ORIGIN OF MAPLE SUGAR
Menomini
ONE day Manabush returned from the hunt without any food. He could find no game at all. So Nokomis gathered all their robes, and the beaded belts, and their belongings together. They built a new wigwam among the sugar maple trees.
Nokomis said, “Grandson, go into the woods and gather for me pieces of birch bark. I am going to make sugar.” Manabush went into the woods. He gathered strips of birch bark, which he took back to the wigwam. Nokomis had cut tiny strips of the bark to use as thread in sewing the bark into hollow buckets. Then Nokomis went from tree to tree cutting small holes through the maple bark, so that the sap might flow. She placed a birch-bark vessel under each hole. Manabush followed her from tree to tree looking for the sap to drop. None fell. When Nokomis had finished, Manabush found all the vessels half full.
He stuck his finger into the thick syrup. It was sweet. Then he said, “Grandmother, this is all very good, but it will not do. If people make sugar so easily, they will not have to work at all. I will change all this. They must cut wood and keep the sap boiling several nights. Otherwise they will not be busy.”
So Manabush climbed to the very top of a tree. He showered water all over the maples, like rain. Therefore the sugar in the tree dissolved and flows from the tree as thin sap. This is why the uncles of Manabush and their children always have to work hard when they want to make sugar.
From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology.
Birch-Bark Yoke, and Sap Buckets, Used in Maple Sugar Making.