Indigenous Canadian students learn maple syrup making

Algoma University in Ontario, Canada, has started a maple syrup making initiative involving members of its indigenous student community.

Shingwauk Anishinabe Students’ Association and Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig groups are collaborating on the project, which will teach young people to collect sap from maple trees and boil it down to maple syrup on the university campus.

Kiniw Cleland is a student at Algoma University. He explained to the Sootoday news platform that the initiative has a special resonance with indigenous students. Cleland said:

“It gives students the opportunity to learn outside the classroom, and have some fun. We are from the land, we are part of the land – so we must learn from the land.”

While Ontario is not the main Canadian province for maple syrup, with Quebec responsible for close to three quarters of Canada’s production, projects like this help to educate students throughout the entire country of the manufacturing process.

So far, over 20 maple trees at the Algoma campus have been tapped by students. The tapping process drills holes in maple trees so that the sap can be collected in buckets or tubes. Next, a boiling process is used to evaporate excess water from the sap and concentrate the sugars.

Once the sap has been boiled for several hours in a sugar shack to turn it into syrup, the product can be filtered to remove impurities and particles. Based on the resulting colour and flavour of the syrup, it can then be graded; ranging from golden delicate to dark robust maple syrup.