Another great video from the National Film Board of Canada archive. Almost 58 minutes of birch bark canoe building.
This documentary shows how a canoe is built the old way. César Newashish, a 67-year-old Attikamek of the Manawan Reserve north of Montreal, uses only birchbark, cedar splints, spruce roots and gum. Building a canoe solely from the materials that the forest provides may become a lost art, even among the Native peoples whose traditional craft it is. The film is without commentary but text frames appear on the screen in Cree, French and English.
Action rqeuires knowledge, and now I can act!
It’s amazing that there are still people that possess such skills and craftsmanship. I consider myself a woodsman and a carpenter but it would severely test my skills to take on such a project. Is he using wood ash in hot water to make the pieces pliable? What type of wood ash works best? Thank you for sharing this and I look forward to others. Moose.
I know how you feel Moose. The skills used by one guy to make this are amazing and learnt from a lifetime of experience which we’re hard pushed these days to fit in with all the other stuff we do!
I’ll have to watch it again to answer the specific question about wood ash in hot water. I’ve used just plain old hot water before to make both wood and birch bark pliable before working them so not sure what the advantage of adding wood ash is for this purpose. Anyhow, I’ll take another look when I have a spare few minutes and see if I know