Northwest Dugout Gathering

A couple weeks ago there was an amazing gathering of 70 or more Northwest-Indian-style canoes in LaConner, Washington. Most were true dugouts, but a few were replicas produced by other means -- fiberglass, strip-plank, etc. Some great photos in this post on the WoodenBoat Forum. (Scroll down and you'll also see a few great shots of a Maori dugout and a few other dugout oddities.) I had no idea that the native people of the US and Canadian northwest were so active in reproducing and using these beautiful boats.

Plywood "log boats"

Reader "Edwin" left a comment on my previous post about Tlingit log canoes that I thought worthwhile highlighting here, since many of us don't read comments. He draws our attention to Applegate Boatworks of Veneta, Oregon, which, along with the usual boatbuilding services on conventional western-style boats, also builds canoes that resemble the large cedar dugout canoes of the Pacific Northwest. The corker, however, is that he builds them out of plywood, using the "taped seam" (a.k.a. stitch and glue) method. (In reality, it's even stranger: the basic hull is plywood, while the ends are solid cedar, so they can be carved to replicate the shapes of the originals.)

They actually look pretty cool, and the stated purpose is to give people some of the experience of the native craft at reasonable cost and accessibility.

Thanks for the link, Edwin.

Edwin maintains Dark Ages Boats, which I've only just begun to look at but which looks very cool and has some bearing on what we call Indigenous Boats. I'll be spending more time there and may report back in the future.

(Photo from the Applegate website.)

American Canoe Culture, East vs. West

In the chapter "Vessels of Life: Northwest Coast Dugouts" of The Canoe: A Living Tradition, Steven C. Brown noted that "the existence of sea-going canoes enabled the Aboriginal Northwest Coast peoples to become the masters of their worlds, living in a seasonal round of camp and village locations that were advantageous for the harvesting of varied and plentiful food resources."

This represented a fundamental difference from the canoe culture of the American northeast, beyond the very distinct craft that predominated in those two areas. For where the Northwest cultures (ranging from present-day Washington state to Alaska) relied upon their large dugouts for seasonal migration, the Northeast cultures did not rely on their smaller dugouts and bark canoes for the same purpose. Both cultures, of course, used their canoes as hunting tools (seeking different game), but the Indians of the northeast did not engage in coastwise migrations. Northeast seasonal migrations were, I believe, primarily movements from the coast to inland and back. Canoes would have been superfluous during the winter months spent inland, when all surface water is frozen.

The Indians of the Northwest, in addition, seem to have maintained a richer material culture, and their large dugouts were well-suited to carrying everything owned by a village. (Indeed, it is said that there were enough canoes in the region to carry every single person living there, plus virtually all of their portable goods.) Northeast Indians had less to carry on their migrations and could do it on their backs.

I suppose this just demonstrates what is a well-known distinction; that the Northwest Indians were a maritime culture, as distinct from the Northweast Indians, who were a woodland culture.

By the way, The Canoe: A Living Tradition is a very pretty book. Its content is uneven -- the level of detail and method of treatment varies from chapter to chapter, each of which was written by a different author -- but there's much interesting information here for a canoe history novice like myself, and lots of nice photos.

The photo above shows a 63' Haida canoe from the Queen Charlotte Islands off British Columbia and was built in 1878. It is from the website of the American Museum of Natural History and is described in detail here.