|
From Ashland Daily Press
by Rick Olivo
Chunks of wood and sawdust flew through the air of a Madeline Island park last week as Kevin Finney toiled with an axe-like tool called an adz to hollow out an enormous white pine log.
Such work routinely was done on the island by Native peoples for centuries. But when Finney and fellow craftsman Frank Sprague started their work earlier this month, it might have been the first time in 167 years that a dugout canoe was handcrafted in the Apostles.
Most people are familiar with the birch bark canoes used by both Indians and European fur traders in the Great Lakes, but less familiar are dugout canoes that were common among the Ojibwe people.
“We have looked through the old records, but we can find no evidence that any dugout canoes have been made here since 1854,” said Sprague, a member of the Gun Lake Band of Potawatomi Indians.
He and Finney are specialists in the preservation of Native American crafts. In the past they have created lacrosse sticks, handcrafted spoons for maple sugaring and pieces of Native history, including an elm bark lodge for the Prairie Island Indian community in Minnesota.
“They didn’t have a structure like the ones they used to live in. There hasn’t been one there for over 160 years,” Sprague said.
The creation of the lodge gave the community, members of the Lakota Nation, a connection with what had been a lost part of their history.
The construction of dugout canoes will have similar meaning to the Ojibwe people of the Apostle Islands region, said Sprague.
The project began when Finney brought a dugout canoe the two had built to the celebration of Treaty Day on the island. A number of residents admired the craft and someone suggested recreating history on Madeline Island.
Paul DeMain, the retired publisher of News From Indian Country, now operates Native American Educational Technologies, a non-profit involved in cultural revival, environmental and clean water advocacy.
“People said it would be neat to have a canoe project, so I said, ‘Well, let me see what I can do,’” he said.
DeMain obtained funding from the Honor the Earth and Indigo Girls funds and received donations from the La Pointe Center for the Arts, the Akiing Cultural Project and island residents, businesses and the town of La Pointe. A total of nearly $10,000 was raised for the effort.
Sprague said the next problem was to find a large enough pine log, free of knots and other imperfections. Eventually, a deal was made for two massive white pine logs from a landowner in Red Lake, Minn., in exchange for a large, vintage copper pot.
The logs were trailered to a small park near the Madeline Island Indian Cemetery, where the process of converting a rough-hewn log into a graceful canoe began. The work is expected to take about two weeks with help from volunteers who have stopped by to be part of the effort.
Construction of their first dugout canoe was a process of trial and error for Sprague and Finney. It involved exhaustive historical research, painstaking measurement of an existing historical dugout canoe and sometimes just plain intuition.
“It’s very much a chess game,” said Finney. “The canoe will change shape, not only based on the carving, but the way it’s treated.”
Part of that treatment involves filling the nearly finished canoe with hot rocks, and exposing the outside to heat, to draw sap outwards. When it cools, the sap solidifies and protects the canoe from cracking. Canoe-builders typically learned such techniques from earlier generations, but Sprague and Finney have had to research and make it up as they went.
“How to build a dugout wasn’t something that was passed down to us,” Sprague said. “We were told that we didn’t need this knowledge. When I was growing up I was also told that I didn’t need the language, either.”
Sprague said a lot of his motivation in recreating the things of daily life that have been lost by Indian peoples was to ensure that what was once theirs physically and spiritually is returned to them.
“It has been a long struggle for us. It is not our ancestors’ fault for not teaching us, but I do believe that it is our responsibility to study, read and learn how to do these things,” he said.
That also involves educating visitors about dugout canoes and how they were sunk in mud of a lake or river bottom to protect them over the winter. The boats would be retrieved in spring. Dugout canoes have been recovered intact after being submerged for hundreds or even thousands of years, Sprague said.
The project site has had many visitors, including members of both the Red Cliff and Bad River tribes, anxious to see the progress on the watercraft used by their ancestors. Kids from the Madeline Island summer recreation program also stopped recently.
“We are lucky that the canoe builders are here right now and are able to teach us about the important history of the Island,” said group leader Zachery Whitaker. “It makes me really glad to see this going on.”
When completed, one of the canoes will be kept by the builders while the other will remain on Madeline Island.
| 
