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We're really excited to work on these types of incredible objects but what's frustrating
is that things will come in and we'll have to understand, learn, things are really new.
What are the properties of birch bark, how do quill's act when you're working with
them. And so for us to have experts like you all here, it's great because I feel like
we can do so much of that investigation on our own but there are a lot of blanks that
we don't understand because we just don't have that familiarity.
The mission of the museum states that expertise is held in communities and that we need to
work in partnership, the more we understand about these pieces, the better we are able
to care for them while they're here at the museum. So we take that job very seriously.
My birth name is Binaakwiikwe, which means Falling Leaves Woman, my English name is Yvonne
Marie Walker, and then my married name is Yvonne Marie Keschick.
My name is Mina Toulouse from Sagamok First Nation Canada. I am here to help the museum
identify their quill boxes because I'm in quill box making.
My name is Theodore Toulouse and I'm also from Canada, Sagamok Anishnawbek Reserve,
I'm here to help Mina for her demonstration and to identify the items.
We usually get our porcupine quills from farmers, cottagers, and road kill (laughter).
I tell the kids this is a porcupine, and then he crossed the road, and here he is. (laughter)
I never tried the natural dyes but the black, how do you do with your black?
I don't use dye, try not to, I try to use the natural quills.
This sweet grass here, when I blanch it, I put it in a dry place and I usually get a
dark, a black material to cover it. How do you?
After it's dry, and we take it off the strings cause it's hanging up in bunches like a grass skirt.
How my grandmother used to do that, in those
days we had a wood stove, she would make a great big fire, and she would slap it, then
flip it over again. And left it on the stove? Unhah, left it on the stove for a while and
then turn it this way again. And her's stayed green for a long, long time.
My teacher Susan Shagonaby said the bark was ready to pick from the trees when the strawberries
are ripe in June in the area where you live. I put tobacco down at the first tree, a general
prayer for all the trees that I'm going to cut. We don't cut every tree we come to,
if the tree is stripping then, we'll cut, the long cut all the way down from as high
as you can reach down to about knee level and then you cut it off, lift the corner and
run your fingers down like this, and it lifts right off, real easy, right where itís supposed
to come off. And all you can hear through the woods is [sound] it's scary because you don't
know what that sound is somebody out there shooting, and the gophers that come along
with us, gather up the bark, it's usually younger people, teenagers will do that, so
they see and they learn. This is white birch, this is the sap side,
this is the part that is wet. I don't think Odawa people could have survived without the
use of the birch bark tree. Maybe one day, you could do a brainstorming of all the things
you can make from birch bark. The majority of the quill boxes that we had
were used for storing dried foods, seeds, herbs, medicine, things like that. With the
Europeans coming they wanted boxes to store gloves, handkerchiefs, snuff boxes, and jewelry.
It caused a change in the making of the quill boxes. And it also made a big demand as a
trade item. So what we're going to be making today is
a birch bark pendent. It's two pieces of bark that are placed together, you quill each
side and then sweet grass gets sewn around the item. So itís a very uncomplicated thing.
It's an introduction to quill work. Do anyone need some more water? Beesh Beesh
over here. I know which one's going to be real good.
It's the perfect circle. Don't come over here Mina.
When you look at it close it's almost touching the quill next door, so the awl and the quill
are almost the same thickness. Quill work is not difficult, it's time consuming, but
I love doing quill work. It's therapy, it's therapy.
Most of them say, after they do a workshop, they say well, now I know why these are expensive.
[laughter] That's so true Mina.
We're getting ready to sew the pieces together. Start sewing, if you right handed, your sweet
grass is going to point off towards your left hand. You're going to wipe stitch all the
way around. And this is a feather using natural shading and this is our tribal eagle.
In our profession, they want us to leave every trace. Now there are different levels of this,
and this is what I'm interested in talking about, there might be options that we're
not thinking about, so while you all are here, it would be really great to talk about what
the different options are. So what we did today will really will inform what we are
writing in this section because we learned much more about how these pieces are made
than we knew before. So what I tried to do was actually glue pieces
of quill onto the tiny little ends and use the quill as a bridge. It worked. I feel like
if I were more adept at using quill, quill working, it would have been easier, more successful.
The thing I liked about it was it gave the same dimension as the quill. The process of
taking the old quill out inserting a new quill, we're very interested in hearing how you
all would do that, and I think the next phase is, if we're really aren't allowed, if they
really don't want us to remove any of the original materials, what we can do.
When I work on an object that needs quills to be replaced, I use the tweezers and the
awl to pull out the old pieces and then if thereís a little stump left in the hole,
I have another awl with a flat tip on it and it falls into the lining, pull it through
on the other side as if it were a single layer of bark, though I'm actually going through
the inner and the outer layer and pull it through and then do the same thing with the top.
It's the lifetime of the quill box, it's
wear and tear and on the box, there are some that they bring to me that are too old, too
brittle, too dry, too damaged, the threads are rotting on it. I cannot repair this, this
one has gone too far. And just let it live out its lifetime the way it is. And when you
dispose of it, you burn it. Again, in working with the curators, a lot
of the discussion centered around is the design disrupted, is this distracting,
to fix it would remedy the distraction. It doesn't take anything away from the piece
and it adds more. What we do, versus what the artist did, has
to be really identifiable, so Nancy when she's been working on here things, she marks the
quills with a U/V marker, you canít see but if someone looks at it under U/V they can
tell which quills sheís replaced. And that's something that we are required to do and we
write it in the report and document where it is, that's another thing that we have
to keep in mind when weíre deciding on what to do.
I was really excited, it was a real opportunity to see other people's work, I didn't recognize
anyone's work and yet the color and the age of the boxes was surprising to me.
And the repair work that was going on, the conservation part that was going on to preserve it.
I thought that was really great.