Wub-e-ke-niew, drilling into the trees
The tap is inserted into the drilled hole.
Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
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[published in
the March/April 1996 Harmony Natural Foods Cooperative
newsletter]
By
the time you read this, we will be in our sugarbush:
cutting firewood, washing kettles and pails, experimenting with what we
hope
will be a more efficient sap evaporator, and checking our first tap to
see if
the sap is running yet.
As
the cycle of the seasons moves toward Spring, the days get
longer and the sunlight soaks the land with welcome warmth. Every being who has rested through the cold
of Winter begins to awaken. The birds
are beginning to return, the bear cubs making their first explorations
beyond
the den where they were born in mid-Winter, and the sap is beginning to
rise in
the trees. As the sugar-beet farmers in
the Red River Valley stare across acres of mud and wait for their
fields to dry
enough to start planting again, here it’s maple sugar-making time.
Sugar
maples were one of the foundations of Ahnishinahbæótjibway permaculture, of the
Aboriginal Indigenous peoples’
harmonious and respectful inter-relationship with the natural cycles of
Grandmother Earth. A sugarbush is part
of a complex, integrated ecosystem where several species of maple,
basswood,
birch, ash and other trees—along with hundreds of species of shrubs,
grasses,
ferns and herbs, birds and insects, and animals all live in symbiotic
and
mutually-supportive harmony. Ahnishinahbæótjibway permaculture was an
economy of abundance, egalitarian
and inter-connected, and not susceptible to centralized control. The Dodems (extended families) would
gather at the family sugarbushes to make sugar together in the Spring. Everybody from babies to centenarians worked
together in the sugarbush and enjoyed the companionship of the extended
family. The heat from sap-boiling fires
felt just right in the gathering warmth of springtime sunshine, and it
was a
beautiful time of year.
Although
the methods used to make maple syrup and maple sugar
have changed on the surface—steel drills instead of axes to tap the
trees, tin
cans and plastic pails instead of birchbark containers, metal or
plastic “taps”
instead of wooden ones—the basic process is still the same. The trees are tapped by cutting or drilling
through the bark into the sap-wood and the sap is collected, drop by
drop, in
pails or cans. The maple sap, which
runs sweet enough to make maple sugar only in the northeast part of
this
continent, is gathered and boiled for several hours to evaporate the
water. When it first starts to boil,
the hot sap begins to froth. We always
use deer tallow or pork fat, dipped into the boiling sap to stop the
foaming
and boiling over. Presently, some
people think that using a spruce bough is the way the Aboriginal
Indigenous
people used to stop the foaming. Not
true. Using a spruce bough actually
makes the syrup taste lousy, almost like turpentine, thus enhancing the
market
for commercial white sugar, and justifying cutting down the maple trees
for
furniture. It also discredits the
Aboriginal Indigenous culture.
Ultimately,
thirty or forty gallons of sap boiled down, are
concentrated to make about a gallon of pure maple syrup, or a few
pounds of
maple sugar.
People
have asked, “Isn’t it a lot of work to make maple
syrup?” It is, but in the old way it
was done together as a Dodem, for the family, and sure, it was
a lot of
work, but it was a lot of fun, too. The
Dodem did all of their food-gathering and food-harvesting
together:
gardening, maple sugaring and gathering mahnomen (which is
sometimes
erroneously called “wild rice”). In
reality, making maple sugar is a lot less work than clearing a
sugar-cane
field, planting the cane, weeding the fields for over a year while the
sugar-cane matures, burning the fields, cutting the cane in tropical
heat,
grinding the sugar-canes to extract the juice—and then finally
beginning the
boiling-down process that the Ahnishinahbæótjibway began with.
Many
people don’t realize that market-scale production of sugar-cane began
with
slave labor, is now economically feasible only with cheap third-world
labor and
fossil-fueled machines, and is ecologically destructive.
Maple
sugar is a living food, and each day’s sap run is
different: syrup will be a slightly different color, and sugar will
have a
different texture. Unlike white sugar,
which is chemically refined and potentially addictive, maple sugar is
an
organic complex filled with minerals; a food which is good for you,
part of a
healthy natural diet. And maple sugar
will not unbalance the blood glucose of diet-controlled diabetics.
The
sugarbush is a time of re-awakening and it was a time of
celebration of family and Spring. But,
most of all, the sugarbush is a time of renewal, companionable
working-together
of family and friends, of giving thanks for the wonderful food given to
us by
Grandmother Earth. Sugar-making, and
the stewardship of Grandmother Earth which is inherent in it, is
something
which is naturally a part of all of us human beings who live here
now—but we
all have to learn to fine-tune ourselves as earth-beings into our
natural
cycles of life, and live in balance and harmony. This
we must do, in order to survive.
[This newsletter article
was the collaborative work of
Wub-e-ke-niew,
Clara NiiSka,
and Mary Harding]
Wub-e-ke-niew of the Bear Dodem,
a Co-op member, is author of We Have the Right to Exist, A
Translation of
Aboriginal Indigenous Thought.
Wub-e-ke-niew,
drilling into the trees
The
tap
is inserted into the drilled hole.
Mary
Harding tending the fires and checking the boiling
sap.
Meanwhile,
the trees do their part.
Clara
watching the fire.
Melvin Jones taste-tests the syrup.
“Boiling
up” at night in Wub-e-ke-niew and Clara’s sugarbush, 1995.
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