During the month of May, I was facilitating a traditional birch bark canoe building workshop from beginning to end in Oneida, near Green Bay Wisconsin. The Project was hosted by the Woodland Indian Art Centre and funded by Ontario Arts Council. The people were awesome and I felt at right at home. They greeted me with a Coming out of the Woods ceremony, a traditional greeting that dates back centuries. We got to work pretty quickly, teaching about the plants, the medicines they carry and, of course, everything that has to do with building a birch bark canoe from the ground up.
Step 1,Get the bark. Harvesting birch bark from a live tree, when done with care and respect does not harm the tree. This is what is shown here. I don’t usually get a chance to show workshop participants this part of the process but the stars lined up for us this time and we were able to literally build the canoe from the ground up today. The trick is to score the bark carefully so that only the old bark is cut. Then we gently separate it from the new bark. It is a tedious and labour intensive process that takes several days but it is well worth it trouble because we are not killing any trees. We can only harvest this way twice a year, when the sap is running and we were lucky that it was running just when we needed birch bark.
I also took community members out to collect spruce resin to make the pitch needed to seal the seams of the canoe and any parts that have gaps or tears. Usua;;y we mix the spruce gum with bear grease and some hardwood ash; when melted it looks like tar but it is far more flexible and less likely to crack when it gets cold so it is a superior choice for canoes. Once we had our 3 main ingredients we were ready to get down to business. The harvesting takes nearly as long as the actual construction does Tune in next week for the pics from the actual build.
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