The Wall Street Journal today (8/29) has a front-page article about the
effort by the Penobscot Indians to re-acquire the skills for making
handcrafted birchbark canoes. They made the last one in 1920, and lost the
art when they adopted factory-made canoes. A white man, who taught himself
to make the canoes, is helping the tribe teach members the skills. It takes
a skilled worker about 400 hours of tough, often dirty work to make one
canoe.
The article is online at
www.WSJ.com.
Alex