 Hello, my name is Barbara Wall. I'm a PhD candidate at Trenton University and I'm on the faculty of the Indigenous Studies Department at Trenton University. So I'm really happy to be in the sugar bush. It's a traditional practice and a sacred process for me in that maple sugar is one of our sacred foods that we use in ceremony and that we use when we connect with the water and feed the sources of water. And being out on the land in the early spring when the snow first starts to melt and the sap starts to run is just a very special time. And from my teachings it's the new year for the Anishinaabe. It's the first gift that the earth and the beings of creation give us, that sweet water that we use as a cleanser, as medicine, and that we use in making syrup and then boiling that down and making sugar. I think it's a really important process for people of all ages to be involved in. It strengthens the connection with not only the land but with our ancestors who have been doing this for time and memorial. It's an important issue when it comes to sovereignty and caretaking of the land and continuing to revitalize our culture and our language. In an atig, maple tree, biscuit to nagan, it's the folded birch bark container for collecting sap, neguak kwanan, the flat cedar spiles. To tap a tree, ojiga, ojiga. Before we tap a tree or before we begin tapping in the sugar bush, we always make an offering to the tree in an atig, the maple tree. And people do it in various ways, but always offering up some semah, some tobacco to essentially communicate with the tree, tell the tree what you're going to be doing and that you're asking it to share the sap with you and your family and your community and you're asking permission. So we use a little bit of tobacco and when we make offerings or when we use our semah, we put it into our left hand because it's closest to your heart. This is where you speak the truth through your left hand and through your heart. And the way I do it is I talk to the tree. I use as much of the language as I can, but mostly it's English and I ask permission and then gently place the tobacco on the ground by the tree. And some people will do this at every tree they tap, others will just do it at the first tree that they tap. But it's a small gesture of reciprocity, of giving thanks to the tree for all that it's giving to us as an Ishnabek. All right, so here we have an example of an old style of tapping and the style of tapping that we use today in this sugar bush. So let's talk about the metal with the metal bucket and you can see the spigot here. And when we tap these trees we use a power drill and we drill in, you can see a hole here from a previous tapping season, but we drill into the bark of the tree through the outer bark and the inner bark and then gently hammer a spigot into the tree. And you can see how far this goes into the bark, so it's, you know, it's this length. And the tree will heal, but the old style tapping is a more sustainable type of tapping. The old style tapping technique, you can see that it's been done here. And there's two cuts that make somewhat of a V and then below the V you have a horizontal cut that's tilted a little bit upwards and then you insert gently tapping the cedar spile into the tree. And the sap comes out here, flows down the V and flows down the spigot into this folded birch bark container and this is called a biscuit togonine and I'm just going to go over the details of making the V on one side here and the other side here. Some people use an axe, other people use a chisel and then importantly the horizontal cut for the spile needs to be at an angle. So it's horizontal parallel to the ground but it's also at an angle so that the sap will run down. You can see the angle on the axe as it's going in. The size of the cut isn't necessarily as important in my opinion as the angle. So you can see I don't know what kind of angle that is, maybe 30 degree angle but it's all intended so that the spile will take advantage of gravity and that the sap will run out of the tree down and then down into the container at the on the base. You can see that you support the biscuit toagon with some sticks to level the ground a bit and to secure it onto the ground in times of high winds but you can also see that you get debris, leaf debris and insects twigs into the sap as it's collected. So the old style way of taking care of this is to use a basswood fiber filter. So this is twined basswood fiber and this fits right on top of and into the top of the sap bucket and then of course you can take this and pour it in and if we were collecting from several we would use another container and do the same thing and the old style way of carrying these buckets through the through the bush is using a yoke and then we'll see that this has a leak in it and when they're full and you can balance yourself and walk through the bush without being concerned of the sap spilling out of the buckets and it's much easier to carry it to this way. So we can talk a little bit about these sap buckets and how they're constructed because they're made out of what we call winter bark. So it's birch bark wigwass that's harvested in the cold months when the tree when the birch tree is not growing so the bark is more it's thicker and it doesn't separate as easily I've got a piece of winter bark over here. So you can see how thick the winter bark is when you harvest it off of the birch tree as opposed to sometimes the summer bark is much thinner and these buckets are constructed pretty much using the technology that we use to to build birch bark canoes. Birch bark canoes are also built out of the winter bark but turned inside out you can see the white part of the birch on the inside and all the stitching is done with spruce root that has been harvested again in the in the summer months and processed by stripping the bark off of the spruce root and then splitting the spruce root and it's very strong for stitching this is some spruce root up here some very thick spruce root forming the the top of the basket. One of the advantages I've been told of the old style tapping is first of all it's gentler on the tree because it doesn't go as deep as the metal spigots and also so people that work in sugar bushes have shared with me that the sugar concentration of the sap closer to the outer bark of the tree is higher than towards the inside of the tree. So if you look over here this is where we tapped this tree last year the old style way you can barely see the V here but it's already started to be healed over so it's a more sustainable practice.