The Indians' most versatile tool

Magazine Antiques, May, 2005 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Thousands of years ago, no one knows where, an ingenious person invented the ultimate multipurpose tool--the drawknife. Around 1500 the Woodlands Indians of northeastern North America, who had been using stone tools, were introduced to iron by French traders and with it they produced an improved drawknife known as a mocotaugan. This simple, logically conceived tool is also known by many other names, among them: crooked knife (couteau croche in French), basketmaking knife, bent knife, and canoe knife. Everyone in the world of American Indian studies concurs that, under whatever name it is known, this is one of the most versatile tools ever developed. The user grips the handle with his palm up and his thumb braced at the end of the handle. The blade is usually set at a thirty degree angle to the handle, and the knife is pulled toward the user. Thus, the mocotaugan can be used with great efficiency and accuracy to carve, cut, shave, gouge, and smooth. It was employed to create splints for making baskets, skin an animal, fashion snowshoes, harpoons, spears, bowls, and ladles, and make a birchbark canoe. One gets the idea that no one ever left home without it.

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More than sixty American Indian tribes occupied the Woodlands region when Europeans began trading in the northeastern part of North America in the early sixteenth century. Because mocotaugans were handmade, their handles of hardwood or bone were embellished with a variety of decorative motifs. Created by chip carving, relief carving, or three-dimensional carving, the motifs include clenched hands, stylized animals, and human figures.

An exhibition that surveys this tool and its products is on view at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine, until December 31. The show, entitled Mocotaugan: The Story and Art of the Crooked Knife, contains about fifty pieces, made from the nineteenth century to the present. A nineteenth-century birchbark canoe, snowshoes, and splint baskets are among the objects made with a mocotaugan included in the show.

Mocotaugan is first noted in French in Sebastien Rasles's Dictionary of the Abenaki Language in North America, written in the 1690s, and it first appears in English on a list of trade goods recorded by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1748, where it is the only Indian word on the list. Stylistically there are a few regional and tribal differences between mocotaugans made in the three regions of the Woodlands: the northeast maritime, the western Great Lakes, and the Iroquois. As European immigrants settled in these regions, the decoration on the handles began to exhibit recognizable influences affiliated with England, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, and Scandinavia. Among these borrowed motifs are fleurs-de-lis, shamrocks, and various other flora, including, after 1876, the Canadian maple leaf.

There is no catalogue of this exhibition, but an excellent and now out-of-print book (from which much of this write-up is drawn) is available through the Internet. It is entitled Mocotaugan: The Story and Art of the Crooked Knife: The Woodlands Indian's Indispensable Survival Tool, and is written by the collectors Russell Jalbert and his son, Ned Jalbert, who have loaned many pieces to this exhibition. The book may be downloaded from www.mocotauganthebook.com.