Time Travel

On Wednesday, the Grade 6s headed to Ska-Nah-Doht in Mount Brydges, ON, a 2 hour drive east.  The real plan was for us to make this trip two weeks ago when there was snow so that we would be able to experience snowshoeing.  Alas, there was TOO MUCH SNOW!  So much that the leaders couldn't get into the conservation park!  This week, the snow melted with the 18C temps so we ended up foregoing snowshoeing but still enjoyed stepping back to 1016 to experience life in this Iroquoian village.

The palisade greets visitors and challenges them to find entrance to the village

Rose, our guide for the day, made us use our math brains as she threw numbers at us and had us calculating time, distance and number of trees.  Field trip doesn't mean your brain is on vacation!

Having granite, bones and pelts guaranteed survival

At the age of 4, boys were expected to be the "muscle of the village" and would carry what the women gathered, learn to hunt rabbit, muskrat and eventually, deer, moose and bear.  Girls became gathers, searching for berries, planting the "3 Sisters" (corn, squash and beans), learning to sew with bone needles, and cooking over open fire.

Rose teaches us that it takes 10 deer to outfit an 11 year old and that our "village" had 22 children.  How many deer would we need to hunt?  Notice the moose hide behind her.  MUCH bigger!

Can you imagine needing to rebuild your house every 2o years?  Ska-Nah-Doht (the village that stands), is presently 43 years old and on its third rebuild.  Cedar trunks needed to be about 2m around and at least 6m tall.  Oh, and you only needed about 10,000 trees to make a village!  In the present, Rose says the trunks she gets look like "toothpicks" because they are too young and skinny.  Whatever the Iroquois took from the land, they replenished for the 7th generation.  This meant that a tree would be about 80 years old when it was ready to be used for the longhouses and palisade.

The frame of the third longhouse is getting ready to be replaced

These longhouses are not the usual 75 feet (they're about 30) and would only hold about 6 families (30 people)

The students also learned the importance of tools.  They were divided into "tribes" and had to elect a leader.  This was their first "test" to see if they had been listening to Rose mentioning that the females were in charge.

Then, the tribes were challenged to make tools using the materials found in a bin.  These materials were sticks, stones, bones and string.  Which tribe would be able to survive?

The available materials

Tealie was elected "elder" of her tribe because she was the oldest in her group.  Good thing she's female! 

Tools needed for these seven areas of life in the village...in order of importance!

The students had some innovative ideas but given the short window of time (10 minutes), they felt discouraged when their ideas didn't measure up to what they had imagined.  Still, we got to see some multi-purpose tools and tools from many of the areas.  We might have to try this challenge again at school!

We're grateful for this opportunity which was completely funded by an outdoor education grant from the Ministry of Education.  

~MissBrooks