Sugardance

There was a man, a writer priest who worked on commission for the King of France and who told in his records of an explorer and mega star from the port of Saint Malo on the channel coast of France, a place renowned for its industries of local extortion and worldly excursions of adventure. The story the chronicler—Andre Thevet, Royal Cosmographer of France—told was how J. Cartier, on one of his tours of findings to a place called the ‘Canada River’, a trip that took 61 men and two ships and twenty days of sailing in search of the riches of the much heard-of Far East and Pacific Ocean, that Cartier had taken a sip of sweet water that ran from trees in the springtime. A squirrel will tell you that with front teeth on cold nights and warm days you gouge the bark of the maple tree to imbibe in the medicine of the season.

‘Sinzibuckwud’— ‘water drawn from wood’ is Algonquin speak for this holy water, this tonic, this maple sap water that cleansed toxins and fat accumulated over winter while offering the body a much revered intake of energy and nutrition; and so it was.

Cartier said that “sap gushed out as good as the best of wines” and that said a lot for a Frenchman from Brittany who appreciated the exotic. And so these new arrivals to what is our present day home studied closely at how the Indigenous Peoples in the northeast region of a vast continent would also take the sap of the birch tree and in a clay pot over fire would render it down to make a resin that could attach a tip to an arrow or seal the seams of the bark of the same tree to make sturdy and fleet boats with tapered bows at each end that combined travel vessel and shelter on journeys of trade and policy within a vast economic system long established with neighbouring Indigenous nations.

And so the touring French watched as the people cut a V-shape into the bark of the maple tree with a hatchet and then inserted a reed to channel the liquid into a container that when left overnight to allow the ice to form and when the ice removed left a denser flavour but not too sweet. Or like the birch sap, when added to a clay pot on a fire to thicken similarly the sweetness of maple would condense with added hot stones to encourage the liquid to simmer down. Venison or any other game when basted with maple before curing gave the recipe for the smoked wild salmon with pine nuts I had for dinner last night, which sprung this stream of consciousness from the reverie of sweet dreams.

But you see, I mean J. as in Jacques Cartier passed away at home in Saint Malo in 1557 after taking on a third tour of the ‘Canada River’—the Saint Lawrence—which had nothing to do with job stress apparently, but by then the French had vast plantations of sugar cane in the West Indies. And so it goes that processing sugar cane needs to be done close to where the cane is grown as it loses its sucrose within hours of harvest. And here again the French adventurers witnessed how the Indigenous Arawak and Carib people of the islands would pound the cane to extract its sap and boil it down to create molasses, a method traditionally passed down from people in Asia and the Middle East long before. So why not replicate a further simmering process in the Country of the Canada’s referring to the maple and the two main nations of Indigenous People they had thus far encountered?

At the earliest of French colonial outposts at Hochelaga, now Montreal, and Stadaconna near Quebec City, small shelters set up in the springtime would not only offer up Indigenous remedies from the evergreens to save the visitors from death by scurvy, the elixir of the maple and the process of the sugaring then happening in European cast iron pots and later on flat tin sheets came to be the process we know today.

The spring harvest in the time of cold nights and warm days was a time of celebration, it was an appreciation of the goodness of the earth for our removal from winter cloistering, of the coming fresh greens of the fiddlehead fern, the migration of the salmon, and the time and place of syruping before the arrival of the Europeans was set as a gathering place for friends and family and for arrivals from near and far. So when we witness this time of the Sugar Moon and the slow leaving of winter and when we do the sugar dance be sure to give thanks in humility to the earth and to ancestral souls from which we have received; their traditions; their know-how; their generosity of human kindness.