Join North Dakota’s Poet Laureate Denise Lajimodiere as she demonstrates the art of birch biting during the Western Art Show and Cowboy Poetry Gathering where she will be selling her work as well as reading her poetry.
Birch bark biting is a precontact art done by all tribes in the northern hemisphere where there are birch trees. Bark is carefully harvested in the spring, doing no harm to the living tree. The bark is carefully and patiently peeled into layers as thin as onion skin paper. She then folds small pieces of the bark, and bites designs with her eye tooth. There is no end to designs that can be made by folding and refolding and biting designs. Denise bites flowers, turtles and dragonflies.
Birch Biting Demo
Saturday, September 23 @ 12:00 Noon
McKenzie County Ag Expo, Exhibit Hall
Western Art Show
Saturday, September 23 | 11 am – 8 pm
McKenzie County Ag Expo, Exhibit Hall
Find out more about the Wild West Weekend in Watford City at wildwestweekend.com
About Denise Lajimodiere
Denise Lajimodiere is a founder of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a nonprofit focused on supporting boarding school survivors. She is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa (Ojibwe).
Lajimodiere’s book Stringing Rosaries: the History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of North American Indian Boarding School Survivors (2019) features interviews from boarding school survivors. The book includes her experiences being raised by her parents, who are boarding school survivors. Now retired, she spent more than 44 years in education as a teacher at Edwin Loe Elementary School, an instructor at Turtle Mountain Middle School, a principal for Turtle Mountain Elementary School and an assistant professor in educational leadership at North Dakota State University.
Lajimodiere is author of the poetry collections Dragonfly Dances, Thunderbird, Bitter Tears and His Feathers Were Chains, and of the children’s book Josie Dances. She is a traditional Jingle Dress dancer and Ojibwe birchbark biting artist. -NPR, July 7, 2022