(relaxing guitar music) (bark scraping) (Pat breathing) (scissors scratching) - My name is Pat Kruse, and I'm a birch barker.

We're in Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe land, and I make baskets and all kinds of different styles of birchbark stuff.

And then I got it cut out, I gotta shape it.

I wanted to do something different.

And birchbark was a route for me to do that.

I wanted to make canoes, I wanted to make baskets.

I just like that stuff.

And it stuck with me since I was little.

So I've been doing birchbark off and on for like 30 years.

(relaxing guitar music) Practically most of my life I've been doing cultural things because birchbark and the culture go hand in hand.

So without birchbark, we would never had wigwams to live in and survive a sustainable winter.

Like it's 30 below zero out, right?

If you've seen a real Ojibwe wigwam you would understand, aha, this is how they did it.

This is culture, this is the way it is.

And then what about the birchbark canoe?

We were able to travel from east coast, west coast, all the way to Montana through all the rivers and portage.

What about bowls and cups, medicine?

All come from the birch tree.

So birchbark goes hand in hand with culture.

(uplifting guitar music) There's no perfection.

There's no ever trying to be perfect with the birchbark.

As you see, things crack, things break, things happen.

And every piece of art I made, whether large or small, it's stressful.

And it's like you're trying to perfect something that's an imperfect thing.

(bark snaps) And you can tell that, see how it wants to go one way or another, see how it did that?

You can, if it won't work one way, you can work another.

And it's important to make sure that you be mindful of any art, anything that you're trying to do Native American, there's never perfection.

And you're just the same as any art or any tree or anything.

We're imperfect.

So we try to mimic a good thing but, at the same time, not trying to be perfect.

(calm guitar music) I have a style from the old school to new school.

So my inspirations are the original people, like old school Ojibwe baskets, and their baskets are phenomenal.

If you seen them, you would understand.

(calm guitar music) So what we're doing is we're trying to tell a story with it through the art.

So that's what a birchbark painting is.

It's like I take a flat piece of birch, put it on wood, and then I put a design on there, whether it's floral or a turtle or a tree.

So giant picture scapes of a whole forest with animals in it.

But it's all different colors of birchbark.

(serene guitar music) Some of my ideas for the birchbark paintings was there used to be scrolls and they would tell the history of us.

So they would use these things to teach you how to hunt, how to survive, and that's what the storytelling bark is about, the paintings, it's to teach you how to understand that nature is as important as each of our family members, and the water or the air, everything we live on, no littering, all that, it's important, and we teach that through the paintings.

(calm guitar music) Me and my apprentice, Terri Hom, found this cradle at the Libertyville, Illinois, Dunn Museum.

And she got ahold of 'em and arranged for us to go meet the people, we went and looked at it, took pictures, and took little measurements and stuff.

And then we came home and I spent three months trying to design it and make the same similar thing.

But the cradle was so important because they were making these things in 1800s.

And that's the last time anybody made one.

We were lucky to be the two people to actually remake something so special as this cradle because now we made the same thing in this generation instead of it being lost 200 years ago, 190 years ago.

I would take up novel words to make people who are not Native American understand how important that is culturally to us, to remake such a thing and to have someone alive on the planet doing these things.

Or to teach it, it's hard to teach, it takes months, years.

It's not something you learn overnight.

(calm guitar music) What I would like people to take away from my art is the planting of more birchbark trees, to recognize the value of this tree, recognize the medicinal value, the baskets, the canoes, the finer art.

And we're actually trying to create something that lasts for generations and generations because our lives don't last that long.

It's just trying to leave a history for your family that this is what I did while I was here.

And these other nice things I tried to make to explain what I was doing while I was here.

(calm guitar music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.