The curved blade Isabelle Hardlotte held was a decades-old tool, used by her grandfather to handcraft canoes.
On Oct. 23, she carried the keepsake with her to a repatriation ceremony for her grandparents’ lost work of art — a rare birch bark canoe built in the summer of 1972 that had been missing for decades.
“It was a very important moment for my family to get it back,” she said
She was about 11 years old when a camera crew visited northern Saskatchewan to film her grandparents building the canoe. The documentary was supposed to capture her grandparents’ process in Cree and English for educational purposes.
Hardlotte, who now teaches Cree language and culture out of Stanley Mission, appeared in the film. Her job was to help her grandmother, Annie Roberts, collect the roots of spruce saplings used to bind the canoe together.
She said that summer was the last time she saw the canoe, but the memory stuck with her as her family attempted to find it. A call to the Western Development Museum years later revealed the canoe was possibly in Moose Jaw, but Hardlotte couldn’t locate it.
The trail went cold until her sister Rose Roberts, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, heard about the canoe at work, Hardlotte said.
Gerald McKenzie, a Lac La Ronge Indian Band councillor, was also trying to find the canoe. He hoped to recover it for display at the Isaiah Roberts Memorial Cultural Centre, named after Hardlotte’s grandfather.
He mentioned the search to some faculty at U of S, who discovered the canoe in the basement of the archaeology building. A university news release said assistant professor Terrence Clark spent about a week building a roughly five-metre box to safely transport the canoe.
While temporarily displayed in Grandmother’s Bay, McKenzie aims for the canoe to be displayed in the memorial centre.
He hopes it will serve as a model to craft a replica canoe, teaching others how to build with birch bark.
“I feel we’re a whole community again,” he said. “It brings back a lot of memories and togetherness.”
The canoe itself has frayed. The wood has warped and Hardlotte said a piece of the birch bark has been torn off. It’s doubtful that it will hold water or float again.
That didn’t make it any less meaningful when Hardlotte attended the ceremony, with one of her grandfather’s tools in hand. She and her brother are the last surviving family members from the documentary, and returning the canoe was “emotionally significant,” she said.
Hardlotte still watches the film to remember her family.
“Like everything else, it’s a memory, and memories do fade,” she said. “But it is important to keep those memories. Just to hear my grandparents talk again is something else.”
