The following interview is with Irving Dana, a member of the Peskotomuhkati (Passamaquoddy) First Nation originally from Sipayik (Pleasant Point) First Nation community in Washington County Maine. The interview was conducted with Trudy Sable on November 1, 1995, in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia. The interview was part of Sable’s research on Indigenous knowledge, including language. stories, songs, and dance, for creating a cross-cultural science curriculum for Indigenous students.

Archiving of the interview is sponsored through the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre in Kjipuktuk, N.S. Pam Glode-Desrocher, Executive Director, as part of the development of the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia Archival Collection, Trudy Sable, Curator. Funding for the project was through the Department of Canadian Heritage Aboriginal Language Initiatives Program (2018-2021) and the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage (2022-2023).

(Trudy is discussing how different words in different languages hold different meanings and descriptions of trees, plants, berries, etc.)

TS        But does it literally mean something else, like, but that’s the English word, right?

ID        Is it?

TS        I mean, birch is the English word. But what would it have meant before English? You see, that’s what I’m trying to understand.

ID        I don’t know (laughs) yeah, yeah.

TS        You see what I’m saying? It’s a whole different thing. It’s like Wilfred (ed. Prosper) looked at something and said “Oh, that’s a summer berry tree, you know? And that means a lot different than the English word.

ID        Yeah.

TS        Uh, there’s another word that was given to me, wiaqajk, it was the red ochre place (Ed. it connotes a place of ochre), but it was the red ochre place, that sort of thing. So, you get description more than you get the, you get the idea of what it was used for, or what was meaningful, as opposed to just, you know, an old birch, blah blah blah. That’s what I’m trying to get.

ID        Yeah, (laughs) yeah.

TS        But look I want to show you something.  This is a description of how the Mi’kmaq made canoes. And what I want to do is, how, if it’s similar or different from the process that you understand or from beginning to end, how do you go about making a canoe?

ID        Mmhmm.

TS        And uh, your whole attitude toward it too.

ID]      To tie (inaudible) the inner canoe structure (?) we use the youngest spruce.

TS        Why’s that? Is it flexible, or is it…?

ID        Strong.

TS        Is its spruce roots, you mean? For tying? Is that what you’re talking about?

ID        Yeah… yeah, plus, its strong, plus, they don’t split as easy as birch would. But the bone part, like poking the holes and stuff, you do the same thing, we use the bone of a bird, and use a leg bone of a bird.  What we do is we sharpen the end and sort of poke it through the bark. But how we do it, how a canoe is really started is um, we go in the woods, and we find a tree maybe, I’d say about uh, two feet…I’d say about three or four feet in diameter, you know. So… then we cut it down.

TS        What kind of tree?

ID        Birch, white birch. Then when we get that is like, usually in the springtime, cause the bark peels a lot easier. And what we do, is we, how we peel it, we peel it with an ax. And we just peel it around and it comes off. And then we take that, and we make a one, no, two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, twelve sticks in the ground, shaped like a, kind of like an oval shape, I guess. Something like that. You know what I mean, ah?

TS        In the ground, you put the sticks in the ground?

ID        Yeah. Put the sticks in the ground. And what we do, is we take that bark, and we shape it in there.  It’s like this.

TS        It’s like a mold?

ID        Yeah. That’s the mold, yeah. So, it’s like it holds it together like this, okay. Then after that, to keep its shape on the bottom, right? where the belly’s at, you put rocks, like, big rocks to get that shape. It’s just like on the ground, and when it comes up it’s like this, you know what I mean? Okay, then we cut it from one tip, say about maybe an arm length, so you cut it there so it flaps over and the reason why we flap it over is so that we can get that, that curve.

TS        Wait is the birch bark length wise or from side to side, the strips?

ID        It’s the whole thing length wise, but it’s like this, from side to side.

TS        So if this is a circle of birch bark, it would be lengthwise, and then curled up?

ID        Curled up, like that, yeah.

TS        Length wise, and curled up…

ID        Yeah, curled up like that, yeah. So, you got a shape…you have a shape like this.

TS        Yeah. One piece?

ID        Yeah. The whole, yeah, in one piece.

TS        That would be one solid piece of birth bark?

ID        The whole tree, yeah. You use the whole tree.

TS        Do you strip the birch from the tree, top to bottom or side to side? How do you get that in one strip?

ID        (Inaudible at 5:54 mins)

TS        So like, you go what, 8 or 10 feet up…

ID        Well, if you’re making a twelve, let’s say we’re making a fourteen-foot canoe, you go like maybe 17 feet, you know, to get your fourteen feet…gives you enough to work with. So, you cut over here and over here, so you have that fold and what it does it brings it up a little bit, you know what I mean? Brings it up a little bit, and then you know, you cut, you cut for the roundedness. And then over here, okay now you got your rocks in there. The reason I have the rocks in there is, so it’ll be flat on the ground, like this. Okay? Then we have that, and you’ll let it set for, I’d say five days.

TS        Why is that?

ID        So that it will be able to take good shape.

TS        So the birch just… you want it pliable enough to…

ID        Yeah but you know, a series of rocks, a whole bunch of rocks.

TS        A series?

ID        A series.

TS        Oh, a series. Okay.

ID        A lot of rocks. And um…

TS        But they must be rounded, right?

ID        Not necessarily, you know. You put water in there, so you know, it’ll get the shape. Where you cut…you see, I might be going too fast here myself. (laughs) I’ll slow down… or the canoe will sink. (both laugh) Um… Okay, then the rocks. Okay, then you let it set for five days, okay? What we had done is we had connected these parts together then we cut it out, right? We cut it out, the shape of the canoe. Okay, then we just put something there to hold it together, so you get that shape with the belly and the rocks. Okay what we do next is we start gathering the materials. The materials is from um, like a small, the pine (?) it’s a small spruce tree, a baby. What we do is we pick up the longest roots, then what we do is we take them out and we cut them, and then what we do is we um, cut them in half and then we split them. Then what we do there is we use that for lacing. But where we had cut here, over here and over here. Okay? After we gather that we go for the water proofing so it won’t leak when we get in, and what we use there is spruce also.We use the sap of a big spruce, the older ones. We gather that.

TS        Isn’t that black spruce?

ID        Black spruce, yeah. We gather all that. Spruce gum, black spruce gum, you know. Boil that down.

TS        How do you gather that? Scrape it off the tree?

ID        You have to scrape it off the tree or chop it off. Okay and we got that. Okay now we want the cedar, and what we do is with the cedar, and it’s gonna be for the inside. The shape. The ribs.

TS        The ribs, right.

ID        The ribs. You have on the boat maybe five inches wide. They’re real thin, you  shave them down real thin. Okay and what we’ll do is we’ll put them in. Put them all in inside the belly, inside so we’ll have them all right there. Okay then what we do after that is, we get what we call a hoop or a rim, that goes inside of the canoe. And outside of the canoe that’s made of white ash, or brown ash it doesn’t matter as long as it’s ash, because it’s flexible. What we’ll do is we’ll put that on the outside and the inside, okay.

TS        What do need cedar on the inside hoops?  Where?

ID        Why do we use Cedar? Because it’s flexible enough and it lasts longer.

TS        Than ash would, even though ash is flexible?

ID        Yeah, exactly. Okay now we’ve got all that in, okay? Now we start stringing the pieces together. So, what we do, you know, is poke holes in the cedar.

TS        In the cedar?

ID        Yeah, in the cedar. Now we got our holes around here, right? On the outside. Okay now we start lacing it together, with the, the black one, the black spruce.

TS        So where the rib meets the birch bark at the edge?

ID        Yeah, at the edge. Like this, then like that. Then, you know, you got your white ash or your brown ash over here and on this side.

TS        So the rim goes around the edge and hoops inside and the birch is between the two.

ID        Yeah, then you tie them in, you do what they call a whipping (?), you tie them together. You go all the way around, now the ribs are… not (?), but the ribs maybe a foot they will slip, you know, (fall apart, 11:50), so you make them closer. It all depends on how you want it. But I usually put them about 8 inches, maybe 6 inches apart.

Okay now we got that, then we start lacing it around. And we lace the sides over here like that and you see it’s all laced all the way around, okay, and you have that. Okay, now we start boiling the uh, and making the sap. What we do is sometimes you boil it and sometimes you  put it on the (fire?)  but usually I boil it. I boil it, you know, with a little bit of fat. A little bit of fat, you know, thickens it up.

TS        And (Inaudible at 12:45)

ID        Yeah, it doesn’t matter. What we do is we put that, where we had cut down in here, and around the whole thing you got to put it on real thick, you know. And when it hardens it hardens like a rock. Then you take the sides of it and have your canoe. It’s simple. Simple. But the seats, you had to poke holes in the seats too.There’s a certain part before (to hold?) your seats up where you just gotta poke holes in there so you can lace it in there, too.

TS        You lace the seats in too?  Those are spruce roots?

ID        Yeah

TS        Black spruce roots?  Or are they ash? 

ID        The seats? Yeah. They’re ash.

TS        How do you?? (inaudible?)

ID        Well you have your seat right here, and you put two holes in here, right? Then you just lace them in this way.

TS        Is it resting on the rim or anything?

ID        Nope.

TS        Is it just loose?

ID        Just loose, loose there. That black spruce, that black spruce. It’s so strong, it’s hard to break there.

TS        Are you latching it around the rim?

ID        Yeah, yeah, you latch it around the rim, on the inside. And uh, the paddles, we usually use ash too and make them like, six feet, from one end of your arm (?) to the other.  (inaudible)

TS        Do you make the same paddles for men and women?

ID        Yeah. Doesn’t matter.

TS        Someone told me they were different for men and women, I forget.

ID        Oh, yeah. I don’t know, maybe. Probably used in certain ceremonies, they probably used canoes in ceremonies, probably.

TS        How would you use a canoe in a ceremony?

ID        I don’t know, I’ve never done it before. There must have been some kind of ceremony, you know what I mean?

TS        Yeah, yeah. What’s the word, see this is what I was curious about. Like, see. Hold on. See? There’s certain words, they’re some kind of… all right, let me get the right one. (laughs) for posterity. This word… different types of bark for canoes, now this is how I’d written it from Rand, Silas, Rand—I was trying to find my dictionary so you could see it. I don’t know what it means. I mean that’s what he translates as. And this is what the linguist, he re-translated it, right? Says it’s plural. How would you say it? (Mi’kmaw 16:24) I know it’s not quite the same.

ID        (Inaudible) I can’t pronounce this; I don’t know how to read this. 

TS        Then there was a section, sorry…It had, uh, a bunch of different names for birch and different… like he has four different white birch, I’m assuming you’re talking about white birch when you’re talking about birch, right?

ID        Yeah, white birch, right.

TS        Like here, white birch. When they’re peeled… what season they’re peeled in?

ID        Springtime.

TS        Yeah, he was, in this particular Mi’kmaw dictionary, when they’re peeled out of… there’s different words for peeling birch out of season, peeling in the winter, when they’re stripped from an old dead log, young birch…

ID        You can use a dead log, you know, (Inaudible, 17:41) At my age, my age. (laughs)

TS        I guess I’m trying to understand what it is about the nature of the bark in spring that makes it good for…

ID        it peels better.

TS        It peels better, yeah. Is it more flexible as well?

ID        Yeah. It’s like it’s got that newer… newer bark.

TS        It won’t crumble.

ID        Won’t split.

TS        Cause I know that there’s also the bark was also used for wigwams, right, and dishes. Do you know anything about that, the different types? Would that be the same thing?

ID        The same thing, yeah.

TS        For dishes, the springtime bark, when the trees in new growth, is that what you’re saying?

ID        Yeah.

TS        It’s the freshest, juiciest.

ID        Yep. It’s the time, you know, when you look at the birds or something, it’s spring. Spring or the fall.

TS        What happens in the fall?

ID        They do the same thing.

TS        So they start shedding the bark? Is that what they do?

ID        Well they shed their top, you know, the first thin layer, and when you see that, that’s when you start cutting it.

TS        So is it the first layer there? Or do you get the new layer?

ID        You get the whole thing.

TS.      The new layer underneath?

ID        Yeah, Yeah.  You go right down to the wood itself and just peel it off.

TS        So what would old dead birch bark be used for, you know?

ID        Um, well, you can use it for the wigwam, for dishes and stuff like that.

TS        Would it be more brittle?

ID        Yeah, you can use it for canoes too, but I prefer to get mine… some people do it different.

TS        I heard one where uh, it was suspended over fire, the birch, using the bark. Have you heard of that being done?

ID        Hmm, nope.

TS        I was just curious. It seemed like a lot of work.

ID        Well, back then, they did a lot of work, you know?

TS        Do you do any designs or anything anymore on canoes, or painting, colouring it in any way?

ID        Hm, no. They used to, a long time ago. They had a certain kind of paint or something on there according to who it belongs to, you know?

TS        And porcupine quill work too.

ID        Yeah. One of the ( inaudible (?) name.

TS        Were there different canoes for ocean, and different for river?

ID        Oh, yeah.

TS       Do you still do that?

ID        No.

TS        Are the canoes you are describing here designed for the ocean, or…

ID        River, but the wider the belly and longer are for oceans.

TS        Wider and longer?

ID        Yeah, it gets tippy. I’ve been on a lake before, but not in the ocean.

TS        I was wondering if one chief could take me across the Bay of Fundy.

ID        No (laughs).

TS        I was reading about how somebody had done it in eight days, from Yarmouth to…No, (inaudible)

ID        Grand Manan?

TS        I can’t remember, I’d have to look it up again.

ID        Yeah, holy smokes.

TS        Yeah. Well, you’d have to ride the tides, right? And you’d have to catch the tides at the right time.

ID        Uh, yeah… a lot of paddling and a lot of praying (laughs). I know I wouldn’t be out there, not that far.

TS        Well, let’s see… what else? I mean, what do you measure these days? You measure the cuts and all?

ID        No, I just look at it (laughs). Just what I need, you know. But you work with what you’re comfortable with, you know? But the longer it is the better.

TS        How do you get the right balance, as well? Cause what I still don’t understand is, when you say you put on these pegs on the ground, you put the bark inside to basically hold it, to stop it from flopping, then you put the rocks in to give it a shape. But how do you get… I don’t understand why these things are this way. I guess the pegs would hold it to hold the rocks…

ID        Straight up and down.

TS        Straight up and down?

ID        Straight up and down, yeah. And so that when you have it like this and you get this and get that little molding like that, that’s where it comes in, whatcha you call it—your hoop?  it brings it in. But the other side looks a bit more… (inaudible 23:35)

TS        Can you think of how many terms, (inaudible-I know it is somewhat awkward when people ask you) are there words with the different parts of the canoe in Passamaquoddy? Are there a lot?

ID        Yeah, there are, but I don’t know them. But there are. See, this is why I learned off my uncle, because he knows all that stuff, you know.

TS        Mmhmm. That’s what I’m trying to sort piece all that all together. People like Margaret, Wilfred, knows.

ID        Yeah… With that you’d have to go to the older people, because they’d know that right down to the, you know, dig your roots and everything, the sap, and all that stuff.

TS        Yeah, that’s sort of what I’m trying to ferret out, you know, get out, is that type of fact. Because from my perspective it’s an extreme detail, you know, tremendous detail, and that’s what I’m trying to show is how precise it is.

ID        Oh yeah. Right down to the last thing. See if I’d known my language.

TS        I’m sorry, I don’t know a lot of my language either.

ID        There’s a word for it though.

TS.       Well, if I ever get it together, I will let you know.

ID:       Well, this is what I’m trying to do, I am trying to help the community out. This is what I want to do too. Is learning that, learning what is it used for, what’s does it mean to, you know, going to get the wood, to go and get it, you know. It’s like, we’re going to get the birch bark (inaudible).  A meaningful, more of a way to say that. Some of those words are hard to explain, you know what I mean? You just got to know it, you know, the meaning of it, you know?

TS        Yeah. Margaret (Johnson) tried to explain some of the words for the splints in the baskets, and some of them are very literal, but you also know there’s a whole relationship.

ID        A whole togetherness.

TS        Yeah, but if I asked for one word at a time as a literal meaning then it’s just that. I know there’s this sort of world around each word.

ID        Well even that, I don’t even know that, you know? There’s the knife, you know, the person making the basket, ans the splints, everything, how you put them on, because there’s a story to everything that you made, you know. The canoes are a story too, but I don’t know them. All that history right there, that’s what I’d like to get into. Something like that that I can teach.

TS        That’s what I’m trying to, I mean I would never be a  teacher in Mi’kmaw, and I’m just trying to say it can be done.

ID        Yeah, it can be done.

TS        That’s why I’m trying to figure out how to take a transcribed version of this story about a woman (going out in the canoe?)  showing that it’s based in reality, and through that you can understand the relationship, you know, sort of bring all of it together, almost bring the spiritual into the daily practical sort of a celebration joining together the different just in this canoe (inaudible)

ID        I suppose a long time ago, they probably had ceremonies before they took off in the water to take care of them while they were in the water.  Cause there was a meaning for everything, what they have done, and what they did.

TS        Yeah, I know in Mi’kmaw, now I don’t know exactly… Bernie (Francis) and I talked about this, a number of people have debated the word for canoe is animate, as opposed to inanimate. I don’t know if you have that one.

ID        Animate?

TS        You know, having sentience. It’s not exactly a spirit but some kind of will or consciousness.

ID        Yeah.

TS        Or some rocks, certain rocks, are animate, or have the potential to be, like Grandmother rocks, that kind of stuff, things  being called Grandmothers, not just rocks. Having some form of consciousness. Having some relationship.

ID        I suppose there was, yeah.

TS        That kind of thing because it changes how you relate to your world. As having a relationship with an object living or nonliving, you know. That kind of thing because it changes how you relate to it.

ID        Well, it’s a spirit. The tree is a spirit. It’s alive. Plus, it keeps us alive. They’re still doing the things what they were meant to do. But we as human beings just got confused somewhere, you know?  We are not fulfilling our (duty?) about what we are supposed to do.  But the animals and the trees and the plant life and the insect life…and everything that’s not human, and what I mean by that is, what I just said, the plant life and the animals, they’re still doing what they’re supposed to do, and that’s why they’re still here.

TS        Some of them.

ID        Yes, some of them, because of man, are extinct, which is sad. They should’ve listened to the Indian (laughs). You feel it (inaudible), there’s a lot of stuff, for me too, I am confused about that I have to find out for myself, you know, but it takes a while. You got to work hard at it. If you want something, you have to work hard at it. And something like that, like the traditional values of what my ancestors did a long time ago, that is something that I’d like to find out. I know some, but I don’t know all of it, and I will probably never know all of it, but at least I’ll know some of it, you know.

TS        Well you know, like when you were describing collecting medicine. I mean that’s been passed down on through the generations (inaudible) It hasn’t been changed.

ID        Well no it isn’t, you know, it’s just that you need to be aware of what you’re picking. If you you’re not aware of what you’re picking, it’s like…dealing with medicine. You got to know what you’re doing when you are doing that, you don’t just go out and say, “Well”, you know like you look…like they have these books on medicine, and you look at that book and you say, “Oh man, this is what it looks like!”  Okay, so a person goes out there and looks at it, okay, yeah but is it the right one, you know? So, you choose like this, like what my father taught me. There’s a left-handed one, there’s a right-handed one, and you stick to the right-handed one because there was one time that I went out and I picked the left-handed one. And I asked him, and he said (Passamaquoddy words) and I asked him, “Is this flagroot?”  And he looked at it and he goes, (Passamquoddy words), “Are you gonna get someone really sick?” And I go, “Oh, I picked the wrong one.” He goes, “Yeah” and throws it away. So, he explained to me what it looked like and stuff, and so I asked him, “Can you show me?” So, he says, “No.” He says, “You’ll know when you get there; you’ll know just by looking at it, you’ll know.” Sure enough, I went down to that place where he told me to go, and sure enough it was right there and I knew right then, I could even smell it. It was a brighter one, you know. And the one that I picked, it looked like the same thing, but it was duller looking. So that one was the right one. You could even (?) and smell it.

TS        Do you smell a lot?

ID        Oh, yeah.

TS        Mi’kmaq are always smelling me. (laughs)

ID        (laughs) Can tell what you had for dinner.

TS        I was just curious. I was thinking about, sweetgrass…I’ve been taken out to pick sweetgrass.

ID        Yeah, you’ll be driving along in your car, and you’ll smell that.

TS        Yeah, but do you smell…like if you saw a field of sweetgrass or an area of sweetgrass, would smell play in whether it was …

ID        Oh yeah, yeah

TS        … how sweet it smelled? Is that the same as medicine?

ID        Some medicines, yeah.

TS        The smell, the colour, and the whole….?

ID        The smell, the colour, the taste.

TS        But what does right and left have to do with that, though? Is that literal?

ID        Good and bad, right and left, black and white.

TS       It’s not like two plants here and you pick the right one.

ID        You stay with the white one, don’t pick the black one. You stay with the good one, don’t pick the bad one.

TS        So it’s not like you always pick the one on the right.

ID        (laughs) No. The one on the left might be good, the one on the right might be bad. You just got   to know how to look at it. Identifying, identify it.You gotta know what you’re picking.

TS        I wonder where right and left came from.

ID        I don’t know, I never asked my father that. I never did, you know?

TS        You had a no reason…

ID        Yeah, I got a reason not to ask him, “Where did that come from?”. He taught me something and that was it, you know.

TS        And you know inherently. Or you know.

ID        Even, you know, medicine, it is hard. It isn’t hard, you just gotta know what you’re doing. You just can’t go out there and do it. You’ll get someone really sick if you mess around with it (?)

TS        Is that the same, did you ever pick dyes, or plants for dying anything?

ID        No, I never did. But they are there. It’s like, you know, these people in…Where was it? I think it was Pennsylvania somewhere, they went out and they thought it was ginseng, but it wasn’t, it was ground hemlock. See, ground hemlock is good, it’s a good medicine, but it isn’t used for internal medicine. It’s used for your hair. You can’t use it internally—it’s a poison if you drink that. And they thought it was ginseng.

TS:       Not too bright.

ID:       No, it wasn’t. Two of them died because of that, you know what I mean? Even with these magic mushrooms and stuff.  There was a woman who approached me and asked me if I…there was two of them and they didn’t know what they were picking. And these mushrooms, the ones they wanted they wanted psilocybin, you know? And what they wanted to do with it was to use it.  Of course, they had it right there, but I just looked down at them and said, “You know, you guys don’t have them (?).  Because I knew already what they were going to use them—they were going to abuse them.

TS        Did you ever have to, did you make offerings when you went out to collect medicine?

ID        Oh yeah, you have to.

TS        Did your father teach you that as well?

ID        No, I already knew that.

TS        You mean as a child you knew that?

ID        Well, as I grew, people used to…yeah, as a child, yeah.

TS        Did your father (inaudible)

ID        Yeah, like they give something, you know. If someone brought medicine, they’d give like a penny or something, or a cup of coffee, or they’d traded with other medicine, stuff like that. So yeah, I remember (?) doing that a long time ago. You could use anything like bread, bread (inaudible), plant…

TS        It doesn’t matter, it’s just the act of offering no matter what it was you had? Is that what you were saying?

ID        Yeah, just making an offering.  It’s like you are giving your thanksgiving. You are thankful for that medicine.

TS        So it’s like giving medicine as well as taking medicine.

ID        Yeah, sort of. You just give your thanksgiving, be thankful for that.

TS        Would you sing, ever?

ID        Yeah, you can sing. You can sing a song (when you are offering?)

TS        Were you brought up, did you dance (when you were a child?), I mean Passamaquoddy dances?

ID        Yeah, mmhmm.

TS        Do you still do that?

ID        No, I don’t do it now.

TS        Do people do it?

ID        Yeah, they still do it.

TS        In the traditional way?

ID        Yeah, people do it in the traditional way. But sometimes it’s getting sold, it’s like a show or something. They don’t do it in a ceremonial way. And you know, that’s common, I guess.

TS        I was just wondering. This last powwow, I just bopped up to Eskasoni for a day to see Margaret and to see people—powwows are good places to see people. I was sitting with one woman, I think she was in her late 50’s, early 60’s.

ID        That’s what powwows are for.

TS        Yeah. She was saying it’s not like it used to be.

ID        It’s good will, you know. People getting together, seeing old faces, and dancing and eating, and just having a good time.

TS.      But the reason I asked you that question is that she was saying (inaudible) she was saying that is used to be completely different.

ID        Yeah, it’s completely different. They still dance, you know it doesn’t matter how you dance, or whatever, you know? At least they are dancing. Even if you get up there and walk, that’s part of a dance, walking, just walking in that circle.

TS        So, it’s being in a circle?

ID        Yeah, the circle of love (?) 

TS.       When did they do dances at Point Pleasant?

ID.       Oh, they just, you know. Any time they have a social gathering, we stay together, there’s dancing.

TS        Have you ever heard of the pine tree dance?

ID        Pine cone?

TS.       Pine needle

TS.       Yeah, Pine cone dance, that’s a woman’s dance.

TS        Is that the same as Pine needle?

ID        Pine cone, yeah. Take that pine cone and you dance, and you twist around it (inaudible)

TS        You mean when you put it on the ground?

ID        No, you put it on a blanket, or something and you dance

TS        That is like the Mi’kmaq, like Wilfred was saying.  They used to put it on anything, like a tin, or anything…

ID        Yeah, yeah. Just dance around it.

TS        Is that what the woman dancers (inaudible).

ID        Yeah. And the way, like the way you say it (ID speaks in Passamaquoddy), (Passamaquoddy word) means like “round”, “dancing around”, “you’re dancing around”. (Passamaquoddy word) means (inaudible)like the women dancers have to listen to the men, the way they are singing on the ground, and they (inaudible) like “dance harder”.  And they’re so beautiful when they do it, especially when you get like the older ones, and even some younger ones too, that’s been taught from their grandmothers. They’re very beautiful up there… and they’re all in one motion, you know what I mean? And you can feel it, I mean you could feel it, especially, like every time a grandma gets up there, oh man, you can feel it. Holy smokes. I don’t know, it brings tears to your eyes, you know?  And then you get the little tiny ones, you know they get their own way of dancing, they’re trying  to dance like them, or learning how to dance.

TS        Why do say they dance harder? I hear that a lot. Dance harder, dance harder. I hear it, I read it…

ID        I don’t know. I guess the harder you dance, I guess the Mother Earth hears you, I guess. Maybe, I don’t know.

TS        It’s like you’re putting out (more energy? inaudible)

ID        Maybe, I don’t know. Even that, you’d have to go to the old people. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t even know. That I have to start asking, I have to start learning so that way you pass it on, you know. Because if I don’t then there’s no one to pass it on, you know. You pass on that (inaudible), you know. Thank goodness for people who do, but if I don’t, you know, when they pass on, that’s going to go with them.

TS        Yeah. That’s how I feel with Margaret. You learn so much.

ID        Yeah, so much. You know, something that really has to be kept, and even if it has to be documented, or whatever, you know?

TS        Yeah. Anything else about canoes? (laughs)

ID        Now we just put in the water and just go. 

TS        Start paddling it. (laughs)

ID        Start paddling and wish for the best, I guess.

TS        Do you have to water it?

ID        No, I don’t think so.

TS        How long does a canoe last?

ID        Oh, it lasts a lifetime.

TS        Even if it was up on shore? Doesn’t it get brittle or dry out?

ID        I don’t know… yeah, you keep on shore.

TS        Does it rip on rocks?

ID        Oh, yeah, if you hit it hard enough.

TS        When did you, you know, when you were learning to canoe on a river (inaudible), did you have to be taught anything particular, or did you just have to come to know that body of water?

ID        Oh, yeah. You have to know where to rocks are at, where the (?) are at. Going down, you know, you have to look out for stuff.

TS        How far have you travelled by canoe?

ID        I travelled… the most I ever travelled is probably about 50 miles. It’s a long ways.

TS        Yeah, yeah. Hm, but not on the ocean. Not yet. (laughs)

ID        Well I’ve been on the ocean with canoes, but not like what you said, going from Yarmouth to across the bay. No, I never did that, the Bay of Fundy. It’s just like (inaudible) he came over one time, so I took him to see a whirlpool—it’s the biggest whirlpool in the world just you know, just off the bridge off the reserve right there.  And, he goes, “I’d like to take a canoe through there,” you know. “Go right ahead! I’ll even get the canoe for you! If you make it, I’ll shake your hand.” (laughs)

TS        Did he?

ID        No, But there’s a way. There was an old man named Grady(?), he used to go that way.  And he got caught in there, the whirlpool, the way it goes around, it shoots you out with the currents, and the way you got to hit it just right, you know, and that’s part of survival if you get caught in one of them.  But if you don’t know, you’re just a goner.

TS        Did you ever do that?

ID        No, never. I didn’t want to attempt it.  I’ve been around it, but not straight square in the middle of it.

TS        So you’d have to catch the current, just like the beginning of a thread or something. You have to go right with the current and be shot out. Like centrifugal force or something.

ID        Yeah, shoots you right out. Cause he’s gotten caught in there. I don’t know if he knew, or what had happened, but he made it out. Something told him just to do that.

TS        Should probably call it a day.

ID        You gonna go to the vet?