At the east entrance on the first floor of the Royal Ontario Museum, opposite to the ticket counter, there is a First Peoples gallery. As soon as you enter the gallery, you can see a large canoe with several small ones hanging above. Today let’s talk about this big canoe.
Such canoes appeared around 1700, long before Europeans arrived. This large canoe requires more than ten people to master and can carry three or four tons of cargo. The canoe on display is 10 meters long and 1.5 meters wide in the middle. The canoe has an upward protrusion at each end, a typical sign of Algonquian canoes.
There are only four materials used to make this canoe. First comes the birch bark, the inside of the bark is the outside of the canoe. The birch bark used to make canoe is very particular. It can only be picked in summer or winter, so that patterns can be carved on the bark. We can see that the tail of the canoe is engraved with a four-petal flower symbolizing the tribe. In the front is the head of an Indian, and in the middle are the name of the canoe maker and the name of the tribe to which it belongs.
The second material is cedar slats used as supports. The third material is spruce roots, which act like thread to sew the boat together where needed. The fourth is a waterproof layer mixed with spruce gum, charcoal, and animal fat. Generally, the frame is made first and then the outside of a boat, but for this kind of canoe, the outside is made first and then the inside.
This canoe did not come from the First peoples. It was made on-site in 1971 by a famous canoe maker during a folk music festival on Toronto's Central Island. There were only four canoes handed down from the First Peoples, but two of them were destroyed by fire. So even though it's from the last century, it's a museum-worthy treasure.
By the way, there are three categories of First peoples in Canada: Indians (also called First Nation), Inuit, and Médis.