A few months ago, I was in the desert with a friend who’s a primitive skills expert and as we were walking along he showed me how to find water where there didn’t seem to be any, to make rope from vegetation, and to use grass to lasso a lizard for protein (surprisingly easy, once you find the lizard). With each new discovery of the utility around me, the world felt more familiar, more like a home, and me at the right place in it. I can only image–well, dream–what the woods of Quebec felt like to César Newashish, a Native Canadian and the subject of this quiet, wonderful 1971 documentary from director Bernard Gosselin.

It starts with the felling of a tree, and from there Newashish builds a canoe by hand using only the materials provided by the forest: birch bark, cedar strips, spruce roots, and gum. It is a kind of meditation, lacking in narration or dialog, only a few simple titles for explanation, but it doesn’t need more because what’s unfolding is too elemental for something as modern as words. It’s the timeless story of man grown to be at home in his world.

If it sounds a bit zennish, perhaps it is, but that shouldn’t scare you. Nor should the 58-minute running length. I suggest watching it in segments–but once I started it was hard to stop. Few of us have the luxury (or desire) of watching an hour documentary on our computers, but in some ways that’s precisely the lesson of César’s Bark Canoe. We chase after the latest shiny thing like a chocolate lab after a summer butterfly, but all it gets us is desire for the next shiny thing. To slow down and give yourself to something in the manner of an Attikamek Indian who can build a boat from a tree and an ax, well, that’s what it takes to be at home in the natural world.

Via Best Made Projects.

Tagged as: canada, forests, water