A wigwam in his head> Skills remain, but materials scarce to build traditional Indian lodges

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A TV crew is waiting. A reporter is waiting. Organizers of this year’s Native American Festival are waiting. A small group of children sit in a circle and play camp games. They, too, are waiting for Barry Dana to arrive in Bar Harbor.

The Maine Arts Commission, the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance and the College of the Atlantic have collaborated to bring Dana to the festival to build a traditional Wabanaki lodge. Having already spent several days gathering materials from the woods near his summer place in Searsport, Dana will arrive three days before the festival to construct the actual birch-bark lodge.

And everyone is waiting because the event is remarkable, a hallmark.

“I was told that he would be late because of something called `Native American time,’ ” says the children’s camp counselor in a tone that makes the words sound more like a question than a statement.

Later, one of the festival’s directors, Theresa Hoffman, smiles in confirmation. “Yes, Indian time is about an hour later than regular time,” she says. “But he’ll be here.”

Finally, Dana drives a white mini-van onto the campus of the College of the Atlantic where the lodge will be a centerpiece for the festival on Sunday. Atop the vehicle, a pile of white ash saplings bounces. Next to it, there is a canoe. Dana, his wife, Lori, and their 11-month-old daughter, Sikwani, emerge from the vehicle which seems to bulge with supplies.

Several people go to Dana to shake hands. He acknowledges each person but his eyes are distracted, busily scanning the space around him. As the greeters talk, he silently pulls them along to one spot, then to another. Someone is trying to tell him where the bathroom facilities are, but Dana can’t take in the information. His mind is elsewhere.

“I just got a wigwam in my head,” he says hurriedly and with a small laugh. “I can’t think straight.”

As he unloads the van, the people around him gradually disperse. They will stop back throughout the day to marvel quietly at his progress, but for now, the work falls to Dana and his family.

Dana’s first task is to pick a site for the lodge. He has hardly had time to recover from the two-hour drive, but the second he begins his work, he is re-energized and good-natured.

He chooses a partially shaded spot surrounded by spruce trees. With squinting, calculating eyes, he stares at the area as he continues.

The saplings must be stripped, so Sikwani, whose name means “spring” in Penobscot, is placed on the grass, and Dana and his wife take out their knives. His is a hunting knife which he stuffs in the waistband of his shorts from time to time. Hers is a Swiss Army knife which she keeps in her pocket. Each picks up the end of a 20-foot sapling, slips a knife blade underneath the bark, and skins off strips which are dry on one side, supple on the other. Their removal exposes a length of moist, blond wood that is slippery and sweetly scented.

Sikwani toddles toward a piece of discarded bark, grabs it with her pudgy fingers and sucks on the cream-colored underside. Her mother smiles at her and asks if it tastes good.

When the first sapling is done, Dana gets his hatchet, chops off a 2-foot piece and makes it into a stake. He bangs that into the ground and establishes the center line of the wigwam. Taking six heel-to-toe steps away from the post, he sets the first point for the circumference. He secures a string into the center point and then uses the stake to draw the circle of the floor of the lodge. When the circle is complete, he steps back, looks at it, nods affirmatively.

Then, he uses the stake to make 16 holes in the ground. In each one, he will place a sapling that will be bent to form a dome. He also could build a conical shape, he says, but the dome accommodates more bodies. It is roughly 12 feet in diameter and holds about 20 people.

As the saplings are stripped, Dana bends them gently between two trees and begins placing them in the ground. He asks his wife to help him, and Sikwani watches as her parents bend and wait, bend and wait, getting the saplings to form an arc and then tying them into place with pre-soaked basswood bark.

As the sun rises toward afternoon, the lodge takes shape. Sikwani, who has busied herself with toys and food, begins to cry. Her mother picks her up and goes into the skeletal structure and lies down. They play there together for a few minutes while Dana goes on with his work.

Families used to make these lodges together, Dana says. Everyone gathered the supplies and, even though the women primarily did the building, everyone knew how to do every step in case he or she had to do it alone.

Many years ago, says Dana as he weaves slips of bark around cross bars of saplings, Indians would come to the coast to fish. They would build their summer lodges in much the same fashion as he is building his lodge.

As with the lodges of his ancestors, Dana’s wigwam will be completely inhabitable and durable for any time of year. He won’t state that it will last forever, but concedes that it will last a long, long time. Still, this one won’t be used officially as lodging but as an educational tool at the festival.

While continuing to strip saplings in slow careful motions, Mrs. Dana slices through the skin on her thumb and blood drips onto the tree. She goes to get a bandage which she later reinforces with duct tape, but the wound does not deter her long.

Soon, she stops to feed Sikwani a bottle. The child lies in the mother’s arms and watches the father, who occasionally steps on a squeak-toy rubber duck that has been pitched into the lodge for the toddler.

Mrs. Dana talks about the several days of gathering they did together before their arrival at COA.

“The way the woods are hacked up by paper companies, it’s hard to find good stuff,” she explains.

“You can’t build a birch-bark canoe or wigwam if you can’t find the bark,” Dana adds. “Quality materials are hard to come by these days. I’m afraid that when I’m 70, I won’t be able to do this because the materials will be gone.”

Both emphasize how important materials are. If you pick low quality wood, then it could split. If you wrap a juncture with bad basswood, it could break. But most of these problems are easily corrected in the moment. For Dana, mistakes can be opportunities for learning more about improving the technique.

“Each time we do something with these materials, we find something new about them,” says Dana as he jumps on a sapling and pogos it into the ground. “If your choices are right, everything is possible.”

For the past four years, Dana has been making lodges as a part of his Native Studies program which he began teaching at Indian Island School a decade ago. A Penobscot raised on Indian Island, Dana admits that he was more interested in wildlife than schooling as a child, and wanted to offer Native kids a chance to explore their abilities outside of the classroom. Eventually, he opened a private business in which he offers training in shelter making, plant identification, hunting, tanning, birch-bark basketry, trapping, and Native philosophies. When regular school is out of session, Dana and his wife take groups on “campouts.” Often they teach the children how to build their own lodges, drums and dream catchers.

“I’m a frustrated artist,” the 35-year-old craftsman says with a shrug. “I can’t sit down long enough to make a painting but I enjoy natural materials. I want others to have an appreciation of material and how valuable the material is. It’s something to be looked after. If people understand the materials, they have a sense of relationship with them and they might in the future end up taking better care of them.”

Dana negotiates his body around Sikwani, who has found a comfortable seat on the ground just under his feet. She chews on a piece of ash bark and laughs at the antics Dana directs at her. She looks happy and right sitting in the grass on an island the Passamaquoddys used to call “Men-es-saw-kik,” or “clan gathering place.”

In three hours, the Danas have the inside structure of the lodge completely finished. Tomorrow, they will cover it with 80 3-foot sheets of birch bark which they will sew together with spruce roots. They will fill in any holes with a gooey but aromatic mixture of spruce pitch and lard, and leave a hole open at the top so smoke from a fire inside may be released. In the summer, the smoke or a smudge helps to keep the biting insects away.

Once the birch bark is in place, they will build an outside frame to protect the white sheets from peeling in the coastal wind. The door will face the east and catch the first rays of sun rising over Frenchman Bay.

Dana says his ancestors would have built the lodge much more quickly, maybe in several hours, because they were so adept. When they were finished living in the lodge for the summer, they would take down the birch bark, pile it in rolls into their canoes and head back up the river to their inland communities. They would use the birch bark to reconstruct their homes time and time again leaving only the frames behind to weather their absence.

When the Danas are finished for the day, they pack up their belongings and cross the road to a hotel where they are staying while they build the lodge. Tomorrow they will return, continue their work, and go back to the hotel again. They will never actually stay in the lodge — although they have stayed in traditional lodges of all sorts. But their work will stand on the COA campus as long as it endures the weather, as long as the space is there, or — as Dana says — a long, long time.