Decorated Birch Bark Container
This cylindrical container decorated with canoeing, hunting and camping images was made in the early 1900s by Sabattis Tomah, a Maine Passamaquoddy who was the only son of Passamaquoddy chief and renowned birch bark artist Tomah Joseph (1837-1914).
Sabattis borrowed artistic birch bark techniques, themes and forms from his father, whose work is well-documented in the 1993 exhibition catalog History on Birchbark: The Art of Tomah Joseph, Passamaquoddy by Joan A. Lester.
The bark of the white birch tree has been an important element of the material culture of Northern Woodlands Indian tribes since long before their contact with Europeans. It was used for making such life essentials as wigwams, canoes, storage vessels, and even cooking pots. (As maple sugaring is in full swing here in New England, it is amazing to think that Woodlands tribes could make maple syrup by boiling sap with hot rocks added to sap-filled birch bark containers).
When birch bark was used as a raw material for making utilitarian goods, the flakey outer bark of the white birch tree was turned to the inside, while the interior bark formed the exterior of the object.
This material is not only strong, pliable and water resistant, but the inner bark also makes an ideal canvas for decoration when harvested in the winter because that is when it has a solid maroon-brown rind. When that darker rind is etched away, the inscribed design appears in the lighter bark layer just beneath it.
The decoration on traditional birch bark pieces that were described as early as the 1600s by European explorers, tended to be geometric. Pictorial decoration on birch bark did not become prominent until the late 1800s, and Tomah Joseph was one of the originators of this pictorial style.
While he used some traditional geometric design elements primarily as edge detailing on his pieces, the main birch bark canvas was dominated by etched totemic figures, local animals, and images of everyday life, as well as figures and scenes derived from Passamaquoddy legends.
Sabattis Tomah’s father was also an innovator in using his tribe’s traditional materials – birch bark, ash and sweet grass – to make objects tailored for sale to Victorian era non-native households, such as collar boxes, glove boxes, picture frames, and picnic baskets.
Sabattis accompanied his mother and father each summer as they paddled from their home in Maine to Campobello Island, New Brunswick where they set up camp and, among other pursuits, made and sold birch bark pieces such as this wastepaper basket to tourists. (See the 1998 book Trading Identities by Ruth B. Phillips for more history on Northeastern Native Americans’ participation in the tourist trade.)
Sabattis Tomah is considered an artist in the “school of Tomah” and the decoration on this basket is quite similar to themes found within his father’s work. There is a teepee with a cooking pot, hunters in a canoe pursuing a swimming deer, traditional tools and implements, a moose, a legendary Wild Cat, and geometric and foliar motifs. It also includes the inscription “Mee-qui-da-hamin” which means “Remember Me” in Passamaquoddy, an indicator that this wastepaper basket was sold as a souvenir.
Sabattis Tomah’s designs can be distinguished from his father’s by several stylistic differences (see Lester, 1993), including that he etched canoeists with beaked noses and drooping feather bonnets, and gave the bodies of human figures solid light bark interiors.
This basket has a traditional sweet grass trim and a wooden bottom nailed to the birch bark sides, but an interesting feature is that it was made of two different sheets of birch bark lashed together on the sides, rather than from a single sheet. The two pieces of birch bark he used had different color tones in the bark layer beneath the brown rind, so the decoration on the front has more dark-to-light contrast than that on the back.
In addition to its artistic merit, this basket is an important cultural artifact that sheds light on historic Wabanaki traditions and a native people’s evolving way of life as they learned to make a living in a world that European culture was increasingly dominating. Remnants of that history are captured wordlessly here in the form of a humble wastepaper basket.
