Through workshops, Native tribes in the Great Lakes region are actively working to preserve their cultural traditions of birch bark canoe building. This practice represents the tribes' connection to their history, community, and environment. However, environmental threats from industry and climate change are endangering the birch trees necessary for canoe building, which risks loss of an important part of these tribes' identities and cultures.

1. Birch Bark Canoe Building: Revival of Culture for Native Peoples
By: Sierra Hess
November 20, 2015
Newark, OH—The Native peoples surrounding the Great Lakes are actively participating in a
renaissance of birch bark canoe building in a movement to preserve their culture. But, this social
and spiritual sharing of knowledge is being endangered by an environmental crisis.
Dr. John Low, a professor on Ohio State University’s Newark campus writes about the cultural
rebirth in his article, “Vessels for Recollection—The Canoe Building Renaissance in the Great
Lakes.”
Beginning about thirty years ago, Native peoples from tribes including the Potawatomi, Ojibwe,
and Odawa Indians, recognized the disconnect that was occurring between Native peoples and
their culture. They knew something had to be done.
In an effort to reconnect the people with their traditions, tribal members in Wisconsin, Michigan,
and Minnesota, are forming workshops that teach the building methods of canoes to the
community.
Dr. Low says that through workshops, members of Native tribes “build canoes while they build
community.”
Canoe building, particularly birch bark canoe building, is very significant to the identity of Great
Lakes Indians as an Indigenous culture because it represents the connection to the land, history,
memory, and community.
Preserving culture is very important to Native Americans as a way of maintaining identity. The
idea of identity through remembering one’s history resonates with many tribes.
It is common within Native belief systems that everyday objects are alive. They tell stories and
hold history. So, material culture, like canoes and baskets, also tell stories and hold history.
Preserving these objects and the traditional methods by which they are made is, then, an
important step in maintaining identity and culture alike.
Canoes have historically served Native peoples in vital ways. They have been a major factor in
survival during war time and migrations.
Birch bark canoes also aided in transportation and farming rice, as well as the social and
economic advantages surrounding trade.

2. Today, the canoes continue to serve a purpose with inter-tribal relationships. Dr. Low says,
“When one community appears to have lost the knowledge to build these vessels, they reach out
to neighboring communities for assistance.”
True to the Native ways, birch bark was harvested in an environmentally friendly way and was
used for more than canoe building. The bark also forms containers, torches, “moose calls, cups,
dishes, trays, cases, and floats for fish nets.”
Today, however, industry, air pollution, the depletion of the ozone layer, and other human-
related factors are putting the birch trees that this canoe-building renaissance depends on in
danger of becoming extinct.
The extinction of “just another tree” is not a trivial idea to the Native peoples. Dr. Low explains
that “the roots of Great Lakes Indian communities, like the birch tree, are in the land. Both are
only as healthy as the environment that nourishes and sustains them.”
If these trees were to become extinct, part of the culture, the history, the memory, the spirituality,
and the identity of the Great Lakes Indians will face a similar outcome.