Portage Lake At the Sugar Camp

And a long time ago we used to live far away. It was about thirty miles as the white man would say. They used to drive horses when we came here to Iskigamiziganing 'The Sap Boiling Place', as it was called. That's where the old lady's sap-boiling lodge was. She made it. I don't remember how she made that sap-boiling lodge. It looked like a house. In the middle she put up what's called an iskigamiziganaak 'sap boiling frame'. She put up four sticks, [two] on each end, they put them up. They laid a stick across [each set of end poles]. Then they chopped some short sticks and carefully peeled them [to go over the cross sticks]. The kettle hangers were [attached to them] there. The kettle hangers were really nice. That's where the kettles hung. One kettle hung there at the front. That's where they kept pouring it as it thickened into syrup. That's how they made syrup. Then when it was done boiling, the sugar thickened into syrup. They didn't just take it off the fire. The kettle was heavy. The syrup was heavy. Holding the [short peeled] stick on both ends, they slid it, slid it along on a stick, slid the kettle along on a stick. It didn't get burnt there then, but the other ones were left to boil. They used a rag to strain the syrup. They were always doing that. That sap-boiling lodge, as it was called, was there a long time. I never see any of them anywhere today. Every spring when they came over, when she came over, all she [grandmother] had to do was tie it up using the inner bark of the basswood and cover it. If there was a lot of snow there, they shovelled it out again. They didn't lie down to sleep on the bare ground. She made a platform just like a bed. The ground was wet as long as it kept thawing out there inside. Well, they kept boiling sap there through the night. Long ago the Indian boil sap outside.

from

Maude Kegg, Portage Lake: Memories of an Ojibwe Childhood, ed. John D. Nichols (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1991), 12-15.