Ramy Brooks had no idea that one day he would use his latent artistic skills to become the creator of some of the most elegant jewelry in the Athabaskan and Yupik traditions.

And among other things, he uses moose horns as his medium to create wearable art that is lovely, compelling and is reflective of his Native Alaskan heritage.

It’s a far cry his background in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear power program, his having earned an engineering degree and his work on the Alaska Pipeline.

"I guess I never envisioned myself making jewelry,” said Brooks, of Fairbanks, whose items are available on voyij.com "I started by working on finished birch coasters. I started designing them and working with them and putting a double epoxy seal on them so that they don’t absorb water. Then I started drawing and I tried to use a laser cutter.”

It was a confluence of events that got Brooks into jewelry making. First, he and his wife agreed that he would work to support the family while she began a career writing novels. Then came a few injuries that forced him out of work on the pipeline for a time.

"I didn’t think I would be doing anything like this,” he said. "I was trying to do something to support my wife’s blog and her dream of writing.”

Jewelry making seemed like a natural course, especially after his artist sister took a look at some of his work.

"My sister saw my ink drawing on birch, and she said, ‘you should try to etch it on moose antlers’ so, I tried it and had the time and I made it a full-time job,” he said. "That’s how I came up with doing it on moose antlers and it worked very well.

"I also started playing around with India inks and berries, blueberries and bush cranberries and I began exploring making things in the Athabaskan and Yupikl heritage, trying to incorporate that into my art.

"I’m really having fun with the colors, the berries, because you can get such a wide range of hues. I made a few pairs of earrings, and I had twenty other pieces, and I went to a show with my sister, and they bought everything I had.”

Moose antlers, as it turns out, are a perfect medium for Brooks’s jewelry.

"I don’t wear earrings myself, but my wife does, and she always says, ‘make them light, don’t make them too heavy,’” he said. "But moose is much lighter than people expect it to be.”

Brooks grew up on the Yukon River and lived a subsistence lifestyle, hunting and fishing, berry picking and trapping. The village where he grew up was largely inaccessible from the outside world, and that is where Brooks came to appreciate beauty of Alaska and Athabaskan culture. His grandfather was Athabaskan, and his grandmother was Yupik, and those influences are part of his tradition.

He also remembers parts of the Alaskan landscape including the lush tones of fire weed that grew after forest fires.

"There was incredible beauty all around us,” he said. "And the Athabaskan traditions and culture were part of my background. This lets me share part of our culture and our lifestyle.”

All of that is wrapped into Brook’s jewelry. In fact, it’s unfair to call it just jewelry. It’s art. Each of his pieces takes two to seven hours to complete, depending on their complexity.

"As I’m making it, I let it take shape itself, and in the process as I finish each piece, I try to put it together with the semi-precious stone beads that I use and let it kind of speak to whatever it’s reminding me of,” he said. "I try to envision the best colors and the best combinations, to use the vision it’s given me.”

Because of his lifestyle as a child, Brooks said that his fish pieces mean the most to him.

"I make ulu pieces with porcupine quills and charms,” he said. "I’ve also learned to do my own wire rapping to give the pieces a more finished look. Start to finish I cut the antler, I add the porcupine quills, dye the antler and picking the berries.”

If his success comes as a surprise even to him, Brooks couldn’t be more delighted.

"It’s gratifying,” Brooks said. "If you had talked to me a year-and-a-half ago about making jewelry I wouldn’t have believed you. It’s gratifying because it gave me something to do when I was recovering from elbow surgery, then shoulder surgery. Now, I’m just working on making the art nicer and I’m getting better as I go along. It’s exciting to share this with people.”

Ramy Brooks’s art can be found at voyij.com.