Birchbark Traditions with Barry Dana, Penobscot

Visual: A panning shot of birchbark objects in a museum case. A birchbark canoe sits in the back of the case. A title card reads “Barry Dana, Penobscot, Birchbark Traditions, Wabanaki Gallery”. The video then transitions to focus on a man standing in the museum next to a small birchbark structure with a rounded top. Next to the structure is a standing sign reading “Birchbark Wigwam” with explanatory text. The man has long gray hair pulled back into a low tail and wears tan cargo pants and a flannel shirt. He speaks to the camera, moving and gesturing with his words.

Voice of Barry Dana: *Speaking Penobscot*

I’m from the Penobscot Nation. I’m 66 years old and still a student of my culture, and that is a journey that has been rewarding but never ending. The reason is Native people today [are] trying to revitalize the knowledge that our ancestors took for granted, which is a good thing, because that was their lifestyle, got eroded, you know, by colonization. So we’ve had a very long period of being colonized for the sake of survival. So, you can’t fault anyone for that. They had to survive. And I am a result of those survivors.

Growing up on the reservation gave me an opportunity to sit with elders who really did know past culture. They may not have been living it at the time, but they knew about it. Stories like my grandmother talking about going upriver every summer to fish camp. And I’d say, “Well, what was fish camp?” You know, “What do you mean, fish camp?” And she would explain it.

Well, we didn’t live like that at that time. We were eating government food and, you know, still in somewhat of a survival mode. But it got me on a journey to want to learn, from elders, what they knew. So, I sort of, stepped out of the traditional rez kid, playing baseball and basketball and running around the rez. Even though I did all that, if I happened to run past my grandmother’s house, she’d pretty much open the door and yank me in, *laughing* and then I’d have to sit down for a two-hour lesson. And I got used to that, and I actually got to look forward to it. So, I spent time learning language from elders and basketmaking, and things of that nature.

My uncle grabbed me, also, and threw me in a bow of a canoe and pointed the canoe downriver in a 22-mile canoe race, which was all whitewater, and I never been in whitewater. And that was that was my beginning of becoming connected to canoes.

Growing up on the reservation, I always saw Native people canoeing the river. One in particular was Nick Ranco. He was really old when I was a kid, and he would paddle around the island in a canvas covered canoe. Silently. I would be fishing, and he’d go by and I strained to listen to his paddle and there was no noise at all. I thought, wow, he’s amazing.

So, as it turns out, I was here making this wigwam for the University as an educational tool, and a professor came here and gave me an article about Nick Ranco; the time he went to New York and participated in the national canoeing championships. It was a solo division, and there were 500 people signed up. Each person raced a person, and the winner would go on to the winner’s bracket. And as the week thinned out, Nick noticed another paddler that he says, I’ll probably be in the championship against that guy.

So, they lined… and it turned out to be that; they lined up at the championship race at the end of the week, Nick against this guy that he recognized as a great paddler, and they went off out to the buoy, turned around and came back. At the buoy the fellow said, “Hey brother!” Well, Nick, used it as that opportunity to jump over the guy’s wake and beat him by one stroke. Turns out that was Nick’s brother, from the Penobscot Nation, who had left for New York 15 years earlier.

So when you grow up hearing stories like this, which I did, it becomes part of the fabric of who you are, your identity, that, even though we weren’t paddling birchbark canoes at that time, paddling, being on the river, fishing, catching frogs, turtles, hunting, going up, gathering fiddleheads, going up to gather materials to make stuff, was really deeply embedded in my childhood and in my young adulthood.

So, then I met Madeline Shay, and she was fluent in the language, and she made ash baskets. So, I wanted to learn the language because I was teaching at the reservation school; I was teaching culture, which included language, in all the activities we did. So, I would learn from Madeline. Then I’d go back across the street to the school, and I would download it into the students, whatever she taught me for words that day, or sentences.

But being a basketmaker, she wanted also [for] me to learn basketry. And I said, yeah, well, good… then I get a double. And she said, “If you make baskets, you’ll always have money.” And I thought, well, I’ll make baskets, but I’m not going to be, you know, I’m going to college, I’m going to, I’m going to get a degree in teaching and that’ll be my money. I won’t worry about being an artist. 

But anyway, that’s the life she grew up in. And, you know, if you wanted to feed your kids, you sold a basket, an ash basket. You wanted to put shoes on their feet, you sold an ash basket. You did something from our culture to create your economy, which was basically pennies at that time.

So, years later, she says, “Well, are you making baskets?” And I said, “Yeeeaaaaah.”  She goes, “I’d like to see them.” *Laughing* So I brought her in the birchbark baskets I had been making, and she says, “This isn’t ash.” I said, “No, this is the baskets I want to make.” Because nobody was making birchbark baskets.

Somehow, and I, you know, it kind of escapes me how I got more into birchbark than ash. I grew up listening to people pound ash, talk about ash baskets, making the pack baskets; I actually worked for elders pounding their ash logs for them. But it never sunk into me to be an ash basket maker until I got the idea of making birchbark baskets. And I think it’s because growing up on the rez, you’d see birchbark baskets, and somebody would talk about them, and…

Oh, I got it!  Working at the school, the shop teacher, who was not Native, said we should make a birchbark canoe. He had been reading a book by Henry Vaillancourt, Survival of the Bark Canoe.  I said, well, I’m not going to make a canoe because a white guy writes a book about a canoe, or a white teacher wants to make a canoe. But now you’ve really piqued my interest, now I feel challenged to accomplish something within my culture that has been dormant for far too long; so, I think I’m going to bite on this: let’s make a canoe.

So, we actually traveled out and sat with Henry, the author of that book, for a full day. And I got to see Henry’s operation of making canoes, and he gave me a videotape of people up in, well, what they call Canada: Maniwaki Reservation. And he, Henry had film – he had a film crew – show from start to finish the making of a bark canoe.

And I said, that’s all I need, now I’m started. And from that video, I tried making a canoe and, well, then I found out they left a lot out of… they edited a lot of steps! *Laughing* So, my process was: let’s make another one; let’s make another one; let’s make another one. I ended up, bumping elbows with canoe makers, here and there, and started piecing together how to make a birchbark canoe. And we, finally, had a project on the reservation where we made a birchbark canoe.

Not for the sake of sitting behind glass; not for the sake of selling it; but for the sake of revival of a tradition that was more than making a canoe. It was reuniting a community around a tradition that was deeply embedded in our genetics. It just resonated. The making of that canoe on the rez brought the entire community out. And on the day it was finished, we had a huge ceremony and launched it in the river. And the very next day we paddled it north upriver to Katahdin. That’s what a canoe is for.

So, for me, to have knowledge, to revive tradition, it helps if it has a implication in today’s times. What good is it knowing how to make a birchbark wigwam if we don’t live in them? So, it’s like, well… what happens if we don’t know how to make a birchbark wigwam? If you’ve never made a birchbark wigwam, never made a birchbark canoe, birchbark basket; if you’ve never made an ash basket, if you’ve never tanned a deer hide, if you don’t know animal tracks, if you’ve never tracked animals, hunted, if you don’t know your plants, then you become disconnected from nature.

If you’re disconnected from nature and you live a totally modern life, such as we do today, you have no knowledge of how our ancestors did it without all the technology; and are today’s ways actually better than the old ways? The answer is in the proof. How are we doing as a society? How is the health of the Earth?

Native people at one time did not violate our responsibility as stewards of the planet; probably wouldn’t have if we could have! *Laughing* Because it was in our mental framework of who we are. Our traditions actually talked about it. You need to protect life today for future generations to be able to prosper.Making a wigwam does no harm to the Earth. Making a canoe does no harm to the Earth. Making a plastic canoe does extreme harm to the planet. Driving in our vehicles is harmful to the planet, where at one time we paddled up and down the rivers for our transportation.

So, if you’re a Native today and you’re living in these modern times, which you all are, but if you’re connected to your ancestral traditions, you feel as though you’re living somewhat in two worlds; not really, deeply, living in the past, but connected to it. But, without that connection, you would be mindless of the old ways, and you would just simply be, you know, part of today’s society.

I find that although Native peoples all live in a house, they all got their TV, their phones, their vehicles, they go to work, that part of them is – if they’re still connected… And it’s the arts, you know, today we call it “arts”. I don’t necessarily call it art. I don’t, I definitely don’t call it a craft. I call it traditional. My traditions. And it connects me with the past and that connection has to be valuable. And what is that value? It is the value of knowing how to interact with nature, to make things, but for a reason. To respect nature.

If you don’t make a birchbark canoe, you don’t know, you don’t ever realize the harm today’s living is doing to what used to be a forest. We no longer have a forest. We have trees. A forest, an old forest, produces the right bark for a birchbark canoe. Today’s trees, it’s a huge struggle to find a right sheet of bark for a canoe because of deforestation.

Visual: The man now stands with a museum case behind him that displays birchbark objects, including a large birchbark canoe, and carved wooden canoe paddles. He holds his hands clasped behind him and again speaks to the camera, gesturing occasionally with his head.

Voice of Barry Dana: My proposal for the school was: in order to get culture really embedded in our students, let me take them on three-day outings. And I have a primitive camp along the Kennebec River. So let’s take grades 3 through 5 for three days, 6 through 8 for five days. They will camp with me. I will feed them, and they will be immersed in nature. And we will do these things culturally, there, so that they don’t have to stop until they’re finished with their project, be it a basket or whatever.

And so we would take walks, and go get the brown ash, lug it back and make baskets. We would take walks or paddling, the tribe had four canoes that I borrowed; and we would paddle the river, the Kennebec, down and get fiddleheads and come back and cook them for supper that night. So it really gave the students a hands-on connection to their culture. You can’t do that in a building.

So, then life kind of evolved for me. I decided I wanted to take up a leadership position in the tribe and took the office of Chief for four years. And then when that phase ended, the school did not want to return to the outdoor activities. And it’s not their fault, I mean, they had to come up with something while I was not there. So they developed an indoor program that they still use today. Which is good because it focuses on the language, which is something I couldn’t really focus on because I wanted so much… I had so many things to teach that, the language was part of every one of them, but not the focus.

So what do I do with myself? I said, well, what do I really want to do? My entire life I’ve been wanting to… I wanted to be an artist. And of course, art, meaning you want to be a Rembrandt. You want to paint. You want to, you know, even though, Natives are really into wood sculpture, and we made war clubs and canes, that that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I wanted two-dimensional, graphic type artwork, you know, like paintings. So. But I didn’t go to art school. I kind of missed that opportunity. By then I had a family, raising kids, and I still needed to provide a living, so.

But I really went out on a limb, I decided to just be an artist. I decided, well, at the same time, this is really cool, at the same time, Theresa Secord, Penobscot, created an organization to revive ash basketry. And with that she created opportunities here at the University for us to show our work. So I made seven simple birchbark baskets, and they all sold, and I thought “There it is! I’m on my way.” Here I am, a traditional artist making baskets out of birchbark, and I can sell them and make a living. So, from that I’ve made many baskets and have provided for myself and my family a living.

Baskets isn’t necessarily… I always say baskets is the frustrated canoe maker. We make baskets because we really want to make a canoe. Baskets contain the same materials as a birchbark canoe. The container is bark, whereas the canoe is basically a very long birchbark container. But, being long, and having to have people in it, it needs an internal structure. The basket doesn’t need an  internal structure, but it does need a structure at the top called a rim. And that rim would be cedar just like the gunwales of a canoe. To fasten the basket, like the canoe, otherwise it falls apart, you have to sew it together with spruce roots.

So, if I’m not working on a canoe then I’m going to be working on baskets because baskets sell at the show.  The canoe does not sell at the show, but the canoe is my driving… that’s what I really wanted to do. Even though I had made a couple, it was still… I am still in that same my mindset. I want to master the art of making a canoe. I want it to look like this one. Mine, I’d say, are close. All the same materials, but their precision and how they did it without modern tools is fascinating.

And so I’ve been honing my skills, making a canoe, and this summer, along with my cousin and my son-in-law and a few other Wabanaki people, we will be going out, gathering the cedar, and spending the rest of the summer shaping the cedar into the parts for next summer’s getting the bark and putting the canoe together. And I told my cousin, “If we do this canoe, we’re going to paddle it to Katahdin.” She said, “Deal.” *Laughing* So, we’re reviving by actually doing it. You know, culture, for me, has to be hands on, it has to be functional.

Today, you know, Native people are struggling with this idea of cultural preservation. And what seems to work best are the low-lying fruits, things that are easier. So, you can have language in school. People get paid to teach it.  It’s easy to learn. We have we have social gatherings, today they’re called powwows. They’re fun. People eat food, they dance, they see one another, and it, it keeps the people united.

So these are all things that other people are good at organizing. For me, what are my skills? My skills are teaching. It always has been. So I want to make a canoe, but in the process of making that canoe, I almost need someone there to learn it, You know?

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the thinking that “You better pass this down to the next generation.” All right? That’s something I don’t even have to think about. It’s something I’m born with, that intuitive, genetic memory that says “You teach your kids what you know because they’re going to need to know it.” So it’s second nature. So when I have someone tell me, basically, that “You should be teaching this to the next generation”, I just sort of laugh at them, just like, you know, tell me I should eat in the morning too, right? You know?

So, there’s things that I take for granted and I don’t mind doing that, As I said earlier. My ancestors took these things for granted. It was just part of their everyday living. That’s what I want Native people to get back to.

When I taught at the school,  a advisor came up and did a grading of whether or not the grant was being fulfilled. What do you call that? Like a, he was… testing if what I was teaching was working. And at the end of the day, he just smiled and said, “I hope the students don’t take it for granted that they have this opportunity, what they’re learning.” And I said, “I actually hope they do.” And he says, “What do you mean by that?” I said, “Just think about it: If they take building fires without matches for granted, tanning deer hides, making birchbark baskets, picking fiddleheads, if that’s for granted, that means it’s part of their everyday life.” And that’s what I’m after. I want this… only then, when it becomes part of your life, will you truly understand why these things are important and important to protect.

If I want to teach birchbark canoe making, I have to move my tribe and this state towards the idea of letting the trees grow. We have to get back to a mature forest. We don’t have it. So, I have to scour the stream beds, which is where logging cannot happen, there’s supposed to be a buffer, and, and that’s where I’ll find a tree. Further up the hill, away from the cut, I’ll find a lot of stumps where they cut beautiful birch trees that could have made canoes, beautiful cedar that could have made the canoe. And I’m sure the basketmakers say, yeah, they’re cutting the brown ash, so they’re taking our basket material.

If Native people in today’s times need to make a living for ourselves, we need to do these things. We need to have forestry, but we also need that Native value, part of the operating management plan, they call it, and manage it for culture as well. And that’s not happening today.

So, it’s very frustrating to want to preserve things like the canoe, the baskets, the wigwam, having to literally struggle to find the right materials. Because just because you have a birch tree doesn’t mean you’re going to have a canoe. One and a thousand birch trees might be good enough for a canoe. If you take the wrong tree, just because that’s all you have, you’re not making a canoe. I’ve done it. *Laughing* It’s quite the learning process. And the same with baskets, you’ve got to have good material. You’ve got to have the right roots, you have to have the right cedar, and, I just get so sad in seeing a log truck go down the road with some of the best looking cedar that I’ve ever see, nice, straight logs, it’s disheartening.

So my current-day struggle is a wanting to preserve our past so it becomes part of today’s future, so that people take that past and… if you want it preserved, you’ve got to protect the forests. And doing so isn’t just about our selfish needs, but it’s about, you know, all of nature. The animals that live there need diverse ecosystems, which you don’t get if you manage your forests strictly for cutting. Oh, it’s great for moose. I get to go moose hunting and I get my moose every year, sure. But, you know, I want to see more deer there. I want to see rabbits, and I want to see everything that should be there in the numbers that they should be there. Not occasional, one here, one there. But, anyway, it’s a struggle that, again, Native people still operating with that genetic memory of having to survive.

Things today are better. Things today…. We’re not surviving in the sense of “Are we going to eat?” Everybody’s eating. And eating too much, actually. And eating the wrong things, because, again, another thing I do to preserve culture is for my personal benefit, and that’s growing our traditional foods.  We don’t buy any meat. We eat the moose and the deer that I take. We grow our, different varieties of beans, different varieties of corn, and different varieties of squash, one being a typical pumpkin, because that is a traditional food as well. And we grow these and that’s our food.

We do supplement with things that we can’t grow, can’t hunt. But, like, I kind of barter for fish because you got to have fish in your diet. We were fish people at one time. We weren’t just eating red meat. The caribou at the time were hard to get in numbers to feed everybody. But from the ocean, you have millions of fish coming up all spring, all summer, and returning to the ocean in the fall. We were fish people. So that’s part of our culture that we’re missing.

And when you miss something in your diet, then you become deficient. When you’re deficient, your health suffers. And today Native people are probably, per capita, the least healthiest race here in our own homelands. Because we’re still caught up in that essence of survival, and we need to break out of that. And how do we do that? I think we do it by re-learning our traditions.

Visual: The man stands in the same place and he is now holding a large birchbark container. It is squared at the bottom with a slightly narrower, circular opening at the top. It is sewn together with spruce root and the entire surface is covered in intricate, finely-etched images including faces, an earth globe, a moon with the silhouette of a rabbit smoking a pipe, an owl in flight, and a howling wolf. As he turns the basket you can also see double-curve designs on the side. The rim is made of wood and is lashed with spruce root. As he speaks he turns and gestures to the basket. A finger and the thumb of his left hand have been bandaged with what appears to be black electrical tape.

Voice of Barry Dana: So, we have a basket I made. The shape of it is called the bucket. The purpose of it was to store food, dried food. So I talked about the vegetables; we would dry our squash. And, of course, beans, you dry. And the corn was a flint corn, so you would dry that. Well, you had to store it. So you’d store it in birchbark because it’s the material that, literally, is nature resistant. It takes a million years for it to fade back into nature. So it’s a good  material to store food in. But you always have to worry about insects. So, we would store certain plants in here first, put all the meat in, all the food, vegetables, and at the top layer would also have the same plant. The animals I think we worried about most getting in are ants. I don’t know why, but, they just seem to get everywhere. But anyway, the plant repels the ants. So, what’s missing here is a cover. So you’ll see other baskets with a cover.

Visual: An overlay image showing a simple, small birchbark container with an inset cover. The container is sewn with spruce root and lacks etching, but the cover is decorated with a double curve within a circle made with porcupine quill embroidery. The image is then removed, showing the man with the container again. He gestures to the basket as he speaks.

Voice of Barry Dana: This one wasn’t made to store food, it was made to sell, made to make money. And that’s not the driving force when I’m making a basket. I have to sort of separate out for a minute, all right, I’m going to make this basket as if my life depended on it. Then if we sell it, then good, we can make a car payment. *laughter*  So, what I mean by that is when I get into making a basket, it’s just me and the basket.

Now, you’ll see artwork, and this is scraped in. So this bark I gather in like right now, this time of year [early May], you take the bark off the birch tree… Remember, I said a thousand birch trees, you may get one canoe. For a basket like this? 100 trees, you may get one sheet of bark like this *tapping sound as he firmly hits basket with fingers*, good enough to be a quality basket.

So let’s say I found my bark. This time of year [early May]  when you take the bark off, it has this red layer that’s called the red cambium. Don’t… be careful with it! Don’t scratch it. When it’s wet the inner bark will show through if you scrape it. All right, so, when I make the basket I haven’t touched this at all, I don’t want any tools next to it, even though I’m using an awl to make the holes. These are spruce roots. You gotta dig them up from the ground and you have to boil them, get the bark off, and then split them in half and split them in half again, get them nice and, you know, small, so they go through these holes. And that holds the basket together. And this is a cedar rim, that holds the top together. If you took the rim off the basket would just fall apart.

Where I shined as an artist, though, I had to bring my art into it, was these etchings. So you get the bark wet, then you have a knife and you scrape away the red cambium to reveal the inner color underneath, which is lighter. So even though this time of year the bark has this red cambium, that doesn’t mean the contrast is of a quality to do artwork. I could make a basket just like this, but if I scrape it, you don’t see the underneath because the contrast is not there.

So when I’m out in the woods and I know I’m gathering a bark for basket, I’ll take a little sample piece and I’ll scrape it. And if it looks like this, nice contrast, I take the bark, so long as the rest of it is quality, which is… There are eyes in the bark, the little lines that run up and down. That’s how the bark breathes. It releases, oxygen during the cooler hours, I think. But anyway, they’re called eyes or lentils. And if they’re if they’re really wide, it’s not good bark; it’ll crack. If they’re all connected together, it’ll crack. So I only take bark that lends itself to a functional basket or a functional canoe. Or a functional wigwam.

Then the art that I decide on, we have in our tradition two concepts: One is traditional. So, if you look at some of these baskets, they have floral designs. They’re very graphic, like modern art, almost, because they’re very double sided.

Visual: Two overlay images appear briefly, with the man still speaking behind them. The left image is of a wide, round birchbark container with two rows of intricate double-curve designs mirroring each other. The right-hand image shows a small, narrow, birchbark container with a cover. The container and cover are etched with double curves and linear designs. These then disappear, leaving the speaker obscured.

Voice of Barry Dana: So we have these double curves and they always sort of match each other like a mirror image. And then we have what’s called contemporary, more modern. So you may see an old basket with a contemporary etching of a hunter on snowshoes spearing a moose in the snow, or, an arrow, you know, bow and arrow shooting at a deer.

Visual: Two brief overlay images appear in succession. The first is of an etched birchbark panel. The panel shows, from left to right, a simple teepee decorated with horizontal lines, a standing person, simply depicted, in a long coat or dress with a feathered headdress and holding a club or hatchet in the right hand and a long spear in the left, a figure on snowshoes and wearing a feathered headdress and holding a hatchet in the right hand and a bow and arrows in the left, small trees, and a moose standing on grassy ground. Above the central figure’s head is the name “Tomah Joseph”. The second image shows a rectangular birchbark box with a cover. The front of the box is etched with a figure on snowshoes with feathered headdress and carrying a hatchet and bow following a large moose. The top shows five different scenes within etched decorative frames. These scenes include a figure on snowshoes pulling a loaded sled, three figures in a birchbark canoe on the water, a figure dressing a deer hanging from a tree by a second figure and a teepee, four figures running toward a teepee, and a group of figures with pipes. This image then disappears, leaving the speaker unobstructed.

Voice of Barry Dana: So I took that as, an allowance from my ancestors, to say, if you want to go contemporary, it’s up to you what you want to etch. My idea is to bring back ancestors out of the bark.

Visual: An overlay image of the container the speaker is holding, showing the face that has been visible to the camera as he speaks. The images clustered on the face of the container are, again, intricate, finely-etched images of faces, an earth globe showing the continent of North America, a moon with the silhouette of a rabbit smoking a pipe, an owl in flight, and a howling wolf. The faces appear to be Native American, and many appear to be elders. Three faces are visible in the image, and a fourth face is just around the edge, not visible in the image, but was seen previously as the man moves the basket in the video. Among the various images are small stars.

Voice of Barry Dana: So that’s why I do these faces. I don’t always do… It has to be a very special sheet of bark for me to do that. First of all, the quality needs to be there to, to get such fine etching. But, also, when I have that fine bark, I want to give that bark respect. So I save my ancestral etchings for my best bark. So this basket is, one, very rare to get a size sheet of bark this big, which, this is big, with quality all the way around it where etching… So, this would be more of a traditional etching.

Visual: The man turns the container, revealing the back to the camera. It is etched with more faces above a mountain and a large snapping turtle, seen face-on. The entire composition is dense, intricate, and very beautifully executed. He continues to turn the container, referring to a simple, beautifully-etched double-curve motif on a small flap at one side, then compares it to the more intricate, realistic images on the faces of the container.

Voice of Barry Dana: You can see that it’s like, artwork, modern day, almost, artwork. You know, like you had a logo, a motif, versus the contemporary, which, I can do whatever I want.

Visual: The man continues to turn the container, returning to the face originally visible to the camera.

Voice of Barry Dana: This one in particular has a message.  I think anybody looking at it would say “That’s the Earth.” I hope so! *Laughing* I hope I captured it.

We need to take care of the Earth, that’s the bottom line, and people aren’t. And I ask people all the time: Stop abusing fossil fuel. You’re changing the climate. It’s changing the bark. It’s bringing more pests from the South up. That’s killing the ash tree. They’re going to lose that culture if the ash borer takes all their trees. I’m going to lose the birch culture because the birch tree is dying from the top down from acid rain And, you know, climate change. Climate change is changing the quality of the red cambium. It’s getting more and more difficult to find really quality etching bark. I can still find good bark, but it may not be good for etching.

Visual: The man shifts the container in his hand to show and gesture toward the lashing holding the rim in place. He refers also to the canoe in the case behind him, comparing the construction of the canoe and the container.

Voice of Barry Dana: Again, this is my… And then, you see this stitching. This is roots and, this is like my idea of I want to make a birchbark canoe. All right? So, this particular canoe doesn’t have the root lacing on the gunwales. The lacing keeps the in gunwale and the out gunwale locked together, which keeps the canoe in its shape. Inside the canoe you have ribs made out of cedar. I don’t need ribs in this *smacks the side of the container, making a loud sound* because it’s nobody’s going to get in it. *Laughing* And so, you can put a lot of food in it because *smacks the bottom of the container, making a loud sound* it’s quality bark. I mean, food’s not going to fall out the bottom.

So even though that one *pointing to canoe behind him* is not laced with the root along the gunwale, it’s still Penobscot made. It’s just that at that time of the canoe, we were already introduced, from colonists, iron. And they had nails. And they thought, “Well, why don’t we just nail the gunwales together? That’s a lot quicker.” And it works. So, if it works, fine. For me, since I know better, I do better. I’m not going to use nails in the canoe that I make.

So *smacking the container again* this has got me started to  become a canoe maker. Because the canoe is the, I won’t say most difficult, but it’s the most challenging thing to revive in a culture. It takes…. People ask, “Well, how long does it take to make a canoe?” And I’ll say “About… at least a month.” They say “Well, what if you have help?” I say, “Well, two months.” *Laughing* So, you know, that’s because I want to be more of a teacher. So we’re actually going to take this summer [2025] and do all the materials that make the canoe and then next summer put the canoe together. So we’re not rushing it. You can only do so much in the summer, trying to bring people together with their schedules.

All right, so, this is what I’m all about. I’m an artist and I make baskets with the idea of mastering canoe making.

Visual: Screen fades to black, then returns to the original panning shot of the birchbark case with a credits card that reads:

Featured Artist: Barry Dana, Penobscot

Collection images: A. Sky Heller, Hudson Museum Registrar
Project Manager: Gretchen Faulkner, Hudson Museum Director
Video Production & Editing: Samantha Grimwood
Technical Support: Arturo Camacho

This project was funded by a University of Maine Arts Initiative Seed Grant.