An Ontario man eyeing a pair of painstakingly beaded, handcrafted moccasins which took an Anishinaabe artisan weeks to make, was kind of hoping they would be cheaper to buy.
“They are stunning but man, three hundred bucks?” said Henry Tusara, who spotted the moccasins at a sale in the Toronto Friendship Center.
“I thought maybe they would be like thirty or forty bucks— tops.”
Tusara said he would think about buying the moccasins—made with smoke tanned moose hide that takes days to prepare—as he left the center but opted instead to pay more than $200 for a pair of sneakers that cost just a few dollars to manufacture overseas, the profit going to corporations and not an Indigenous artist.
