NETT LAKE - Darren Landgren and George Strong surveyed the progress being made on a traditional birch bark canoe last Saturday morning, as part of a weekend of activities here designed to reconnect Bois Forte band members with the traditions of their culture and language.

Landgren and Strong were part of team being led by Wayne Valliere, one of only five remaining Ojibwe master boat builders in North America.

“People like to say that birch bark canoes are primitive crafts; they’re superior crafts,” Valliere said. “The shape hasn’t changed since they were created. Europeans even abandoned their boats when they got here.”

The history of the birch bark canoe dates back centuries and was brought to the Great Lakes region as part of the Ojibwe westerly migration.

“They are so important in our past,” Chaz Wagner said. “It’s an old technology, but it’s the technology of our future.”

The canoes are used for everything from transport, to ricing, spear fishing and hunting.

Valliere said it wasn’t too long ago when all Ojibwe families knew how to build one. He said the canoes were once as common as cars are today.

With only five master builders left, Valliere said some, including himself, have spent the past eight years traveling the Midwest to revive the skill including a residency at the University of Wisconsin - Madison where Valliere and several apprentices brought the canoes to life on campus.

The style of the canoe is called a “high-end” canoe, which is one of the most archaic designs. While the majority of the design is birch, other components are made from cedar and spruce.

“This particular canoe is very special because several tribal members have put their hands on it and helped with it,” Valliere said. “There is a lot of leg work that needs to happen. They’re modeling it for their people.”

Valliere and Wagner said the process of collecting the material can be long and hard, with only one out of every 50 birch trees having the right type of bark to use. And with birch trees in Minnesota becoming less common, the process becomes more complicated by the scarcity of resources.

Those resources, though, when harvested properly don’t deplete their environment.

“The thing about the material is that it all regenerates,” Valliere said. “We only use secondary (tree) roots and the bark regenerates over time. It doesn’t leave an imprint on the environment to build these crafts.”

The canoe was set to be completed by the end of the weekend with an official launch set for Sunday or Monday afternoon.

Keeping the

language alive

Boat building wasn’t the only topic of learning and immersion in Nett Lake this past weekend. A series of Ojibwe language speakers were also presenting at this year’s third language immersion camp.

Wagner said weekend camps in the past have focused on specific activities, such as ricing, but this weekend was about the language itself.

Dr. Anton Treuer, a professor of the Ojibwe language at Bemidji State University, was one of the teachers present for the event.

“This isn’t a lecture day, but one with activities to build up their speech,” he said. “It’s a combination of academic and social learning environments. Everyone is wired a little differently. Some need to hear it, others need to see it.”

Some of the activities range from conversation prompts on Jenga blocks while others are more traditional classroom-oriented lessons on sentence and grammar structure.

Treuer said language and culture are the bonds that tie all communities together, and he believes that immersing communities in their cultural traditions will heal many old wounds.

“For those who do know (the language), it translates to a positive development in their life from relationships to emotional, physical and spiritual health,” he said. “To preserve a language is the most important way to combat domestic abuse and other community ailments. Other solutions are just band-aids that don’t always address the root of the problem. It not only heals wounds but prevents them.”

He said the loss of language to Native peoples around the Americas is a dire situation, one that isn’t always recognized.

“It is scary out there, but anyone who isn’t worried, doesn’t have their eyes open,” Treuer said. “Only 20 of the 500 known native languages are spoken by native kids. Where we’ve seen meaningful revitalization projects, we’ve seen really amazing things. A community language camp won’t make everyone fluent, but it does advance the knowledge of those who do attend. It connects people with information that can help them keep going.”

The canoe building and immersion camps are organized through the Bois Forte radio station, KBFT. Future events can be found by going to their website, www.kbft.org.