A Pictorial History of the Canoe

Abstract

A Pictorial History of the Canoe The Canoe: A Living Tradition. Ed. John Jennings. Toronto: Firefly, 2002. What a beautiful book! I open it at random at pages 42-43, and there on the left is a picture of a North canoe, on the ground at the Hudson's Bay Company Bear Island post on Lake Temagami. It contains seven men and a dog. The caption points out that this picture must have been very carefully set up, because normally canoemen got out of a birchbark before reaching shore. On the right-hand page another birchbark fur-trade canoe, this time loaded with eight men and gear. Below it, a woodcut of a York boat on Lake Winnipeg by Walter Phillips, showing the artist's great debt to Japanese printmakers in his handling of waves, space and colour. It doesn't matter where you open this book; each page is a feast for the eyes. There are pictures from Canada's earliest times, through the first photographs of birchbark canoes, paintings from past to present times, photo essays on many types of craft including West Coast dugouts, birchbark canoes and the large Umiaks the Inuit built. The pictures form a pretty complete essay on the canoe, its history and use. Combined with these pictures is a series of essays on the history of the and other craft used by North America's Aboriginal peoples - it is after all a bit of a stretch to call a kayak, which is propelled with a double-bladed paddle, or Umiaks (the large skin-covered boats of the Inuit) canoes, any more than were York boats. But all have their place in the history of water craft in North America, either in their use by Aboriginal people or as crafts that rivaled the in some uses. It does not do to be a purist, and the broader interpretation of canoe does allow for a better overview of paddle-propelled craft on the rivers, lakes, and sea waters of North America. The first section is on Native craft, and the first essay, by John Jennings, introduces the Aboriginal birchbark canoe, the main protagonist of the book, in a thoroughly scholarly way. So does the second, on the frontier and by Jennings as well, which discusses the use of the birchbark by the early explorers, missionaries, and traders as North America was discovered, opened up and settled by Europeans. The history related in these two chapters needs to be told and retold. The exploits of the early travellers by canoe, especially the French coureurs de bois, stand among the great adventure stories of all time. They, and the evolution of the fur trade through the use of the canoe, explain why Canada is logically an east-west nation, at a time when so many of the commercial and cultural exchanges have become north-south at the expense of internal Canadian cohesion and identity. The fur trade, and the French in the North American West, get well-deserved attention in this chapter. The photographs and other illustrations in these two chapters nicely complement the text. The evolution from the comparatively small canoes of the pre-contact Aboriginal people, which rarely exceeded 25 feet, to the huge Montreal canoes of the fur trade, which reached 40 feet, is not only well covered, but also forms its own fascinating story of the cultural and economic exchanges between Europeans and Aboriginal peoples, and the evolution of an Aboriginal technology under commercial pressures. The next chapter, by Rick Nash, discusses the building of birchbark canoes by Aboriginal people, and the types of craft constructed by the various Aboriginal groups. This chapter as well is lavishly illustrated with appropriate photographs and drawings from a wide range of sources. Following it is a five-page, 28-photograph essay on the building of a birchbark canoe. Next comes a companion piece by David Finch and Don Gardner that describes the craft of the Aboriginal people of the inland Northwest. Much of this is devoted to the birchbark canoes of the Dogrib Indians, which in many ways are constructed and look like a cross between the birchbark canoes of the more southerly Indians and the kayaks of the Inuit. …