The Woodlands Indians comprised the many tribes from several different North American language stocks inhabiting the vast area extending from Ontario and Minnesota eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. The Ojibwa Indians, an Algonkian speaking Woodlands people, originally lived at the east end of Lake Superior. During the fur trade, they moved north and westward until they had spread over the largest geographic area occupied by one tribal group in North America. During the 19th century, in this country they gradually ceded most of their land in treaties with the government and settled on numerous reservations, principally in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

White birchbark has been a vital resource for the Woodlands Indians for centuries. The bark of the common birch tree played a major role in everyday life of the tribes of the vast Woodlands area.

Thinking of birchbark calls to mind the image of an Indian silently paddling a feather-light bark canoe across a moonlit lake, but the canoe was only one of many functional and artistic uses to which wigwaas, as the Ojibwa called birchbark, was put.