Maple Syrup

This historic photos shows a woman collecting maple sap using a wooden spud and a birch bark container.

In 1933, Bill Seuliar took Volney Jones to his sugar camp and showed Jones the traditional tools he used to collect maple sap. Originally, Mr. Seuliar used wooden spuds carved from cedar to tap the trees and placed birch bark containers under the spuds to catch sap. Sometime during the early 20th century, he switched to metal spuds and tin pails that he hung from them. He said this methos was an improvement because the birch bark containers tips as the snow melted and the sap could spill out of them.

Mr. Seuliar told Jones that sugar maple trees made the best syrup but that other soft maple trees, as well as birch and black ash trees, were also tapped.  When Jones asked how many days he tapped the trees, Mr. Seuliar estimated "as little as ten days to as much as six weeks." He explained that if the winter thawing is slow and there was frost every night, the flow was slow and lasted longer. If the winter was damp with alternate warm and cold spells, there is more sap, but it is thinner.  He esimtated that a large tree produced about 1.5 gallons of sap per day in a good year.  Mr. Seuliar estimated that he tapped 350 trees a year.

The sugar mold from Mr. Seuliar

Mr. Seuliar also told Jones how he made candy from maple syrup. After boiling the syrup a bit longer, he poured it into a wooden mold where it harden into shaped sugar or candy. Bill Seuliar gave Jones this mold and told him that it was made at least 50 years before.

Amable (Amab) Boissineau told Jones that when he was a child, his family made vinegar from the sap from maple or birch trees that had soured after sitting for a few days. To make a more concentrated vinegar, they boiled the soured sap.  He said that birch sap was commonly boiled down to half its original quantity.  As the sap continued to ferment, it turned a milky color and then brown.  In the mid-summer, it was strained and put into jugs for later use.  

Jones was primarily interested in the traditional objects the Anishinabek used to tap the maple trees.  He did not record any of the Anishinabek teachings about why sweet sap flows from the maple trees. 

Ziisbaakdaboo - Maple Sap

Anishinaabe children learn about the importance of hard work in a story about Ziisbaakdaboo, maple sap.  The story describes a time when people could gather maple syrup, not sap, directly from maple trees.  When Nanabozho, an Anishinaabe culture hero, found people greedily drinking the syrup from the tree, he realized they did not appreciate this gift from the Creator and so he diluted the syrup into a thin sap. Today, it takes about 40 gallons of boiled sap to make one gallon of syrup. As Josh Homminga told the 2020 Museum Anthropology students “Gotta put in the work to get the golden syrup!” 

Watch this video to learn more Nanabozho's teachings and see how the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa makes maple sugar today.  Sections of the video are in Anishnaabemowin (the language of the Anishinaabe) with subtitles. 

Video created by Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Natural Resources, posted on June 3, 2019