canoe maker

A while back, I responded to a forum post over at SongofthePaddle.co.uk. The poster wanted feedback regarding constructing their own canvas canoe using traditional native methods of construction. I recommended the poster obtain a copy of Garth Taylor's 1980 book Canoe construction in a Cree cultural tradition. It visually documents the building of a traditional Eastern Cree canoe made using canvas as a substitute for birch bark - see my original write-up about it here.


The poster, Elspeth Soper, has a blog documenting the early attempts at construction and includes some of the frustrations with broken gunnels. A recent post showcases a research visit to the British Museum which granted an exclusive tour of the full sized and model bark canoes in their possession. One of models has a decorated Cree paddle with the historical hash marks and dot decoration featured in Garth Taylor's book.

New York's Metropolitan Museum of the Arts has a Maliseet bark canoe model with decorated paddles in their collection dated to pre-1845. The paddles look to have a basic decoration with half the blade coloured in pigment creating a yin/yang sort of effect.


Canoe Model with Accoutrements
Ralph T. Coe Collection, Gift of Ralph T. Coe Foundation for the Arts, 2011
Accession Number: 2011.154.6a�p

Found some pics of another, earlier canoe model with some decorative paddles. These photos date from 1955 showing the "Chartres Canoe" dated to 1672, at the Mus�e des Beaux-arts in Chartres, France. Black and white only, but you can just make out the chevron style hash marks on the paddles.








"Model of a birch bark canoe 1672, at art Museum, Chartres; Summer photos 1955; CCFCS [Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies]"

Here are some pics of some painted model canoe paddles built for a swiss tourist in 1799 now part of the collection of the Museum of Ethnography in Neuch�tel. Pieces like this really give a clue to possible native decoration on life-sized paddles on the era.

Wabenaki, Huron (Wendat), Mohawk, and Algonquin converts from Roman Catholic mission villages along the Saint Lawrence River cooperated with nuns to manufacture Native "tourist art." Older traditions of doll-making were adjusted by using wax to model faces for figurines that were then clothed in the Native dress fashionable at that time. For tourists who bought canoe models such as the one shown here, their souvenir represented a vivid and portable manifestation of their more or less close encounter with the American aborigines and of the latter's ability to adopt Christianity. This one was acquired by a Swiss tourist, Jeanne Elisabeth Gugy, in
1799.