Indigenous students build canoe from scratch as part of traditional learning

Students building Indigenous canoes from scratch From CTV Kitchener's Heather Senoran: A group of UGDSB students are getting a lesson on Indigenous heritage by building a birch bark canoe.

GUELPH — Indigenous students from the Upper Grand District School Board headed out into the Eramosa River in a canoe they built from scratch this week.

It’s all part of a course to help students connect to their heritage using the traditional art of birch bark canoe building while also earning a credit.

“To come and earn a credit for summer school and do something that doesn’t normally have it in our school system,” Colinda Clyne, the lead of First Nation, Metis and Inuit education at the UGDSB.

The school board said it is important for students to stay connected to their roots.

“Learning Indigenous history, learning different realities today because we don’t want people to just be teaching us as people from the past,” said Clyne.

"I think all Indigenous students should learn how to do traditional things like this," one student said.

Leading the course was master canoe builder Chuck Commanda. Commanda is considered one of the few First Nations individuals who continues to practice the art of building canoes with birch bark. It’s an old traditional involving no manufactured parts: just cedar wood, spruce needles and birch bark.

“For a 12 foot canoe you’re looking at about 600 to 700 feet of prepared root,” said Commanda.

In the Indigenous community, it goes beyond physical materials. There is also what's known as The Sacred Grandfather Teachings'.

“There’s seven of them: love, wisdom, bravery, courage, Humility, honesty, and truth,” Commanda said.

There’s strong significance behind the canoe, a popular symbol in both Canada and within Indigenous history.

“For the Eastern Woodlands people which would’ve included all of the Anishinaabe tribes that was their main mode of transportation,” said Commanda.

The sustainability of harvesting is one of the main lessons Commanda hopes students take away from this experience.

“We don’t want to go in there and harvest everything and take away from the next seven generations. We’ve got to keep those next generations in mind all the time,” said Commanda.

The team took their canoe out on the Eramosa River after building it in a just over a week.