The word for sugar.

Bush is iskigamizigan.

Bush is iskigamizigan.

So you tap maple trees and the sap runs out.

And generally it's like 2 to 5% sugar and then it takes like about 50 gallons to make one gallon of maple syrup.

There was a period like when I was in high school where we kind of stopped because my dad, he has a muscle atrophy disease and that's kind of like when he stopped doing the sugar bush.

So I'd say about like two or three years, I didn't do it, but I've been doing it ever since I was a little girl.

Being anishinaabe different families do different things.

We've always had kids involved.

We used to boil on site at our sugar beach when I was tiny, and we had like this 80 gallon black kettle cast iron pot that we would put all of our sap into and then boil it down.

And I remember being just little, two, maybe three years old, when my dad handed me a branch and like he held me over this pot and I got to put the pine needles into the sap so it wouldn't boil over.

If you are interested in doing traditional practices like this, I would say trap one tree one year and then maybe the next year tap two trees and work your way up until you get to that, you know, 50 gallons and you can actually make one gallon of maple sirup.

Keeping this tradition alive is so, so important.

The Slice, from WDSE WRPT.