History of Maple Sugaring
By Jack Michael and Cam
The
Maple Sugaring industry is huge. It dominates the shelves of Canadian and
American supermarkets. Canada, the leading maple syrup producer, produces 27
million liters of maple syrup a year. Canada makes over 75% of the world’s
maple syrup supply, most of which comes from Quebec. Creating maple syrup is a
very advanced occupation. It has many different technologies to create the best
tasting syrup in the least amount of time. But before this, it was not the
case.
It is not completely
known who first found maple sugar, but it has
been guessed that the people living in the northeastern part of North America
first discovered it. It isn’t known when it was discovered, but it is thought
to be hundreds of years before the European settlers came over. There are lots
of different legends about how maple syrup was discovered, but most of them
revolve around a person who substituted sap for water and cooked venison or
some meat with it. When they cooked it, it boiled off the water and left the
syrup that coated the meat. There are many sugar-making rituals and traditions
that take place before the sugar harvest. Some of them are dances, such as the
Maple Dance on the first full moon of the spring. The first full moon of the
spring is called the Sugar Moon, not to be confused with the sugar bush (a
plantation of maples). Another legend is related to the Earth Mother, Kokomis,
who made the first maple syrup. Now Kokomis made a hole in a tree and maple
syrup poured out. However, her grandson, Manabush, was worried that if the
sweet gift of the maple tree was so easily obtained, the Indians might become
shirtless and lazy. So he showered the top of the sugar maple with water, thus
diluting the maple syrup into sap.
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| Settler Carrying Sap |
 |
| Native American Tapping |
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| Native Americans Cooking |
Algonquin tribes
used stone tools that make a v-shaped incision in the trunks of the trees, and
then they would insert birch bark tubes into the tree. On the tubes, they would
hang birch bark buckets. They used hollowed out tree trunks filled with hot
stones to boil the sap into syrup. Another way you can turn sap into syrup is
to let the sap freeze over and the take the top layer away that would be frozen
water. All that remains is concentrated maple sap.
The European
settlers learned how to tap trees from the indigenous people, but as time went
on they started to mass-produce it and the ways of the native people are, for
the most part, gone. They started to make contraptions that could cook boil sap faster and they would tap trees faster. It wasn't a small operation anymore, it was very commercial.
Many
people enjoy Maple Syrup. Not just as a food but as a occupation and a
hobby. But all this joy that has
come from Maple Syrup, is all thanks to the innovativeness and intelligence of
the ancient Native Americans of North Eastern America.
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