Ceremony celebrates indigenous people
Miawpukek First Nation donates handmade birch bark canoe to museum
Residents of Newfoundland’s only reserve celebrated National Aboriginal Day in Peterborough on Wednesday.
And they brought a gift for the city’s Canadian Canoe Museum, too.
Miawpukek First Nation, from Conne River, N.L., donated a handcrafted birch bark canoe to the museum.
Mi’kmaw canoe builders and youth constructed it over 14 weeks during the winter. The 22-foot boat is made of birch bark and cedar, sewn together with spruce root and sealed with spruce gum and bear fat.
“There’s no modern things here to hold it together... no bolts or screws or nails... the same way we built them 200 years ago,” Miawpukek First Nation Chief Mi’sel Joe said.
Joe helped lower the canoe into the Trent-Severn Waterway below Lock 21 on Wednesday afternoon.
A ceremonial paddle was meant to take place along the waterway, but the boat sprang a leak after making the long travel by truck to Peterborough.
Instead, Mi’kmaw people and museum officials paddled in one of the museum’s canoes.
In 1997, Joe and a few others paddled from Newfoundland to a Nova Scotia in a traditional openocean canoe just like the one that was donated to the museum.
After participating in a speaker’s series at the Canadian Canoe Museum a couple years ago, Joe decided to have a canoe made for the museum.
The chief said he sees the boat as a “textbook for education.”
Not many people are aware that there are Mi’kmaw people living in Newfoundland, he said.
“It spreads the word that we’re in Newfoundland, we’ve always been in Newfoundland…people are going to see this canoe and talk about this canoe and talk about our community.”
Karen Taylor, the museum’s education manager, said she’s thrilled to have hands-on item to work with when teaching.
Unlike some of the museum’s old and fragile artefacts, the birch bark canoe will be able to handled.
“It will be one of our handling crafts, not put away for no one to touch or hidden away as an artefact that we can’t handle or touch,” she said.
Having a canoe built by a First Nation community that’s rarely talked about is a great way to get the conversation started about indigenous reserves in Canada, Taylor added.
“Most of the kids in our area have never thought about a First Nation community in Newfoundland,” she said.
Throughout the day and into the evening, artists from Miawpukek ran dance, drumming and singing workshops and canoe builders discussed their process and showcased materials at the museum.