Wisconsin Life

>> The birchbark canoe is the apex of our crafts, of our art forms in our region. Even our culture goes way back. We hunted, fished, gathered. Everything we did was out of the birchbark canoe. And in recent times, we've lost that culture. My name is Wayne Valliere. My native name is Miminogiizhig and it means "Good Sky." My clan is Mockwa, which is the bear. There's approximately 150 canoe builders in the Midwest, but you're only going to find three Native American canoe builders. Myself, my older brother, and one of my teachers. My teacher, Marvin Defoe, from Red Cliff, came to our community when I was probably 11 years old, and he built a model birchbark canoe one summer for some teachers. By the time I was 16, I'd built my first birchbark canoe. You don't go on your terms, on your time. You go on nature's time. For an example, the birch. It only peels in mid-June to maybe early July. So there's a short window of opportunity to actually harvest the bark. The roots are there, gotten usually later in the fall when the sap runs into the tree. We usually harvest our cedar when the swamp is frozen, because when we go into the cedar swamp, there's no mosquitoes. It's easy to travel into the swamps to get the cedar for all the woodworking in the canoe. The pitch runs in late August, when it's the hottest part of the summer, because we use white pine pitch with a concoction of deer tallow and crushed hardwood coals. A friend of mine by the name of Tim Frandy, who is a doctor in folklore down here in Madison, he just graduated. He heard about these residencies, so we collaborated with the university and some other people and created this project. We brought some of our at-risk kids from our community, and also some of our kids that were not at risk in our community, and got them involved in the canoe project. This canoe here played a major role in the lives of our ancestors. My grandmother, she challenged me as a young boy. She said your grandfathers are written throughout history, she said. They were very, very exceptional men. And she said, what I challenge you and your brothers, what I challenge you young men, is that, what will your great-grandchildren say about you someday? So, I'd like to say that the work I've done in working in Nishnawbe, saving our language and working in different areas, saving our culture, I'd like for my great-grandchildren to talk about their great-grandfather and say, "Hey, he did his job, he kept that alive for our people We didn't have to go looking for it. It's here for us."

all cheering