canoe maker

From this Ebay Seller is a 58" paddle with a large narrow blade and a nubby style grip. Credit again to Luc P for sending me the link. The paddle's overall shape looks quite similar to Cree Style paddle blades posted on in the past, although to my eye, it looks as though this design would be quite blade heavy and unbalanced.




This is from the same seller that featured a huge, 96" northwoods style paddle a while back as well as the 84" Mustard Yellow painted paddle from the post on February 7th..

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.

Came across an image of a paddle carving workshop focusing on the traditional elongated Cree design (one of my favourites). This deep water paddle design doesn't require a very wide piece of lumber stock yet provides quite a bit of power given its length. The gentleman on the right is holding a painted paddle which resembles some of the painted artwork of Cree paddles in the Canadian Museum of Civilization

A traditional paddle, since the arrival of motorized freighter canoes, is the pole paddle. Stan Thomas called it a "Hunter's Paddle". These are about 88" long, and the shaft and blade are each about 44" long. The shaped tip is for purchase in the shallow gravel river beds. When it wears done it is just re-shaped a little shorter. The blade is flat on one face and shaped on the other.

Many thanks to Doug  for his efforts in documenting this unique paddle design and to Mike O for posting about this earlier last week.

Working on some technical issues with the blog. The original clickable sliding gallery that appeared on the top right disappeared and stopped functioning entirely. It's been replaced with a non-clickable slideshow. Links to all the completed paddles are now found on the separate Paddle Image Archives page

In the meantime, paddling friend Mike O of the ever-insightful Reflections on the Outdoors Naturally blog has put up some pics of Cree paddles from Fort Severn. They include some standard looking blades painted in utilitarian green but also a decorated blade with an interesting tip. For anyone interested is seeing the pics, the direct link to Mike's post is HERE.

Also, for those who might of missed it last time, Mike's canoe restoration work with Fort Severn First Nation (along with Doug Ingram, Pam Wedd, & John Hupfield) was documented in Canada's national news network. Here's that post from earlier this year

Came across another treasure trove of paddle information on Archive.org. This publication entitled, Material culture of the Davis Inlet and Barren Ground Naskapi outlines enthographic items collected by William Duncan Strong from the Davis Inlet and Barren Ground Naskapi in 1927-1928.

Plate 49 (pg 89) features a diagram of 4 decorated Naskapi paddles accompanying the model canoes in the collection...


Naskapi Paddles in the Strong Collection
These are, not surprisingly, very similar to the sketches in Garth Taylor's, 1980 publication, Canoe construction in a Cree cultural tradition which I used in the painted decoration of my Bushcraft Cree spruce paddle. Pgs 19-20 contain a book contains a brief write-up on these paddles:

The collection contains seven canoe paddles, with handles approximately half the length of the blades or slightly less. The blades are flat or have a slight ridge down the center and vary in width from 7.5 cm to 11.5 cm. The handles widen slightly and are flattened at the end. Only two specimens show signs of use. The blades of five paddles are decorated; the decoration on the illustrated specimens, in orange pigment, red crayon, and indelible pencil, is typical (fig. 49A-D). The partridge design and a motif which Strong (1928e) called "whale tails" occur on one paddle (fig. 49B). These bands of decoration appear to be a common feature on paddles, at least as far west as the Cree around Great Whale River (Taylor, p. 94, fig. 9).

Last summer, I had worked on a bushcraft cree style paddle hacked out from a chunk of 2x6 spruce with an axe and finished off over a weekend with a crooked knife.


Crooked knife work; Paddle taking shape
With an hour of free time up at the cottage, I worked on cleaning up the blade and reducing the shaft thickness my angled crooked knife, a superb tool for finishing work.

For decoration, I thought I wanted to replicate some historic line designs found in some printed texts. Spruce isn't a good choice for wood-burning decoration so I figured I could use some of the left over Epifanes enamel paint from the cedar canvas canoe to add a nice bit of color.


Decorated Cree Paddles
In the end I came up with a slightly different pattern than Paddle (D) on the far right, a museum model piece from Fort Chimo now at the McCord Museum in Montreal. Using some masking tape and a cheap foam brush on hand, the painted accents were added easily enough.. Still, my hand isn't as stable working with messy paints so they are quite amateurish


Final Paddle


Blade Closeup

Apologies to those wanting to see more paddle making specific posts. Things have gotten very hectic as of late but another piece is sitting here in the den awaiting some free time for decoration. In the meantime, here are some Montagnais paddles from the American Museum of Natural History


PADDLE, WOMAN'S
Culture: MONTAGNAIS
Locale: QUE, LAKE SAINT JOHN
Country: CANADA
Dimensions: L:153.7 W:9.9 H:4.1 [in CM]



Culture: MONTAGNAIS, CHICOUTIMI?
Locale: QUE
Country: CANADA
Dimensions: L:167.5 W:10 H:2.8 [in CM]

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Canadian visitors. Had some time today to upload some more paddlemaking pics from this summer. After my pitiful attempt at a bushcraft paddle back in 2009, I decided to take another try at making a paddle with just an axe and crooked knife. This time around, rather than harvest the wood from a downed tree, I ended up using a left over scrap from splitting the 2x10 spruce board for the canoe pole project.


Split spruce chunk
This piece of spruce had a nice, straight grain for the shaft area (if I avoided the conspicuous knot) and at 5" wide was perfect to try another design. I wanted to try a straight sided Eastern Cree paddle like the kind I posted on here and are illustrated below:


Fresh spruce paddles hung to limit warpage
This style of paddle also feature prominantly in the NFB film, Cree Hunters of the Mistassini and I've posted a screenshot of Sam Blacksmith using such a paddle on a previous post. Apart from the obvious green paint, this one has a distinct spine to add some rigidity to the narrow blade design.


Sam Blacksmith paddling his paddle
Once the blade shape was roughly hewned with the axe, a series of cuts were made in the shaft area with my homemade bucksaw. More axe work and the shaft region was taking shape which was later cleaned up with the crooked knife.


Saw cuts in shaft area; shaft roughly hewn out
After a while, my little one came over with his toy dump truck and started collecting shavings to transport down to the beach, dumping each load in the sand and then returning for more. This continued every few minutes for about 2 hours. Definitely distracting, but it kept him quiet and occupied him at least.


Collecting shavings dump truck game
By the next day, I had progressed to working down the blade and was beginning to shape the handle.


Crooked knife work; Starting to take shape
At this stage, I had started carving a simple roll style grip, but later changed my mind to form a more roundish, flat style which seems to be more consistent with these Eastern Cree Designs in the Canadian Museum of Civilization collection.


Blade Closeup; Grip Photo
I've read of craftsmen using the crooked knife with such skill as to carve a paddle perfectly smooth, leaving no tool marks and requiring no sanding. It'll be a while before my skills progress to that level, but I'm still happy with the relative smooth results I got with this spruce attempt. Still some tool marks on the blade and the shaft isn't perfect, but overall it's a functional paddle that was made lazily over a weekend, and could probably be done in a rush in a few hours of concentrated work.


A weekend's project
Don't think I'll be burning decorations on this one as spruce doesn't take pyrography very well. Maybe I'll dabble in a painted decoration over the winter.

July 23, 2011: UPDATE - Paddle has been decorated. See the final post here

Reshaping and sanding of the birch Cree paddle modeled after one in the Canadian Museum of Civilization collection was completed over the summer.


Reshaped Birch Cree
Now it was time to decide on the decoration. According to various readings and museum searches, many Cree paddles were decorated in a simple manner, typically painted with boldly contrasting colours and often with stripes or other banding decorations. In particular, Garth Taylor's 1980 book Canoe construction in a Cree cultural tradition documents the building of a traditional Eastern Cree canoe made using canvas as a substitute for birch bark and has a nice illustration of various decorated Cree paddles.


Decorated Cree Paddles
A while back I had also come across a post (now deleted) on the FrontierFolk.net Forums, debating types of sealants on historic paddles. One poster put up the following pics of a canoe displayed in a store with a painted Cree paddle decorated decorated with white dots.



Another decorated Cree paddle
In my case, I kept the decoration extremely simple and in this same style. The grip and rounded tip were high heat burned to resemble the decoration of paddle D in Taylor's illustration. A few thick horizontal lines and bars with circular dots and the burning was complete. Certainly more simple than the complex patterns of Wabanaki paddles, but I find it very fitting for these unusual paddle shapes.


Completed Paddle


Blade Closeup
Given the limitations of the original paddle blank picked up at a roadside sale, the blade isn't proportional to the elongated dimensions of the blades outlined in Taylor's book. Still, for 5 dollars, this discarded blank turned out to be a great little paddle.

Mark of WildPaddler.ca thoughtfully sent a pic of a home-made paddle he came across at the end of a portage during a 9 day canoe trip on the Churchill river in northern Saskatchewan. Mark believes the paddle likely belongs to someone in the nearby Cree community of Grandmother's Bay. It was estimated to be about 67" long. The shaft was very rectangular with only the corners rounded off. Looks like it was quickly shaped and then sealed with blue paint on the blade and grip areas.




The blade design is a much more modern looking, fat beavertail design rather than the leaner, square sided Western Cree paddles Adney and Gidmark document in their books. I suppose when people think "canoe paddle" today, this is the shape that most commonly comes to mind.

Many thanks for the photo Mark!

Just around the corner from home, I spotted an amateur "Antiques for Sale" sign pointing to an industrial warehouse. Intrigued, I went inside and found a huge haphazard collection of stuff that had seen better days. I was on my way out when I saw the shape of a paddle behind a pile of rusty tools. It turned out to be a half-completed, 57" paddle blank made from what appears to be yellow or white birch.


The partially complete Birch blank
The wood stock seems to have been 1" thick as this is the maximum thickness of the shaft. Not ideal for a heavy use paddle, but still workable for light use. At least the grain in the shaft is well contained and runs perfectly parallel down its length so the original builder was either lucky or knew exactly what was needed for paddlemaking. The bulk of the blade had been power planed down to about 1/2" with some noticeable areas of tear out but these should be easy to clean up with some spokeshave work. A small, crudely shaped pear grip had been rasped out. Basically the hard work had been done and now only final shaping needed to be completed. In pencil along the shaft was the name "Skyler". It seems someone started this project but then abandoned it. The paddle was mine for $5 and I immediately began visualizing reworking it.


Small Pear Grip
My first observation was how huge the blade area was relative to the length and this caused the paddle to be extremely blade heavy...not ideal. The 5.5" wide blade had a beautifully rounded tip and I wanted to preserve this feature. But to make the paddle more balanced, the blade area had to be reduced. After being please with the Attikamekw design as a favoured solo blade, I wanted to try another close style to this slender shape. In particular, I've been eager to try some of the Cree Style paddles I've posted on before.


Cree Paddles - Canadian Museum of Civilization
In the end I chose the sweeping, recurved blade design of the middle paddle. After marking out some of the basic points on the blank, I used some clamps and a flexible metal ruler to draw out the curves. Here is the result...


New blade shape marked out for cutting
The Mrs. did some planting and cleaned up the balcony last weekend. I can tell she doesn't appreciate the wood dust and shavings in her flowerpots, so in order to minimize any domestic disturbance, I headed to the nearby park with the paddle, a saw, and my two crooked knives. Rather than saw out the entire paddle shape, I thought I take a shortcut and make some perpendicular cuts, chip out the rough shape, and clean it up with the crooked knives. While I had brought both knives to the park, the recently completed Orien Knife outperformed by own homemade version, mostly because of the steeper bevel being better suited to the kiln dried hardwood, birch stock. Here's where the paddle stands now...obviously not an exact replica but I had to work with the limitations of the existing dimensions.


Chipping out the outline; Cleaned up with the crooked knife
The sharper angles will be eventually worked down. But it's a funky shape and I'm curious to see how it'll perform.

SEPT 21, 2010 UPDATE: Paddle is now complete and decorated. See post HERE

One of the blogs I follow keenly is that of Mike Elliot of Kettle River Canoes. Mike's artistry and skill with cedar canvas canoe restoration is just wonderful. His posts are filled with nuggets of wisdom and fantastic photos of restoration projects. A recent post about spring cleaning for the canoe included a picture of a custom made paddle in the Western Cree style with a bobble grip.

Adney has an illustration of the Western Cree paddles and noted that this tribe was the only one he was aware that had separate paddle designs for men and women. Graham Warren also has a reduced image of this paddle shape in his books as well.


Adney's Plans; Mike's Alder version
Mike generously emailed some extra details about the paddle. It is made from an 8/4 board of Alder (Alnus rubra) which was then worked down to shape the 2" bobble grip. That's a lot of extra carving! This prevented the need to laminate extra wood on the grip, as was the case with my bobble grip experiment. Never made a paddle out of Red Alder before but I just checked out the Exotic-Woods.ca site and it is available - looks to be a gorgeous grain pattern as well. Many thanks for the paddle wood suggestion!

Found some photos of Cree elders carving canoe paddles (looks like from knotted spruce). Via the International Boreal Conservation Campaign website with photos credited to Natasha Moine.


Instruction from an Elder


More carving


Hanging paddles to limit warpage