Birch Bark Baskets

Early in the month of March each year birch bark is gathered for making birch bark baskets, or in Anishinabe, bis-ki-ta-na-gann. The birch bark is cut into squares or rectangles according to the size and shape of the basket wanted, and sewn with wi-gub (basswood twine) of their own making.

The simplest baskets are made from a rectangular strip of birch bark formed into a cylinder that is stitched to a circular base. The baskets are made in various sizes, holding anywhere from a quart to a gallon of sap each.

Non-watertight baskets were used for dry storage, tableware including bowls and plates, berrypicking, and carrying things. Did you know you can cook in a pot made of birch bark? As long as the flame doesn't touch the pot, liquids can be boiled in birch bark.

Basket seams were traditionally stitched or laced with tree roots, rushes, or other plant materials. Sometimes baskets are stitched together with decorative dyed rushes. The base and top of the basket is reinforced with a woody twig shaped into a ring.

Quillwork

Although birch bark baskets are quite often left undecorated in any other way than the natural beauty of the bark, one lovely type of additional decoration is embroidery with colored porcupine quills, like this moose on an Athabascan basket lid.

Porcupine quill embroidery is usually done before a basket is stitched together. Holes are poked with a sharp awl according to a design pattern drawn on the bark. Softened and flattened quills are positioned one at a time and both ends inserted into the prepared holes.

When the design is complete, the bark is moistened and heated to soften it so the basket can be shaped and sewn together. Little boxes made of birch bark richly embroidered with porcupine quills were offered for trade, often filled with maple sugar.

Native women's quilling societies undertook quillwork as a sacred task. A woman had to be sponsored and tutored for membership. The objective of these societies was technical perfction in the art.

Sacred quillwork in many areas was undertaken to fulfill a vow as a form of prayer for someone. The process of making it was sacred, but the finished piece -- to be worn or used by someone -- was not considered sacred.

Quillwork fashioned from the quills of porcupines often adorned the buckskin clothes of the men and women. The product was, however, of secondary importance to the process of creation, according to John C. Ewers, of the Smithsonian Institution. The focus was on the vow, the thoughts and prayers and the work, not on the thing.

To see some exquisite examples of birch bark baskets visit the Museum of Anthropology Virtual Exhibit.

Birch Bark Biting

Birch Bite Earrings

Birch bark was a very important material for the Ojibwe. They would carry it with them and use it year after year for different purposes. They used it to make baskets, cradle boards and canoes, and they covered their wigwams with layers of bark. Birchbark bitings are called wigwas mamacenawejegan in Ojibwa, and are also known as "transparencies" or "chews".

Birchbark biting was an activity shared among women during the time in spring and summer when many families met. Competitions were frequently held to determine who could create the best bitings. At times, birch bark bitings were used as patterns that were later transferred onto cloth for beadwork and quillwork.

The Paper Birch, also known as the Canoe, White or Silver Birch, was used extensively by Algonquian, Cree and Ojibwa peoples for art, utilitarian and religious purposes. Midiwewin scrolls were pictographic-style records in birchbark, thinly inscribed using the points of deer antlers and sewn together.

As memory aids for religious beliefs, the scrolls were never revealed to non-Natives. In the 1950s and 1960s, artists in northern Ontario, influenced by Norval Morrisseau, developed their own iconography from these images and stories.

More recently, First Nations artists from northern Ontario and Manitoba continue to use the bark as canvases for their paintings.

Selection and preparation of the bark requires much effort. Birch trees are chosen in the spring when the thawing bark is supple enough to retain indentations. The bark must be knot-free with thin layers, making the bark easier to peel. The best bark will have up to ten layers, and usually five or six of these are suitable for biting.

"Transparencies" are made by biting into intricately folded sheets of specially prepared birch bark. A thin white piece of bark is selected according to the prerequisites of the proposed design.

The bark is then folded in half and then in half again. Particular folds are made for different designs, much like for papercuts. Guiding the bark with her fingers, the artist bites along the folds, sometimes changing the intensity of the bite to produce different shadings.

This process is repeated depending on the size or detail of the design. Pin-like perforations constitute the design while the surface of the bark forms a textured background.

A bark "transparency" is complete only when held up to the sun so that the bark warms to a golden hue and the hundreds of perforations are infused with light.

Dreamcatchers

According to Native American Ojibwe tradition, when a little child was born, its mother would weave a dreamcatcher to place in the cradle. Only the good dreams would be able to pass through the web, and all of the bad dreams would become entangled. When the sun rose and the first rays of sunlight touched the dreamcatcher, all the bad dreams would dissolve.

In her book, Chippewa Customs (1929), Frances Densmore describes the dream catchers of her time as looking like spider webs that were usually hung from the hoop of a child's cradle board.

She said "they catch and hold everything evil as a spider's web catches and holds everything that comes into contact with it."

These "Dream Catchers" were wooden hoops with a 3 1/2 in. diameter, woven with a web made of nettle-stalk fiber that was dyed red with the red sap of the root of bloodroot, or the inner bark of the wild plum tree.

For many years, only Ojibwe people made Dream Catchers as each tribe made only its original crafts.

How to make a Dreamcatcher

Bandolier Bags

Bandolier bags were exclusively made by women for men. Occasionally, a woman might wear one she made for a husband, brothr or son who had died or -- in a Mide healing ceremony, she might be the stand-in for the man needing healing too debilitated to take part.

Bandolier bags became associated with the ancient Ojibwe medicine, religion, history and cultural teachings society, not to be confused with Midèwayaanag, the actual medicine bags given to each initiate (sick people were initiated to the first or lowest degree, to take part in healing ceremonies). The word "wayaan" means skin or hide. Actual Midè medicine bags, which shoot the miigis shells, are of whole animal hides.

How the Midè came to the Anishinaabe, and the first whole-animal skin medicine bags

A little before noon, the people heard a peculiar sound in the sky. It was from the east. Someone was calling Wa hi, hi, hi as they call in the Midè ceremony. They watched the sky and saw four Indians walking toward them in the sky, giving this call. Each Indian had a living otter in his hand. The four manidoo held the otters with the right hand near the head and the left hand below. These otters were their medicine bags.

Each of the Manidos shoots a migiis shell at the dead man (actually the East Manido), who revives. The Manidos then teach the Anishinaabe Midewewin, put souls in thir bodies, teach them religion and curing. This all happened on Madeline Island (Wisconsin), the 5th stopping point on the Migration, the 5th fire. (Told to Frances Densmore in 1907 by Nawahjibigokwe (Woman Dwelling Among the Rocks) a prominent White Earth (Minnesota) Midè woman of the 4th degree.)

Click on the link to learn more about Ojibwe Bandolier Bags.

Seed Beads

Manido-min-esag ("Little spirit seeds, gift of the Manido" the Anishnaabemowin name for seed beads) was what Anishnabe (Ojibwe, Odawah, Pottawotomi) women named seed beads. The need to have good feelings when one is beading continues this early reaction: that these little things were a gift of beauty from the spirits, handed over by the white man as an intermediary of some sort.

"Miinens" is the fruit of the hawthorn tree, miinensagaawunzh. It has been conjectured that seed beads were named for this tree because its 5-lobed leaves are remininscent of women of hands.

The Ojibwe may have learned from the Ursuline nuns who taught bead embroidery in the early 1700's that the hawthorn's thorny branches were used for Christ's crown of thorns, and so felt the tree was sacred to the Europeans, who brought seed beads, a gift of beauty and skill.

The Hawthorn's white or pink 5-petaled flower is actually the "daisy"motif, the first thing young girls learn to bead because it is easy and fast. Click on the link to learn more about MANIDOOMINENS, the name the Anishinabe women call the sacred seeds/fruit of the Hawthorn tree.

Almost as soon as seed beads were available, native women invented two techniques for using them: loom beading and applique embroidery. Those two techniques are still in use today. Loom-beading and a form of single-needle weaving (peyote beading) are not adaptations of techniques known to European or other cultures; they are native inventions.

Beadmaking is an old craft. Bone, stone (turquoise and other semi-precious stones) and shell beads are still made the ancient way, little affected by modern technology. Sea shells, the commonest material for handmade beads, have been important native regional trade items for thousands of years. Click on the link for instructions on Seed beading techniques.

Basketmaking

Of all the traditional Native arts, basketmaking has had the greatest difficulty surviving. Unlike beadwork, clothing or jewelry, baskets traditionally were not luxuries of dress and decoration, but tools of living. Lightweight, portable, sturdy containers for gathering, harvesting, storage, cooking, and serving food.

The land-takings, the changes in all lifeways ~ and the availability of cheap mass-produced kitchen and storage ware ~ has meant that the only remaining use-function of baskets in Indian communities is a few ceremonial uses, and occasional home display or gifts.

Traditional basketry involves knowledge of the living world. Plants for splints, coils, fibers and dyes must be gathered at the right times and places. The porcupine globe basket on the left was created by Elder Edith Bonde of the Hubbard Lake (MI) Ojibwe.

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