- On this "Native Report", we follow Chi-Ma'iingan as he prepares for a fall moose hunt.

We journey with him as he collects birch bark to assemble a traditional moose call and follow along as he harvests a moose.

We also learn what we can do to lead healthier lives, and hear from our elders.

- [Announcer] Production for "Native Report" is made possible by: grants from the Blandin Foundation, Anishinabe Fund, and Alexandra Smith Fund in Support of Native American Treaty Rights, administered through the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation, the generous support from viewers like Jack and Sharon Kemp, DSGW Architects, personalizing architecture, online at dsgw.com, and viewers like you.

(upbeat flute and guitar music) - Welcome to "Native Report" and thanks for tuning in.

I'm Rita Karppinen.

In this episode, we are learning how to make our traditional moose call.

It takes parts from many different plants.

Chi-Ma'iingan takes us along as he harvests the different trees and designs a functional moose call.

(peaceful guitar music) - It all started with with bezhigo-semaa.

I offer my tobacco first.

I always lead first with my tobacco and give those to the spirits, you know, aki, to Mother Earth, because she's the one who nourishes us day in and day out, and we thank her for that and we thank her for these gifts here that she's able to provide for us.

And so, when I'm working on things like this I keep that in mind, and I also keep in mind of the people who taught me this work and also the ones that taught them.

(speaking Anishinaabemowin) It's different for me living in modern day world, modern day society, but for them it was their way of life.

Boozhoo.

Chi-Ma'iingan from the Fond du Lac Nation.

Today I asked you guys to come out with me to harvest some birch bark, some wiigwaas, and we're gonna use that birch bark to make a moose call for this upcoming fall hunt.

We're harvesting the birch bark this time of year in the springtime because the nutrients from the tree are still in that birch bark.

So when you harvest that bark, you peel that layer of bark off on the inside, it's still a lot darker than it would be let's say in the summertime.

And that darker bark, what it does is it allows us to etch some pictures on it if we wanted to, and do some artwork on that.

And when I make my moose calls, I like to draw some Ojibwe floral designs on that.

There are some designs to indicate where I come from.

I'm Bear Clan, so I might draw some Bear Clan images on there.

But also, since I'm harvesting moose, I'll probably put some images of moose on that call at the same time.

And that's the only time of year that we can harvest that bark to where we can make these designs on the inside of that bark.

The birch bark is a very important resource to the Ojibwe people, to the Anishinaabe.

If we think back before colonialism, we lived in birch bark, we lived in wiigwaams, our homes were made out of that bark.

We were able to boil food and boil sap this time of year, in actual birch bark.

We use it to winnow our rice.

So, to say that it was, you know, part of our livelihood is almost an understatement.

And that's how important wiigwaasomtik is to the Anishinaabe.

All of our young children, our Anishinaabe children, when they receive their names they have people that take care of them and show them certain ways of our people, certain ways of how to do things, whether it's harvesting bark, maple syrup, hunting, shooting, skinning animals.

We call those (indistinct).

And my (indistinct) were my uncle's.

I have one (indistinct) that, Gordon Fonda-ban, he's traveled on now, I used to harvest a lot of bark with him in the summertime.

One of the tricks that he had taught me was when you're taking spring bark, it's so hard to get off, and he showed me this trick here with this stick of kind of prying the bark open instead of using it all over your hands.

So this is one of those things, one of the tricks that he had taught me.

So I'm gonna use this.

Today I'm harvesting this bark here.

And my moose call is not very big, so I will just take this piece of the tree off, of the bark, and that's what I'll harvest from here to here.

There's almost like two layers of bark on each tree.

So we'll cut through the first layer and we wanna leave that second layer 'cause once you harvest just that top layer it actually grows back.

So that's why we use so much caution and so much care when we do this.

We make sure that we don't cut too deep and I just make a vertical cut on the tree and then I'm gonna make some horizontal cuts around, and that's gonna be the spots that I'll be harvesting.

A little secret weapon that I use for my spring and winter bark harvest is a three inch putty knife.

So the hardest part is getting started.

Then I can get under the bark and start slowly peeling it back.

You could actually hear the bark start to pull away from the tree.

(bark peeling off the tree) So this is the bark that we'll use for the moose call.

I can see that it's a little bit more golden than what I want.

We would like this to be a little bit darker.

But I think we can still use this to etch on.

We're out at my property at the Fond du Lac reservation and we are going to harvest some red willow that we're gonna be using as, I guess, a stabilizer on our moose call today.

And I got some red willow here that happens to be just right on the side of my driveway.

Red osier dogwood is, we'll say, the Latin name for it.

The Ojibwe word that we call red willow is miskwaabiimizh.

And you put that word together, miskwa, it means 'red'.

This time of year though, in the early spring and this time of year, red willow is actually green in the summertime.

I don't take any more than what I need, so today I'm just using some for the end of my moose call and the end of the opposite end of my moose call.

So I only need maybe 20 inches.

And I got a piece right here and I'm gonna just go ahead and harvest this.

What's amazing about red willow is red willow never freezes and it's always pliable and it's always used for us.

Miskwabiimizh.

Miiwi, that's it.

We need some lashing to put it together to actually sew it all together.

And that'll hold on to our red willow when it's on the front and the end and also down the middle of the moose call.

And one of the things that we use for that is called wiigob, And that's just the secondary inner bark of a basswood tree.

And one way that you can identify a basswood tree is to actually look at the leaves.

And a basswood tree is gonna have large, large leaves on them.

Especially, you know, you want something that's kinda like right around a sapling, a little bit bigger than a sapling.

And you want one that really doesn't have much branches or knots on them.

I just take just a little bit, cut into the tree here, and you can peel it right up.

(bark peeling off tree) And it'll go all the way up the tree and this is how you can get your longer lashings and your longer ropes.

Especially if you have a tree that is gonna let you go farther up into the tree to take it down.

And we have a nice beautiful piece here.

And this is the piece that we want.

We want this inner bark.

So we could actually take this and split this again a second time.

And when we have nice warm days, just like birch bark, wiigob pops off the tree and that inner secondary inner bark pops right off too.

And you usually don't have no problems peeling that.

We'll roll it up, and if we just place this in water, it'll stay and we'll be able to use it later.

So we can actually store it, use it a couple weeks down the road if we wanted to.

Same with birch bark.

And I'm gonna bring some birch bark back to life for us us so that we can actually work with it now.

So this is the wiigob that we have and this is what we're gonna be using.

So, now we'll go over to my studio and work on that other piece.

- Stay tuned to watch Chi-Ma'iingan put the moose call together and to hear the call being used to call for a moose.

(peaceful flute music) - I encourage you to do what you want to do.

Sometimes I know, in working with students especially, when I worked at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, I've seen so many young people.

This is where they are now and here's where they wanna go and where they wanna be, but how will a person get there?

And so, I worked in Student Affairs, and the logistics of getting through a system can be such a challenge, and providing a little guidance there.

And sometimes where you get to is not where you thought you would be, and often it is what you really are meant to be doing.

And so I think people, you know...

I encourage people to keep open eyes and open heart.

And as my dad used to say, though, he was a boxer and he would say, "And watch for your opening."

And so that is my advice.

And know that there are people who wanna help you in any way that we can.

So, you know, I wish all my best to the younger people.

I have great faith in them.

- We now enter Chi-Ma'iingan's workshop to watch him put together a working moose call.

This is more than a hunt for Chi-Ma'iingan.

He is also passing on this tradition to family.

(peaceful guitar music) - Check if my iron's hot enough.

This is a piece of bark that we harvested in early April and has been able to dry out, lose a lot of its moisture.

So it's brittle and it would crack easily if I tried to cut it.

And it's able to add enough moisture to this, just for me to make it a little bit more pliable, and that's all we want.

If you're a talented enough moose caller, you don't even need to use a birch bark call.

You could use just your hands.

And it was taught to me that the moose antlers on a moose, the reason why it curves out around their ears is because it echoes that call into their ear.

So it could actually hear a moose calling from probably five miles away.

And if I could duplicate that with just my hands, imagine how much farther I could cast with a good well-made moose call.

And that's what we're doing here.

When I get out into the woods and I start calling a moose, if nothing answers me back or if I don't see nothing in 20, 30 minutes, I know that I'm gonna have the patience to stay there for up to one, two hours long.

I'm gonna trace this out real quick on here.

Now we can go back outside.

A lot of people that work with these materials, they have some bark scissors that they are able to use for this, and they work a lot better than than my scissors.

We just work slow, we don't have to rush it.

So we're just slowly working the bark to give it that shape, so that it takes shape of a cone or like a megaphone.

There's something about working in the sunlight that I enjoy.

When I work on things like this, especially when I work with materials from the land, I like to work out here on the land with it at the same time, just because we have that sunlight shining down on us, which is a vital nutrient, our vitamin that our body needs.

So it's important that we soak up that sun as much as we can because the ones that came before us that did this, they did it the exact same way.

Actually got my moose application inside, filled out, ready be turned in.

So, if you get a bigger moose, or even a moose, the animal's right around 700 to a thousand pounds, which is a lot of meat.

It's important that we share that meat, especially that's what our people used to do is when they would harvest a moose, they would harvest a moose and they would give that out for everybody.

From the moment we harvest the bark, to putting it together, harvesting the wiigob and red willow, and you saw how long it took me to just steam and form the call, we're talking about probably right around eight to 10 hours of work.

So, this piece here I'm gonna just save and I'm gonna go around this edge here for my red willow.

But this is where this would wrap around this piece here like this.

I can scrape that golden layer of bark off.

And this is why we harvested that bark in the springtime.

But at doing this, with this patience, it pays off being in the woods waiting for that moose to come in when you're calling.

(Chi-Ma'iingan moose calling) The reason why I wanted to come out to this spot here today is this is where I've hunted the last couple years and I've harvested two moose outta here already.

And this is a perfect little spot because all across this clear cut, which is probably maybe a half mile by half mile long, so it's extremely large.

But there's these little brush piles that are all over out here, and I like to climb on these brush piles and kinda disguise yourself inside these brush piles and make moose calls.

This is gonna be our main spot that we're gonna come to Saturday morning and we're gonna set up in here.

And we'll probably just keep coming back and coming back and coming back until we get something.

So, that's gonna be our plan.

In the past it was just me and my son that were hunting out here, so it was easy for us, but this year we're gonna have a larger group.

So it's gonna be me and three other kids that I'm gonna be hunting with, and we're gonna have them harvest the moose this year, which is big for them and for our family.

When a young person, whether it's a man or a woman, once they harvest a moose, we go through a ceremony for them, a change in life ceremony.

And it goes from being a child, we have to provide for you, provide for you as a child, but now that you've been able to hunt a moose and take an animal, you are now a provider.

And that's whether you're 10 years old, 11 years old, or 12 years old.

You're now a provider for your family.

This is state land here, this is state forest land, but all across this whole Arrowhead region, we call this the 1854 Treaty territory, and this is where we're allowed to hunt.

And what's significant about this year's hunt is opening day of moose season, which is September 24th, is the actual Treaty Day signing for the 1854 Treaty.

So it's a huge day, it's a big day for us to still have these rights that we practice every single day.

And it's what our ancestors wanted for us, what they saw for our people.

And to just hold onto that and practice this culture day in and day out is significant.

And to be able to do it on that day of the treaty signing is big for us.

There's a ceremony that's done for a big hunt like this and it's a moose hunt ceremony.

That hasn't been given to me and I haven't partaken in anything like that.

I've just heard stories about it.

If we don't have those ceremonies, I was just taught, we say (speaking Anishinaabemowin) in honor of those spirits.

And it's important to recognize those, especially for a significant hunt like this because this is one of those hunts that feed our families for the whole year.

(Chi-Ma'iingan moose calling) You understand the significance of it because you know that there's not a lot of Minnesotans that are able to partake in a hunt like this.

And this is a limited hunt for even the Anishinaabe, for the Fond du Lac Band and also 1854 Treaty Bands.

We're blessed to be able to partake in a hunt like this, even today.

(youth whispering) (gun firing) - We started doing calls like 10 minutes in and then we got some calls back.

And then like five minutes later the moose came out and then we just shot it.

- With the light that we had, I seen Lewis's muzzle flash and I seen the impact of the bullet on the moose, and I let Lewis know, I said, "That's a perfect shot."

And the moose beared down and it ran off maybe 10 yards and it turned away.

And I've seen that a hundred times, when a moose does that.

I knew that it was a perfect shot.

So it was just after 6:30 that I think Lewis took that first shot.

I bet you it was not even barely seven o'clock when we walked up to it to take a look at it to see if it expired.

This was, in my lifetime, the quickest moose hunt that I've been involved in.

Maybe seven minutes of legal shooting hours.

And Lewis put a good shot on and he was able to bring us home some moose meat.

That should be it.

- After the hunt, Chi-Ma'iingan and his family were able to provide moose meat to the elders and other community members.

If you missed a show, or wanna catch up online, find us nativereport.org and follow us on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram for behind the scene updates.

And drop a comment on social media if you enjoyed the show.

Thanks for spending time with your friends and neighbors from across Indian Country.

I'm Rita Karppinen.

We'll see you next time on "Native Report".

- [Announcer] Production for "Native Report" is made possible by: grants from the Blandin Foundation, Anishinabe Fund, and Alexandra Smith Fund in Support of Native American Treaty Rights, administered through the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation, the generous support from viewers like Jack and Sharon Kemp, DSGW Architects, personalizing architecture, online at dsgw.com, and viewers like you.