De Pan

One of the blogs I follow keenly is that of Mike Elliot of Kettle River Canoes. Mike's artistry and skill with cedar canvas canoe restoration is just wonderful. His posts are filled with nuggets of wisdom and fantastic photos of restoration projects. A recent post about spring cleaning for the canoe included a picture of a custom made paddle in the Western Cree style with a bobble grip.

Adney has an illustration of the Western Cree paddles and noted that this tribe was the only one he was aware that had separate paddle designs for men and women. Graham Warren also has a reduced image of this paddle shape in his books as well.


Adney's Plans; Mike's Alder version
Mike generously emailed some extra details about the paddle. It is made from an 8/4 board of Alder (Alnus rubra) which was then worked down to shape the 2" bobble grip. That's a lot of extra carving! This prevented the need to laminate extra wood on the grip, as was the case with my bobble grip experiment. Never made a paddle out of Red Alder before but I just checked out the Exotic-Woods.ca site and it is available - looks to be a gorgeous grain pattern as well. Many thanks for the paddle wood suggestion!

Came across another treasure trove of paddle information on Archive.org. This publication entitled, Material culture of the Davis Inlet and Barren Ground Naskapi outlines enthographic items collected by William Duncan Strong from the Davis Inlet and Barren Ground Naskapi in 1927-1928.

Plate 49 (pg 89) features a diagram of 4 decorated Naskapi paddles accompanying the model canoes in the collection...


Naskapi Paddles in the Strong Collection
These are, not surprisingly, very similar to the sketches in Garth Taylor's, 1980 publication, Canoe construction in a Cree cultural tradition which I used in the painted decoration of my Bushcraft Cree spruce paddle. Pgs 19-20 contain a book contains a brief write-up on these paddles:

The collection contains seven canoe paddles, with handles approximately half the length of the blades or slightly less. The blades are flat or have a slight ridge down the center and vary in width from 7.5 cm to 11.5 cm. The handles widen slightly and are flattened at the end. Only two specimens show signs of use. The blades of five paddles are decorated; the decoration on the illustrated specimens, in orange pigment, red crayon, and indelible pencil, is typical (fig. 49A-D). The partridge design and a motif which Strong (1928e) called "whale tails" occur on one paddle (fig. 49B). These bands of decoration appear to be a common feature on paddles, at least as far west as the Cree around Great Whale River (Taylor, p. 94, fig. 9).

After waiting 4 months on the Toronto Public Library's system, I finally got a hold of Garth Taylor's book Canoe construction in a Cree cultural tradition(1980). It documents a commission build for the Canadian Museum of Civilization of a traditional Eastern Cree canoe made using canvas as a substitute for birch bark.

The building took place of the summer of 1979 in the village of Great Whale River (now Whapmagoostui) in northern Quebec. John Kawapit and a few assistants constructed the craft using traditional methods and material available to them. Gunwales, ribs, and sheathing were made of spruce rather than white cedar used by more southern builders.

Taylor points out that use of canvas for the hull began early in the 20th century and by 1908 was nearly used exclusively for its ease of use and durability. It required slight modification of the gunwales, use of nails rather that root lashing and an exterior stem piece. Normally the canvas was painted to make it waterproof but a shortage of paint at the time meant it was left untouched save for the red decorative marks on the ends and ribs. The final work is pictured below.


John Kawapit's Eastern Cree Canoe
Artifact Number III-D-686 a
Full Citation