Thought this might be of interest - Mike Soja

Wall Street Journal
August 29, 2003
PAGE ONE

Maine Indian Tribe Dips Back In To Craft of Birch-Bark Canoes

By ROBERT TOMSHO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

INDIAN ISLAND, Maine -- Watched by a dozen members of the Penobscot
Indian tribe, Steve Cayard plunged a pair of tongs into a steaming vat
of boiling water and extracted a 4-foot-long cedar slat.

"You need to cook them for about 10 minutes," he said. Mr. Cayard
knelt on the steaming board and slowly pulled its ends up to form a
wide, U-shape -- perfect for a canoe rib.

Mr. Cayard, a white man with long interest in Indian culture, was
hired last year to help the Penobscot tribe revive a lost art form:
making birch-bark canoes. The Penobscots once were among the
most-famed builders of canoes on the East Coast, using the graceful
craft to ply the local rivers and bays. After a trip here in 1857,
Henry David Thoreau praised their boats as "neat and strong," adding
that they were the envy of white men who saw them.

But the Penobscots are believed to have last made bark canoes in 1920,
when several tribal craftsmen were invited to paddle to Plymouth,
Mass., to take part in the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing.

These days, about 500 of the tribe's 2,100 members live here in the
small homes and house trailers of Indian Island, a wooded 360-acre
reservation in the middle of the Penobscot River, just across from Old
Town, Maine.

In a community where the median household income is only about $20,000
a year, the canoe-making venture has elicited mixed emotions. Some
dismiss it as frivolous, while others grumble about relying on Mr.
Cayard. "Just the fact that he is a non-Indian is why," says Richard
Hamilton, a former Penobscot chief.

But Barry Dana, the tribe's current leader, maintains that, with no
skilled Indian available, Mr. Cayard's presence is crucial to a
cultural revival he promised when he was elected chief three years
ago. "If there are still some tribal members uncomfortable with it,
then so be it," the 44-year-old chief says. A few tribal leaders also
hope some much-needed jobs might come from the effort by turning
canoe-making into a commercial venture.

With money from a $5,000 state grant, Mr. Cayard was hired last summer
to conduct his first three-week workshop on Indian Island. The tribe
has since landed another $100,000 in federal grants to film the
canoe-making process and look into whether there is a viable market
for high-end canoes handcrafted by the tribe. "It's just a privilege
to know these people," says Mr. Cayard, who wears his brown hair in a
long ponytail. "It's their culture, really, that my skills come from."

Mr. Cayard, 47, abandoned the conventions of his own culture long ago.
The son of Quaker college professors from Wheeling, W.Va., he became
enthralled with Indian traditions at 16, when his father gave him a
book about bark canoes. Mr. Cayard dropped out of high school and made
his way to rural New England. There, he worked planting trees and
picking apples while teaching himself to hunt, tan hides and build
canoes.

By the mid-1980s, he'd moved his family into a remote home in
Wellington, Maine, that was powered by solar panels and heated by wood
that he chopped himself. Mr. Cayard continued perfecting his craft by
examining old canoes in museums and private collections. These days,
his canoes have decorative bark inlays and price tags of $10,000 or
more.

In 1989, Mr. Cayard's daughter, then 9, visited the Indian Island
elementary school as part of a school exchange program. Mr. Dana, the
tribe's future chief, was teaching a class there in Indian culture. He
was stunned by how much Amber Cayard knew about the Penobscots and
asked to meet her father after learning he made Indian-style canoes.
"Growing up on the reservation, I saw no one with a birch-bark canoe,"
says Mr. Dana, who grew up paddling factory-made boats.

In a way, the fame of the Penobscot canoes may have contributed to
their demise. Old Town Canoe Co., located just across the river from
Indian Island, started making wood and canvas canoes modeled after
those of the tribe in 1898. By 1910, when Old Town Canoe and rivals
churned out 3,500 craft, the town of Old Town boasted it was "the
canoe center of the world."

Over the years, hundreds of Penobscot men worked at the factories,
putting them in daily contact with modern watercraft far simpler to
acquire and maintain. "It was just easier to buy them than to make
them," says Mr. Hamilton, the former chief. Eventually, canoe-building
just withered away, along with other traditional crafts such as
basket-making.

Even for a skilled craftsman, building a bark canoe can involve more
than 400 hours of meticulous labor. Harvesting the canoe's outer skin
means searching the backwoods for a birch roughly 18 inches in
diameter and with a long expanse of clear bark. After soaking, the
bark is sewn into the rough shape of a canoe and its interior is lined
with thin planks made from cedar logs that are hand-split and planed
to the proper thickness. The rounded inner ribs that press the
planking tight against the bark must be carved and bent into shape.

Then there is the job of searching for the roots of black spruce
trees, which are split into thin strips and used to lash the bark to
the canoe's frame. It's sweaty, miserable work. The black spruce is
often found in moist, peaty bogs full of mosquitoes and stinging black
flies. Last year, some younger Penobscots journeyed with Mr. Cayard to
dig for spruce roots -- and promptly quit the canoe seminar.

On a recent steaming August morning, Mr. Cayard led a group of 12
Penobscots into a woodland bog. They soon fell to their knees and
began to scrape at the black mud below them with knives, sticks and
bare hands.

"I don't know if I can tell a black spruce from a red spruce from a
white spruce," said Nicholas Dow, the tribe's economic-development
director, as he swatted at bugs.

Looking up from his own spot in the mud, Mr. Cayard advised that the
interior of the black spruce root is pinkish, with a thin red coating.
"Scratch the bark," he said, while slowly pulling up a root of his
own.

By the end of the morning, they gathered 1,000 feet, enough for one
canoe. The tribe expects to complete that canoe any day now. While
last summer's session also produced a canoe, its skin cracked from
stern to bow after one enthusiastic builder took the craft from its
warm storage room into subzero weather last winter, aiming to show it
off at a local school. Although Penobscots traditionally kept their
canoes outside in the winter, they didn't typically expose them to
such rapid changes in temperature.

Still, if Mr. Cayard's efforts never spawn a single job, some members
of the tribe have been inspired. Sitting in his garage on a recent
afternoon, retired telephone technician and tribal elder Butch
Phillips, 63, fussed over the nearly completed bark canoe he had
dreamed of building for years. Mr. Phillips, who has taken Mr.
Cayard's class both years it has been offered, said he felt
reconnected with what was once a proud part of life for his ancestors,
and reckons he will burn tobacco or make some other traditional
offering when he first puts his boat into the river. Part of his
thanks will be for Mr. Cayard. "We consider him a friend of the
tribe," he said.

Write to Robert Tomsho at 2

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Updated August 29, 2003

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