Tomah Joseph Canoe Backrest
Etched double-sided birch bark canoe backrest made by Tomah Joseph, circa 1900. 22” high, 12” wide, 3” deep
If you have ever sat as a passenger in the bottom of a canoe with a thwart cutting across the middle your back, you know that leaning against a thin edge of wood is not particularly comfortable.
The solution to this pain-in-the-back situation is a canoe backrest, an innovation which has been in use for as long as non-natives have been canoeing.
Wabanaki guides awaiting customers for ocean tours around Mount Desert Island, Maine, circa 1881. Note the backrest leaning against a thwart near the stern. (photo: McBride & Prins, 2009)
This birch bark canoe backrest (now sold) was made circa 1890-1900 by Tomah Joseph, a Maine Passamaquoddy who created a wide array of birch bark accessories to sell to non-native rusticators in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
Native Americans set up to sell their handiwork to tourists in coastal Maine, 1889 (photo: Maine Historic Preservation Commission)
The backrest is double sided with a steam-bent ash frame and stuffed with wood shavings to hold a pillow-like shape. Each side has age cracks in the stiff birch bark panels that are lashed to the frame with ash splint.
Both sides of the backrest are etched with pictorial and geometric designs.
Tomah Joseph would have made the birch bark “canvas” for his illustrations by gathering winter bark from white birch trees, turning the bark so that the flaky white outer bark faced the interior of the backrest, then etching through the dark inner bark of the tree (now facing outward on the backrest) to create designs in the lighter layer just beneath it.
A roll of birch bark showing the smooth, darker inner bark on the outside, with the flakey, white outer bark of the tree rolled inward. (photo: sagaan.eu)
It is Tomah Joseph’s distinctive etched artistry that elevates this backrest beyond a functional canoeing accessory. But before exploring the meaning of the backrest’s imagery, it is helpful to establish some context about the artist and his life.
Who Was Tomah Joseph?
Tomah Joseph in middle age.
Tomah Joseph (1837-1914) was a member of the Passamaquoddy tribe, and later its Governor, who lived on the Peter Dana Point reserve in north coastal—also known as “Downeast”—Maine. While growing up, he participated in the tribe’s traditional hunting and fishing practices for subsistence.
Once Tomah Joseph married and had a son, he expanded how he supported his family by creating and selling incised birch bark objects, working as a canoe and hunting guide, and narrating Passamaquoddy stories at events for tourists.
Tomah Joseph dressed for a storytelling performance for the well-dressed rusticators visible in the background, circa 1910 (photo: mainememory.net)
Like most Native people of his era, Tomah Joseph adapted to making a living by providing goods and services to affluent non-natives visitors, primarily in the summer resort colony on nearby Campobello Island, New Brunswick.
Tomah Joseph and his family paddled each summer with a canoe full of goods they had made during the winter, from their home on Peter Dana Point in the upper left corner of the map, across lakes and down the St. Croix River to Welshpool, the town near where they camped on Campobello Island, New Brunswick to sell their wares, provide guiding services, gather blueberries, and harvest sweet grass. It is about a 60 mile trip via roadways today.
During his summers on the island, Tomah Joseph became known to a prominent Campobello family—the Roosevelts. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s parents, James and Sarah, built a summer home on the island in 1885, when Franklin was 3 years old. FDR spent summers on Campobello for 36 years, until he contracted polio in 1921.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt with daughter Anna and dog Duffy on the porch of their Campobello cottage in 1907. (photo: rooseveltcampobello.org)
Crafts such as log holders and letter holders that the Roosevelts acquired from Tomah Joseph are still in the Campobello cottage today.
Interior of the Roosevelts’ summer cottage showing Tomah Joseph pieces in a room setting as the Roosevelts displayed them (photo: newenglandhisoricalsociety.com)
There are also Tomah Joseph letter holders in the Home and Library of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, NY, indicating that the family appreciated and valued Tomah Joseph’s artistry enough to live with it in their proper home back in the states.
Letter holder in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York (photo: Lester, 1993)
The Roosevelts also recognized Tomah Joseph’s skills as an outdoorsman, and often engaged him to guide the family on canoeing expeditions around Campobello Island.
When Franklin was a young man, Tomah Joseph built him a birch bark canoe, bestowing the future president with a tangible legacy representing the convergence of Tomah Joseph’s talents as a craftsman and artist with his deep competence in all matters of outdoor life.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt paddling the canoe that Tomah Joseph made for him. The canoe is now on display in the visitor’s center of the Roosevelt Campobello International Park. (photo: rooseveltcampobello.org)
The etched decoration on the bow of FDR’s canoe that is barely discernable in the photo above, is a portrait of “Mikamwes” (seen more clearly below on a detail from a Tomah Joseph letter holder), one of the little people who dwell in the woods according to Passamaquoddy legend.
Detail from a Tomah Joseph birch bark letter holder. (photo from Lester, 1993)
Canoe Guiding and Backrests
Although Tomah Joseph often guided sportsmen on hunting and fishing expeditions in the Maine woods, his work as a canoe guide on Campobello Island focused on showing tourists the island’s scenery from the ocean.
We don’t know of any written accounts of tourists’ trips offshore with Tomah Joseph, but can surmise that his clients were as thrilled as Caroline Briggs, a woman who summered in Bar Harbor, Maine (down the coast from Campobello Island) in the 1880s where she went on coastal canoe excursions with a Penobscot guide named Frank “Big Thunder” Loring and his son Mitchell, who were contemporaries of Tomah Joseph. Here is a sampling of her effusive diary entries:
“Almost every day canoeing. Big Thunder is always our guide, and one could have no more fitting companion . . . We have paddled with dear old Big Thunder, when the waves rocked us in his little canoe, and when we glided like shadows, while twilight fell around us so softly that one felt like a baby in its mother’s arms . . . We often go out in Mitchell’s canoe: at morning when the sun is sparkling and surf dashing at the feet of the beautiful islands; at sunset when the ocean looks like a melted opal, and out into the darkness with all its mystery, only the stars twinkling overhead and the drip of the paddle . . .” (McBride & Prins, 2009)
Rusticators engaging Penobscot guides in Bar Harbor, Maine for an offshore tour, circa 1881. Caroline Briggs would have looked very much like the well-dressed woman sitting on the canoe at right. (Photo: McBride & Prins, 2009)
It is no small feat on the guides’ part that Caroline Briggs felt comfortable riding ocean swells in a birch bark canoe that was inherently “mighty tippy,” as recounted by one Maine island resident about Big Thunder’s boat:
“I remember Big Thunder . . . I used to borrow his canoe to go up to the pond. Mighty tippy. He never minded. A birch canoe was a good boat if there was an Indian in it.” (McBride & Prins, 2009)
Given the inherent instability of watercraft made with a narrow hull for swift traveling, it was essential for guides to seat passengers on the bottom of a birch bark canoe to lower the center of gravity and avoid upsets.
Sitting stably on the bottom of a canoe would have been even more important in the notoriously squirrely waters with rushing, extreme tides in the Bay of Fundy between Maine and New Brunswick where Tomah Joseph guided tourists.
Tomah Joseph used backrests to make tourists sitting low against a thwart comfortable during guided excursions, as documented in his own birch bark etching below.
(photo: Lester, 1993)
This detail from a Tomah Joseph backrest in the collection of the Boston Children’s Museum shows a woman with a parasol—obviously a tourist—sitting in the bottom of a canoe with the small of her back against an angled backrest.
Tomah Joseph used and sold birch bark backrests prior to the commercial availability of wooden canoe backrests, the first of which appeared in Maine in the 1901 B. N. Morris Canoe Company catalog (below), and later in the 1916 Old Town Canoe Company catalog, during the era when wood and canvas canoes were developed and popularized as a more durable alternative to birch bark canoes.
A wooden backrest for sale in the B.N. Morris Canoe Company catalog, 1901 (photo: woodencanoe.org)
Stories and Symbols Etched in Birch Bark
The Tomah Joseph canoe backrest we’re presenting also includes an etched picture of a guide with passengers seated in the bottom of the canoe.
They are paddling from one of the near-shore attractions off Campobello called “Friar’s Rock” whose form suggests a human figure preaching to the vast ocean beyond the pulpit.
This stereocard shows Friar’s Rock in 1880 during the time period when Tomah Joseph was paddling tourists around the island to see it (photo: tidesinstitute.org)
Although non-natives called the rock formation Friar’s Rock or Friar’s Head, the Passamaquoddy people had their own name and origin story for this sculptural sea stack. One legend described the formation as the figure of a man who turned himself and his wife into rocks facing each other on either side of Campobello Bay so they would never lose sight of one another until the end of time (Leland, 1993).
Most likely Tomah Joseph recounted this legend during his tour to to the rock, and illustrated the legend on his backrests. His inclusion of feathers on the “head” of the rock formation was his way of marking which figures in his illustrations were Natives, and in this case he indicated that the rock had once been a Passamaquoddy rather than a friar.
Above this coastal scene on the backrest is an illustration of a large teepee framed by stylized fern fronds.
A Native man (identifiable by his feather coronet) carries a stack of long wood—for firewood, baskets or canoes—towards the teepee.
On the reverse side of the backrest, the top segment shows a Native man on snowshoes carrying a throwing axe and club in pursuit of a running deer.
Below the deer is a scene of traditional Passamaquoddy camp life—a teepee with a woman (in a solid skirt rather than leggings) tending a cooking pot over a fire.
The camp illustration is much smaller than the hunting illustration, perhaps to indicate distance between the hunting grounds and the camp, or representing the passage of time between the scenes of hunting a deer and cooking a stew.
The two pictures are unified as one scene with a dividing line below the teepee illustration, which is a common way that Tomah Joseph segmented multiple vignettes on a single birch bark piece.
Example of segmented vignettes on a Tomah Joseph picture frame in the Boston Children’s Museum (photo: Lester, 1993)
The lower portion of this side of the back rest combines an ancient and symbolic Wabanaki cultural motif—the double curve of stylized fern fronds—with a cross-hatched triangle, or stylized teepee, which is also among the earliest incised birch bark imagery documented by European explorers visiting the coast of Maine as far back as 1638.
Although Tomah Joseph incorporated ancient foliar and geometrical cultural motifs in his illustrations, he was also an innovator who advanced birch bark etching as a mode of storytelling, creating a type of narrative artwork.
Tomah Joseph’s etching on this birch bark box tells a story of Passamaquoddy family life, travel and subsistence.
While the canoe backrest was created for visitors to use while sightseeing offshore of Campobello Island (and then to purchase as a souvenir of the trip), Tomah Joseph also made a variety of objects to sell to tourists that would be useful back in their Victorian-era households.
Tomah Joseph collar box in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian
Existing forms of Tomah Joseph’s work, many of which are in museum collections, include waste baskets, picture frames, log baskets, magazine holders, letter holders, yarn holders, collar boxes, glove boxes, carrying baskets, picnic baskets, hat racks, and wall pockets.
Tomah Joseph log holder made in 1913, one year before his death. (photo: cowanauctions.com)
While the forms of his crafts catered to the tastes of his non-native customers, Tomah Joseph used materials, techniques, decorative designs and pictorial imagery that were very much rooted in Passamaquoddy culture.
Birch Bark Artistry
While made to be functional, this canoe backrest can now be appreciated as Native American art.
Given its height and sculptural form, it displays well upright on a mantle, shelf, desk or table, or on a display wedge placed higher on a wall among other artwork.
The canoe backrest’s locally sourced birch bark and ash, its pictorial imagery and ancient design motifs, and the form itself all summon the daily world, livelihood, and life of Tomah Joseph: skilled craftsman, artistic innovator, man of the outdoors, tribal leader, and proud Passamaquoddy.
Tomah Joseph paddling his birch bark canoe. (photo: National Museum of the American Indian)
Sources
History on Birchbark: The Art of Tomah Joseph, Passamaquoddy. Joan Lester, 1993. Exhibition catalog of The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Bristol, Rhode Island: Brown University.
Indians in Eden: Wabanakis and Rusticators on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, 1840s-1920s. Bunny McBride and Harald E.L. Prins, 2009. Camden, Maine: Down East Books.
