Bushcraft Take-Aways From The Manitoba Museum

Description

What can you learn about bushcraft and wilderness living skills from a museum? Lots it turns out. If it's a good museum, that is. And the Manitoba Museum is a good museum for nature, native skills, bushcraft, self reliance, anthropology, history of wilderness living, voyageurs, trappers, surveyors and first nations.

In this video I visit the Manitoba Museum and share some insights from the displays there, with a particular emphasis on the boreal forest.

I'd just finished a 2-week canoe trip through boreal forest and the content of the museum dovetailed nicely with my experiences on the river with natural history, geology, ecology and native history.

Remember to subscribe to my channel for more informative videos on wilderness bushcraft, survival skills and outdoor life.

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PKirt

Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/paulkirtley/

Get a tonne of wilderness bushcraft and outdoor skills information and advice on my blog at http://paulkirtley.co.uk

Cheers!

Tags: Manitoba (Canadian Province),Manitoba Museum (Museum),Museum (Building Function),Tourist Destination,bushcraft,wilderness,skills,Anthropology (Field Of Study),Indigenous Peoples Of The Americas (Ethnicity),First Nations (Ethnicity),Boreal Forest Of Canada (Location),northwoods,moose,loon,caribou,Chipewyan Language (Human Language),Algonquin People (Ethnicity),Algonkian,forest,tundra,frontier bushcraft,canoe,bald eagle

Video Transcription

well I'm in slightly unfamiliar surrounds today I'm in a hotel room own in the hilton in Winnipeg we're just at the end of our blood vein trip and we're just about to check out but we're heading downtown Winnipeg today to go to the Manitoba Museum which is really interesting museum lots of history of the area lots lots to link in with the trip that we've done in terms of the native peoples of the area the natural history of the area and the history of the fur trade and the Hudson's Bay Company so that's going to be a really interesting visit today and I'll try and capture some of that with my with my camera as we go and I'll share that with you in this video so enjoy this stone structures an example of an Inukshuk an Inuit word meaning something acting in the capacity of a man or something resembling a person you

varying in size complexity and location these structures were part of caribou hunting strategy they served as land and water navigational aids as well as campsite markers and they were in some cases reminders of special occasions none of Manitoba actually lies in the Arctic Circle but the north of the province particularly the land closest to Hudson Bay experiences extreme cold in the winter combination of a low winter Sun and arctic air flows creates a really cold environment Churchill Manitoba in the north of the province is famous for its polar bears

polar bears however are not the only animal species to have become really well adapted to the snow in Manitoba's winters

native people have adapted to the various cold environments here too with ingenious material cultures I like this this is a sled break made of caribou antler and here we've got to snow knife made of bone various bands and tribes of native peoples made use of local resources as has been widely popularized the coastal Inuit made use of large sea mammals such as Narwhal and seals but there were some more inland Inuit who hunted caribou and further south and further into the boreal forest were also the Denny in this area this is nice here are some examples and models of Inuit hunting technology from a model kayak to bow and arrow to a harpoon to even a slingshot harpoon tips there and interestingly in the middle and this is a little Gill needle for collecting fish together and above that is this bladder which was used to stop sea mammal prey from sinking and we've got a nice hand line they're made from a caribou antler as well so that was used for ice fishing sinew called some of the bands of Inuit and dinnae or chipper one relied heavily on the caribou which are very similar to European or Eurasian rained here as well as a source of meat and antlers and other major use was to make clothing from the skins and here's examples of a child's Parker and a woman's Parker these required a lot of work both interns preparing the skins and then cutting and sewing the clothing air into the finished garments as you can see here they're really finely crafted and they're really almost works at art anyone who's prepared to skin noses a little scraping involved and here's a couple of scrapers that were used for preparing caribou skins on the right is a shoulder blade of scapular scraper that was used initially for defleshing the hide and then on the left is a stone scraper which was used for softening the fibers and stretching the fibers after that then there were a couple of other scrapers the implements on the left here are metal scrapers and these we use to scrape the skin thin and before access to metal these are made of sharpened bone the tool on the right the semi circular blade is the tool that's often referred to as a woman's knife or the Ulu this is a general purpose tool for cutting meat preparing hides cutting tobacco cutting moss for lamp wicks that type of general purpose here's some sinew which was pounded and used for thread and this is a traditional sewing pouch made of the feet of IDA ducks now here's a few things I thought you might like there's a strike a light made of a piece of file embedded into a piece of antler and that was used on a piece of iron varieties to create sparks also this is quite ingenious I like this it's a water collection ladle effectively made of caribou hide I'd like that like the ingenuity there and then also traditionally snares were made of rawhide sometimes referred to as babish this type of snare twisted up also here we've got a netting needle bit of a rough example but some nice netting there as well made of traditional materials often used bark fibers from trees for making nets traditionally in this part of the world American basswood was one that was used a lot for making good fishing net the northern coniferous or boreal forest biome is when the largest biomes on earth it's dominated by evergreen conifers and occurs as a broad band across the northern half of Eurasia as well as right across North America the siberian sections are largest forest on earth and the North American segment stretches 6300 kilometers east to west and five to eight hundred kilometers north to south long and bitterly cold winters and short and often hot summers are typically characteristic of this type of forest and you can see from the satellite imagery of Manitoba a large swath of boreal forest cuts across the middle of Manitoba and this is the environment we've been traveling through you can see it's a mosaic of late it's in forest and the canoe makes sense here in the winter much of this is frozen and the land becomes a realm of the snowshoe and the sled or toboggan and it was a hard winter for the native peoples here and I particularly liked this spring Thanksgiving which I saw in the museum and I'll replicate it here for you

in the museum is a neat little model Camp reconstruction of an early summer camp in the southern boreal forest around the time of European contact with these are gong jian speaking people these people were primarily hunters and they subsisted on moose woodland caribou elk bison bear and smaller mammals fish birds and plant resources such as maple sap berries and wild rice were also dietary staples mobility was important it was a necessary adaption to seasonal movements and local fluctuations of game material belongings were few and far between they were highly portable Methodist transportation which included the birch bark canoe and tump line in the summer and snowshoes in toboggan and winter flexibility in group membership enabled people to disperse in times of scarcity and to reassemble when food resources were plentiful usually remaining together until late fall these regional encampments allowed many forms of activity to occur a bit further along in the museum are some life-size depictions of forest scenes and I found them a little bit twee to be honest with you I thought they're a little bit a little bit naff but one thing that did come out of this or two things actually they were interesting one again is the emphasis in the dependence on small game or the reliance on small game and the importance of small game and second was the depiction of painting of rock art and that rang a chord with me because we'd seen some absolutely fantastic pictographs on the blood rain river while paddling it previous few weeks interestingly as well later on there was information on how they made the paint and specifically the fish resources that they used sturgeon in particular here's a depiction of the sturgeon a very prehistoric looking fish and it wasn't just the oil that was used part of the body was actually used to make a container to contain the oil as well which is very resourceful and here's a an example of that in the display what I liked about the next section was a focus on a really useful resources that the native people valued highly but they're still really important bushcraft resources to this day first was the birch and its various uses as well as uses of other things like famous momentary switch grows on birch typically particularly in this part of the world uses of the bark art worth bite art using the artwork that's a calling horn therefore calling moose and this is lovely decorated basket birch bark basket at the bottom here as well next up was the moose the moose was a significant factor in the survival of the Cree and a jib where First Nations and this is shown by its frequency in art forms such as pictographs and decorative motifs you can also see the many other items apart from the hide and the flesh that the moose was useful here from drums to pipes two hammers two games to scraping tools to actually d flesh the hides in the first place many many uses for all parts of the animal and we can't come to the end of a discussion of this part of the world without mentioning the loon this is the loon it's the Great Northern diver it's call is synonymous with the North Woods particularly lakes of the North Woods and anybody who's paddled there as we had done in recent weeks will recognize it and it's just one of the icons of the north woods and the water that goes with the North Woods this was my second visit to the Manitoba Museum and if you're ever in Winnipeg I'd thoroughly recommend a visit I enjoyed it as much if not more than the first time I visited there's a lot there of interest to people who are interested in bushcraft and traditional skills those of you that are interested in nature and native peoples and anthropology there's lots and lots of interest there and for us it really capped off well the two-week trip that we've done where we've been traveling through part of the environment from Ontario into Manitoba and we'd seen many of the species the birch the pie and the spruces would see moose we'd seen many the small game we've seen wild birds would sing loons with heard loons and it was just great to put all of that in context with a natural history and the geology and the history of the native peoples that used to live from the land in that area so it was a really nice bringing it together there's lots more in the museum about different parts of Manitoba as well and i would thoroughly recommend you spend a good amount of time in there if you do you need more than a couple of hours to see everything in there so thanks for joining me on this virtual visit to the Manitoba Museum hope you've enjoyed it I hope you've learned something from it or its consolidated knowledge you already had or made some connections between things that you knew or is filled in some gaps or joined some dots I always learn stuff from visiting museums such as this and I hope it also gives you an idea of why I love visiting and traveling in the boreal forest as well and the boreal forests of Manitoba is very special and look out for a full length video of our journey that I'll be producing at some stage in the near future