How to wear the Beothuk quiver?

I don't know how the Beothuk wore their quivers.  Judging from Cartwright's illustration, it looks like the quiver strap was very long and not permanently fixed to the birch bark tube that held the arrows.  This makes me think that the quiver was adjustable and could have been worn any number of ways across the back, over the shoulder, or at the hip.  I'm not going to pick a most likely scenario, but here are a few options that come to mind.  In each version the strap is tied around the top and bottom of the quiver and either left at its full length, shortened by one additional wrap around the tube, or shortened by two additional wraps around the tube.  The version shown worn at the waist is looped through an additional rawhide strip acting as a belt around my waist.

With a very long strap the quiver
could be worn low across the back.
This style makes sense if you
imagine it worn over a large winter
robe.

With a short strap the quiver could be
worn at the waist on a belt.  You could
get a similar effect with the very long
strap hung over the opposite shoulder
like a sachel.

Slung over one shoulder.  Fine
for short distances, but
probably not the most secure or
practical option in most cases.

Worn diagonally across the
back, the quiver is secure,
the arrows are easily accessible
and they aren't in the way for
walking through the woods.

Photo Credits: Lori White

Beothuk Birch Bark Quiver Progress

The quiver... so far, so good.

My main goal in the workshop this week is to finish the reproduction Beothuk birch bark quiver.  Probably the biggest obstacles to overcome are that I don't have a lot of experience with working with birch bark like this or a pattern to work from.  As far as I know, there are no surviving Beothuk quivers and for a visual reference I only have one contemporary drawing to refer to.      

Detail from a 1773 map by John Cartwright.  I've used this reference before for bows and arrows and have found it to be accurate and plausible representations of the actual implements.  As I make the quiver, I'm finding the details of the quivers design and construction to be equally plausible and helpful.  There are details in the spruce stitching that make a lot of sense. 

The first step in assembling the brich tube was to sew the long seam running the length of the quiver.  I marked out the holes and drilled them prior to lashing them together with spruce root.  The 5 Xs in the foreground of the photo are the spruce root stitches and the pegs running off into the distance are holding the unlashed portion of the tube together through the drilled holes.

One of the big challenges was figuring out how to stitch the middle of the tube.  Working near the end wasn't so bad but as you get farther and farther into the cylinder it became impossible to thread the root through the holes just using my fingers.  I twisted and taped a long wire to the end of the root and used it as a kind of needle to thread the awkard stitches in the middle of the tube.  I don't know what the Beothuk did.  Maybe their quivers were a little longer, or maybe the sewers had smaller hands and arms than me.

I wanted to match a design element on the top of the illustrated quivers and used existing Beothuk Birch Bark baskets as the inspiration for the technique.  In her book, "A History and Ethnography or the Beothuk",  Ingeborg Marshall shows photos of decorated Beothuk birch bark baskets and says that the design was done like porcupine quillwork, but with spruce roots instead.  The designs look sewn in, but in reality, each portion of the design is a separate 2 inch section of root, inserted and folded in place.  I'm working the design into a sheet of bark that will then be stitched around the top of the quiver.

The birchbark sheet with the spruce quill work is shown in place here, although it hasn't been stitched on yet.  The pins are holding it in place.  You can start to see the overall look of the quiver.  There is still a fair bit more stitching to do, it needs some sort of shoulder strap added and then the whole thing will be covered in red ochre.  I'm looking forward to the final product.

I didn't quite know how to close off the bottom end of the quiver, but Lori gave me the solution.  I made a round disc and folded it around the edges, kind of like a coffee filter and inserted that into the bottom of the tube.  There is a small sapling ring holding it in place.  The light coloured band is another section of bark wrapped around the outside of the tube to add more strength to hold the stitches.  I tried sewing the bottom disc in place without that band and the bark started to tear.  If I would have continued, the bottom 3/4 of an inch of the tube would have just peeled off.  Adding the piece of bark with the grain running in the opposite direction seemed to give the tube enough support to stay in one piece.  

 Photo Credits:
1, 3-7: Tim Rast
2: Plate from Howley, James P. 1914 The Beothuck or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge

More than just a birch bark tube

The quiver should have a very slight taper from the opening
to the base.

The main project that I'm working on at the moment is a reproduction Beothuk birch bark quiver.  Conceptually, its a simple tube container, but it should also be tough and functional.  It's for a museum display so it needs to be made from the appropriate materials and match the few references that we have for Beothuk quivers.  I'll go into more detail in future posts, but here is a first look at the main body of the quiver.  I've cut it more-or-less to length, although there will be pieces added to each end, so I may need to trim it again to match the size that I'm going for.  I haven't sewn the main seem up the side yet, but I've cut the outside edge of the birch bark to a scalloped or "pinked" edge.  This is a design element common to Beothuk birch bark vessels that have survived in museum collections.  This edge may be purely ornamental, but I suspect it also helps in preventing tears in forming and spreading from the edge, the same as pinked edges work on fabric.

I used a plastic map tube as a form to wrap the birch bark around.  You can see it peeking out under the clothes pins.  You can also see the zig-zag edge running down the length of the tube.  These seem will be sewn together with spruce roots.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Harvesting Birch Bark

A sheet of bark is flexible

In the spring, I received a commission to build a reproduction Beothuk birch bark quiver.  Birch bark can only be harvested during a relatively narrow window in the late spring/summer when the sap is running.  I tried to collect the bark that I needed in June, before leaving for the field, but it wasn't ready yet.  Birch trees have an inner and outer bark layer and for most of the year, those two layers are stuck together, so that if you try to peel the bark off, it will strip the tree down to bare wood.  Not only is the resulting bark too thick to work with, but this also hurts the tree.  However, if you peel the bark at the right time, the outer bark is loose, flexible, and unrolls easily leaving the inner bark attached to the wood to protect the tree and continue growing.

You can harvest birch bark with a pocket knife.  Just cut a ring around the tree at the top and bottom of the section that you want to peel and then cut a vertical slice to connect the two rings. 

When you peel the sheet off you get a square or rectangular sheet of bark.  

The bark is fairly tough and surprisingly flexible.  It has tendency to split where you cut through those little white lines on the edge (you can see daylight between my fingers), but if you are slow and cautious, its not too hard to get the sheets to come off in tact.

Some of the bark peels easier than others.  The vertical lines you can see on the inner bark here are from where I ran my pocket knife under the peeling bark to separate sticky parts.  But for the most part the gap between the two bark layers felt cool and damp and I could coax it apart by sliding my hand between the two layers.

The bark I collected is for Beothuk quivers to fit 3 foot long arrows.  The finished quiver won't be that long, but I looked for nice straight, knot free trees that were a little bit bigger around than a quiver and cut out 3 foot sections.

 

Hopefully at least one of these four pieces will work and I can complete a quiver or two in September when I have a chance to return to the project.  I'll need a little extra bark for details on the quiver.

In the meantime, I've rolled the bark back into tubes, about the same diameter as the finished quiver so that as the bark dries it will take on the correct shape.

Fresh off the tree the bark has a texture similar to a stiff leather, but much more fragile.  Splits like to start on those little white marks and will run around the bark and split the long tubes in two, if you aren't careful.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Beothuk Birch Bark Containers

A pair of red ochre stained Beothuk birch bark containers on display in the Mary March Museum in Grand Falls-Windsor.  I have a Beothuk birch bark reproduction on the horizon, but it will have to wait until later next year because I've missed the window for harvesting bark for this year.  The best time to harvest the bark is late spring or early summer.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast