Preserving Native American lore — excerpts from “Lies to Live By”

By Lois Bearslee
Michigan State University Press, published 2003
Lois Beardslee, author of Lies to Live By, is an accomplished Native American artist, teacher and writer in Leelanau County. She practices many traditional art forms, including birch bark biting, quillwork, and sweetgrass basketry, as well as painting and illustration. In publishing these excerpts from Lies to Live By, the Glen Arbor Sun seeks to initiate and expand coverage of this area’s history and traditions preceding the white man’s arrival. — the Editors

Birch Bark Biting
As far as I know, there were only two of us alive in Michigan still making birch bark bitings, although for years Canadian collectors told me about an older lady in the far north who was still making them. Then I started hearing about the lady who made them bus was in her eighties. Finally, someone told me that she was gone. One Valentine’s Day, I traveled around Lake Nipigon. While there, I demonstrated to some of the Ojibwe and Cree women how to make bark cutouts. Some of the people I spoke to asked if I did bark bitings. It is an art form that is remembered and respected, but no one there knew how or knew of any local individual who still made them. There is so much communication, travel, and intermarriage between the Indian communities of the northern Great Lakes, that word tends to get around about such things. We value the old art forms and want to know who still does what.
That was back when there were two of us. Then Ron had his eyetooth pulled. The bitings are created only with the eyetooth, and the biter, either right-handed or left-handed, tends to favor one eyetooth over another. Never having gotten the opportunity to demonstrate bitings to any of the interested parties at Lake Nipigon, I found myself the last living soul I knew of still creating this art form. Painfully aware of my own mortality, I began dragging other Indians out into the nearest birch woods. “I don’t want the responsibility,” I insisted.
Birch bark bitings were originally done strictly for amusement. The designs are traditionally floral and abstract. Pictures of animals are also done, and these are usually at least bilaterally symmetrical. As a child, I saw it done near the small northern Ontario Indian community of Palomar. The bitings were done as a curiosity after dinner, by a couple of older men who peeled the bark directly off the firewood next to the stove. I was very young and didn’t know yet that these things I saw would disappear, so I didn’t really pay attention to the details of how the bark was treated. Mostly I remember the joking and cajoling as the designs were held up to the kerosene lamp. One uncle lacked the necessary teeth to make the designs.
Eventually, as an adult, I began to try bark biting as an offshoot of other bark that I do. It was hard, and it hurt my teeth. One day Ron Paquin, a Native who worked at the Ojibwe Culture Museum in St. Ignace, Michigan, mentioned that he did bitings. He suggested that I try heating the bark over a candle flame to make it more pliable. Although I had known that heat was traditionally used to flatten large sheets of birch bark, it had not occurred to me to try it on such delicate layers. It’s tricky. As Ron warned, too much heat destroys the bark.
Today, I make my bitings while I am doing other bark work, utilizing the papery thin layers that peel off but are too thin to fold and cut. I rarely have time to use fresh bark when it is first gathered. Much of my bark work is done during the winter, when the bark is less supple. I trim the bark so that it is symmetrical, because the designs are created strictly by folding, refolding, and planning the bite patterns. I use the pot of hot water on my woodstove to heat the bark. If I am making a particularly complex design, I keep touching parts of the bark to the stove surface. I use the warm water to help pull apart the bitten layers without splitting them. Pressing the unfolded finished pieces onto a hot, cast-iron skillet helps to eliminate fold lines and create a smoother finish for market work.
I don’t remember how many years ago I started making the bark bitings, I’ve gotten better over the years, just because of the hands-on learning experience I’ve had. It is my absolute favorite traditional art form, because of the surprise element created by the challenge of working with a surface I can’t see once it enters my mouth. As with bark cutting, the size, shape, thickness, and texture of each individual piece of bark determines the final product. No two are alike. Birch bark biting is also the single most threatened traditional Woodland Indian art form that I know of. I can teach people how to do the cutouts any time, any place, with paper and scissors. But biting is trickier, and young people think it’s “icky,” because I put the bark in my mouth.
Sometimes when I am out in the woods I pick up pieces of bark that the tree sheds naturally during winter’s harsh winds. I make bitings, then lift and release them to flutter away in the breeze. This is how I thank the woodlands for my livelihood. This is the way of leaving a message to future generations that the Anishnabeg are still here, that this one small tradition has not yet perished. Sometimes my children find the bitings, years after I have released them. For a few brief moments we admire the tree’s gift of a particularly suitable piece of bark, and we wonder at the durability of the medium. Then we send them back to the forest floor… I long to find someone else’s, for the security that comes with being part of a mainstream, part of something that is alive and growing, like a culture.
One of our traditional stories tells about a group of siblings who entertain themselves by cutting and biting animal and floral motifs with their mother’s basket-making scraps. Preoccupied by the illness of her youngest son, the mother angrily swept the children’s “mess” into the fire. Later, her recollection of the bark designs was the only remedy to save the infant’s life.
Minan
Minan is the Ojibwe word for berries. Some berries are named for what they look like. Strawberries are really called “heart berries,” or oday-minan. Raspberries are miskiwiminan —“blood berries.” As children, after we had carried them around in our hands for too long, we used to call them miskiwiiwiminan, or “bloody berries.”
The word for blueberries is simply minan — “berries.” Blueberries are the most important wild fruit in the subarctic. People who have never been north of the southern Great Lakes during late summer and autumn cannot fathom how extensively minan grow. They are not picked a handful at a time. They grow in such large, thick, bushy swaths that women and children can gather huge quantities of them in only a few hours. Minan have such a high content of sugar and pectin that they stay intact and harvestable from mid-August until hard frost. Even if the berries dry on the bushes, they are still harvestable and edible. In the old days, it was not uncommon for northern Ojibwe to trade blueberries for corn, beans, and squash with their cousins to the south.
My family has a camp in the far north. In September we bake as many as a half-dozen blueberry pies in one day. Big, full, bulging pies. We scoop up the minan with our fingers stretched out, raking them up by the handful, eating at least as many as we bring home. I have always told my children that I have only one berry-picking rule: for every berry you put in the bucket, you must put two in your mouth. A favorite game is to eat them like bears, on all fours, no hands.
We are not alone when we pick our berries. Sometimes the dog’s ears perk up. We look up, to stare off into the bush where a lumbering, crashing sound in the woods has come to a sudden stop. Sometimes we pick so quietly that the bears happen upon us. They watch us, then silently, cautiously back away. It is their favorite blueberry spot, too. On the way home, we see their loose, blue-stained stools on the dusty openness of the bush trail. It seems that we both enjoy and depend upon minan so much that we risk this uncomfortable interaction with one another.
We have a story about Minan, the Blueberry Boy. He wandered off from his sister and his mother. Like most small children, he didn’t understand the importance of the task of gathering berries for the long winter ahead. He ate so many berries that he turned into a bear, and his family did not recognize him.
I gaze over at my own little blue-tooted Minan and urge him to stay a little closer to me and the dog. The big St. Bernard cross is lying down, lapping up blueberries with her tongue. When the buckets are full, we join her for a last-minute feast, on all fours, no hands. Mmmmmmmm-minan.
Lies to Live By was published in 2003 by the Michigan State University Press and is available locally at the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor. Lois Beardslee’s next book is forthcoming. For information about the publisher, please visit www.msupress.msu.edu or call (517) 355-9543.