Canadian tribe wants its canoe back

Date Published: 27-Mar-2009

THE Chief of a tribe of Native American Indians is urging a Galway university to return a 200-years-old canoe to his tribe because of its “powerful spiritual meaning” to the indigenous people.

The rare 21-foot traditional birch-bark canoe of the Canadian Maliseet indigenous tribe, said to be the oldest canoe of its kind in the world, is owned by NUI Galway, but the tribe’s chieftain says it is precious and now wants it back.

Maliseet craftsmen built the canoe in the early 1820s and sold it to Stephney St. George, a wealthy Galway landowner and Captain in the British Army, who shipped the boat to his home in Headford Castle.

In the 1840s, St. George died and his brother Richard St. George moved the family to Dublin. It is believed in an effort to avoid bankruptcy he leased Headford Castle to a magistrate, Mr. Edmund Lombard Hunt, who donated the canoe to NUIG’s James Mitchell Museum in 1852.

The canoe was…