A celebration of Mi’kmaq culture
If you go for a walk in the forest surrounding the First Nation community of Wildcat, you might come across a pair of twins tearing up the soil.
The six-year-olds are the greatgreat-great-grandchildren of Joe Jermey.
The latter being the famed Mi’kmaq birch-bark canoe builder.
Tepkunaset, the boy, and Nakuset, the girl, won’t be alone.
Their mother, Melissa Labrador, will be helping them dig the 700 feet of spruce roots required for one 16-foot birch bark canoe.
“I am the bridge between my children and my father,” said Labrador on Friday.
“If not for me and for them, there’s nobody else to carry it on.”
Other than her father, Todd Labrador, Melissa doesn’t know any other Mi’kmaq still building birch bark canoes.
They were the primary method of transportation around Atlantic Canada for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers.
They are also what our modern fibreglass canoes evolved from.
“The body is like a large hollow cradle; they are eight or 10 feet long; moreover so capacious that a single one of them will hold an entire household of five
or six persons, with all their dogs, sacks, skins, kettles and other heavy baggage,” wrote Jesuit priest Biard in a 1613 letter to a friend back in Europe describing the Mi’kmaq and their canoes.
“And the best part of it is that they can land wherever they like, which we cannot do with our shallops or sailing boats; for the most heavily loaded canoe can draw only half a foot of water, and unloaded it is so light that you can easily pick it up and carry it away with your left hand; so rapidly sculled that, without any effort, in good weather you can make 30 or 40 leagues a day ... They are never
in a hurry. Quite different from us, who can never do anything without hurry and worry; worry, I say, because our desire tyrannizes over us and banishes peace from our actions.”
Last week Melissa’s father, Todd Labrador, was drinking a medium Tim Hortons coffee and putting the final stitches of spruce root collected by Tepkunaset and Nakuset into a 14-foot canoe.
He and Melissa built the canoe with three Mi’kmaq apprentices in Millbrook during a six-week program this summer that aimed to rekindle the traditional skill in a new generation.
It and another of Labrador’s 14 canoes were on display last week at the Mi’kmaw Summer Games on the Wagmatcook First Nation in Cape Breton.
Games co-co-ordinator Terry Bernard explained that beyond the 23 athletic events that have brought 1,400 to 1,500 people to Wagmatcook daily, the whole week was about Mi’kmaq celebrating their own culture.
“We’ve organized it to have the elders interact with youth so we can keep our traditions going,” said Bernard.
The Mi’kmaw Summer Games wrapped up Sunday with closing ceremonies.
For Melissa, who has helped her father build nine birch bark canoes, the goal is to build one on her own with his grandchildren.
They’ll find birch trees around their community of barely a dozen homes and peel the bark back as the sap runs up the tree during the summer months.
They’ll find a stand of black spruce and dig up the webs of fine roots.
Like Joe Jermey, they’ll steam cedar ribs and frame the canoe up with a fair curve.
Then they’ll launch it in the Wildcat River.
“In a birch bark canoe you are on your knees — there is no seat — and you feel every little bit of the water below you,” said Melissa.