, which while avoiding appropriation, left me feeling like much of the context of the spice itself was lost.

North House does, however, make an effort to represent Indigenous culture through McIntire’s classes and a working relationship with the nearby Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. In the past, basket maker and Ojibwe language teacher Greg Biskakone Johnson (Anishinaabe) has taught a hide-tanning class, using the brains of the deer — a traditional method among many Indigenous cultures. In June, he taught a class on giizhik, the northern White Cedar, where students learn about processing, cutting, dyeing, and weaving material for large cedar mats.

North House classes can be pricey, but the school tries to keep it accessible with discounts for locals, scholarships, and the scholarship can sometimes include a small stipend to defray some of the expense of coming and staying in Grand Marais. A two-week work study program allows folks to earn toward tuition while staying with a local instructor. “It’s a really great way to be able to get into class and get a feel for the community,” Frost says. They also have paid internships and Artisan Development Programs. As Frost says, “At North House, we believe that craft should be for everyone.”

I left Grand Marais and North House with a lot more skills than when I arrived. And while I’m not sure if I’ll be tanning sheep hides in my Chicago backyard anytime soon, I was surprised that I started my experience wanting to be anywhere but that stinky room full of dead flesh, but since I left, all I’ve wanted is to figure out the logistics of how I can keep tanning hides and being more sustainable in my consumption of animal products. And that, I think, is the true genius of North House.