Building a Birchbark Canoe: The Algonquin Wâbanäki Tcîmân

Geoff Cragg teaches in the Faculty of General Studies at the University
of Calgary.

Readers of Woodenboat magazine may be familiar with David Gidmark
through his advertisements for courses in building birchbark canoes.
This book offers a retrospective from which to understand his teaching
activities; its core consists of four accounts of Native canoe-building,
observed over the period 1970–1989.

For many, the canoe is an object of aesthetic as well as practical
delight. While cedar-canvas and cedar-strip canoes have their devotees,
the birchbark canoe is frequently acknowledged as the ultimate; it is,
after all, the source of the others. Unfortunately, the success of the
cedar-canvas canoe in the last century, followed by more recent
synthetic abominations, has made the birchbark canoe a rarity. There is
a degree of urgency in Gidmark’s attempt to describe the techniques of
living canoe-makers so that this tradition is not lost.

Building a Birchbark Canoe is more accurately described as an
ethnography of material culture than as a set of instructions. Its
opening discussion of the origins of the modern Algonquin canoe is
followed by a useful chapter on “General Construction Techniques,”
which sets the stage for the accounts of specific builders. While
photographs and illustrations are frequent and helpful, nowhere does
Gidmark provide plans and dimensions. But the motivated reader may well
study it, like an apprentice, and attain a measure of understanding of
the Algonquin culture, as well as of their marvelous craft.