Gary Shaver's Birchbark Canoe Restoration

Northern Lakes Chapter Member,  Gary Shaver, has provided an update on the circa 1950 birchbark canoe that he restored. See below for the story and photos of this canoe:

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In 2019, pre-covid, I had the pleasure of being gifted an old Canadian made birch bark canoe needing a major restoration. A fellow member of the WCHA posted an ad in the WCHA forums asking if anyone would be interested in taking this project on? I promptly replied and drove down to his place in Delaware, USA to pick it up. He put me in touch with it's owners who explained that it was one of two canoes that had hung in the dining hall of Camp Norway on Lake Fairlee in Vermont. These canoes were built by a Cree Chief in Manawan, Quebec in the late 1950's. When the camp closed in 1988 they kept this one canoe which hung in a barn until I got it. 

It was made of one piece of birch bark, but unfortunately due to it drying out, both ends had broken off and it was split from gunwale to gunwale amidships. Wanting to restore it to as close as possible to it's original condition I decided to do all work on the canoe with the same tools that would have been used to originally build it.  Such as a draw knife, crooked knife, plane, awl and hatchet. All materials needed for the restoration, including birch bark, spruce root, cedar and maple I harvested right here locally. 

I completely dismantled the entire canoe keeping as many parts to re-use as possible. It did not comewith either seats or thwarts and the original gunwales were broken. I was able to save most of the original cedar planking and ribs. I chose to put seats in it as I have trouble kneeling and was hoping to paddle it more often. For a complete overview of the restoration work please see the following thread in the WCHA discussion forum site:

https://forums.wcha.org/threads/birch-bark-canoe-restoration.17123/

After paddling this canoe for the past three years I realized that it had a story to tell and that wasn't being done sitting in my backyard as often as it was. So this Spring I posted an ad locally asking for anyone who might be interested in the canoe to tell me why and what they'd use it for? You can imagine that all I ever got was people wanting it for nothing so they could turn around and sell it for profit. That is, until I heard from JP Longboat. He is a member of the Mohawk tribe, Turtle clan of the Six Nations peoples and serves as their story teller. It was meant to be and I knew that this was where this canoe now belonged, back in the hands of our First Nations Peoples who had built it. As it turned out the only day we were both available to get together was June 21st, National Indigenous Peoples Day. JP has promised to keep me in the loop on how the canoe is being used to tell not only its story but the story of those who built it and continue to build these amazing craft.