Making Maple Syrup
The Ojibwa Way of Making Maple Syrup
Making maple syrup and maple sugar was an annual spring time event and an important part of the Ojibwa diet wherever maple trees grew. Birch syrup was made instead if maples didn't grow in the area.
Maple syrup was so important that the fourth moon of the year (late March-April) was called Izhkigamisegi Geezis, the Moon of Boiling. Large amounts were made during the few weeks in Spring when the maple sap ran.
Snow would still be on the ground when families would head to a section of the forest that was traditionally 'theirs' to harvest the sap. They'd carry rolls of birch bark to cover the frames of last years wigwams and, in early years, would also haul in birchbark bowls and baskets to catch the sap. When they became available from traders, iron kettles were treasured tools of the maple syrup trade.
When the families arrived at the camp the work was divided up. Often a cache of food had been stored at the site the previous fall so young girls were sent off to unearth cedar bark bags of wild rice or dried cranberries sewn up tightly in packets of birch bark known as makuks. Men and boys found openings in the ice and fished for the evening's supper.
Tools for making maple syrup
The women made spiles by pushing the pith out of large elderberry stems or sumac, sharpening the stick at one end and notching it to hold the sap basket or pail. The spiles were called negwakwun. They were hammered into the south side of the tree about three feet from the ground and sealed in with hot pitch from spruce trees.
In the old times birchbark baskets were used to catch the sap and cook the syrup. The best time to make baskets was in the spring and early summer because the inner layer of bark was wet with sap and could be folded eaily at the corners. The bark was sewn together with boiled basswod fibre or the core of the jack pine root.
Birch bark doesn't burn easily when thoroughly soaked in water and can withstand being heated over ...not in...an openflame. Rocks were heated in the fire and dropped into the basket to heat the sap to the boiling point. Repetitively adding hot rocks as others cooled down allowed the water in the sap to evaporate until it became maple syrup.
No one I knew had to endure the drudgery of dropping a multitude of hot rocks into a basket as part of the process of making maple syrup. It's a lot easier to set an iron pot of sap over a fire and just watch it boil!
When the maple syrup was finally ready some of it was stored in it's liquid form, some of it was made into maple sugar.
When they became available, tin cans and jam pails made good containers to catch the sap. Whatever they were made of, the sap collection pails were called nadoban. It's a verb meaning 'she goes and gets' but in the context of maple syrup it became a noun because it takes 30 or 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of maple syrup. There was a lot of 'going and getting'!
