Birchbark canoe building brings students together

By Rick Garrick

Fort William’s Stephanie McLaren helped with the March 19 rib installation process on a birchbark canoe that students have been constructing at Lakehead University since last September.

“Today is one of the first days that I really got into putting stuff together,” McLaren says, noting she has been busy with her studies. “At the beginning of the year there were little things that I was doing, like those little ties. I helped tie in a few of them. My niece and nephew came and they really helped out one day while I was doing (my studies).”

McLaren, Damien Lee, Sheila Pelletier-Demerah and Helen Pelletier were among the Fort William citizens who helped install the ribs and sheathing strips at the Pollard garage on the bank of the Kaministiqua River. The project is usually hosted at the Lakehead University Student Union’s Aboriginal Awareness Centre, but the rib steaming and installation process was held at the Pollard garage, which is located north of Fort William’s Mission Road.

“It’s a learning experience — I really like it,” Pelletier-Demerah says. “It’s like a puzzle, figuring out how to do the layers (of sheathing) to make it work.”

A variety of students, including Lakehead University and Confederation College students, have been working on the birchbark canoe for about an hour at a time, usually on a weekly basis, since the Fall Harvest celebration in September.

“We’ve had students from all over,” says Helen Pelletier, coordinator of the Aboriginal Awareness Centre. “Damien Lee, who was here earlier, brought his students from (Confederation) College, so we had two or three classes from the college. We had students come in and out from the centre work on it, so it was a student-run project.”

Pelletier says many of the students were “excited to learn something new” while working on the canoe.

“A lot of students had never made something like this and they were naturals, so they found the ability to do something they had never done,” Pelletier says, noting the students also learned about the amount of work that is required to build a birchbark canoe. “We’re trying to bring back some knowledge to the youth and almost some kind of excitement. We use birchbark, it’s useful. It’s not something we burn, it’s something you can make things with, like canoes, baskets, homes.”

Pelletier says there has been a lot of interest from university staff and passersby about the birchbark canoe project.

“When you’re walking by the centre and you see a canoe on the table, right away you want to know what is going on,” Pelletier says. “At one point, I heard a student refer to it as the canoe room.”

Pelletier says the canoe will be painted by Rocky Bay artist Shaun Hedican once the construction work is completed.

“I’ve asked him if he could do some Ojibwa floral on it,” Pelletier says.

Darren Lentz, a birchbark canoe builder and elementary school principal, provided guidance on the canoe-building process.

“The most amazing thing about it is how a community comes together, and how the canoe builds a community of people that are from all walks of life and from different cultures,” Lentz says. “There were people from places around the world that stopped in to lend a hand. It’s almost like the materials and the canoe and the teachings that go along with it do that community building and educating.”

The birchbark canoe will be hung in the University Centre Agora meeting space once it is completed.