My name is Thomas Duvernay and I am a member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, in the Petoskey/Harbor Springs, Michigan area. I visit my hometown once or twice a year, but spend most of the year in Korea, as I teach in a Korean university (for the better part of two decades). My favorite hobby is Korean traditional archery (and is related to the subject at hand), and I have been a practitioner for more than a dozen years. I spent years internationalizing Korean trad archery, in many ways. I founded a web site (www.koreanarchery.org), produced two videos (crafting the Korean horn bow and crafting the Korean bamboo arrow), and have demonstrated Korean archery at trad archery events, over the years. For years, I wanted to do something useful for the LTBB, and saw the lack of traditional Anishnaabe archery as an area I might be able to help in. With my background in trad archery, and resources available to me, I hope to be able to revive/resurrect the tradition. Although many Anishnaabeg bowhunt, it is most often with compound bows, not traditional gear--when people question the effectiveness of trad gear, they should consider that our ancestors survived and thrived for tens of millennia using only that. The downside is that much of the archery knowledge of the Anishnaabeg was lost and forgotten. Now, it is a matter of finding the small bits and pieces and putting them together. I believe that many elders have memories related to it, from their childhood days--possibly a grandfather or uncle made them a bow and taught them a little about it. I have some trad archery friends (mostly non-Anishnaabeg) who are working on replicas of the bows, arrows, quivers, and other archery tackle for this project. They are photo-documenting the procedures, and I hope to be able to eventually have an article written on the subjects, with their help. We need to find out other things, too: *traditional archery games--formal/informal *ceremonial traditions *hunting/warfare archery traditions *hunting/warfare regalia *terminology and so on... I'm hoping that archery events will even become part of our local jiingtamok (and maybe yours, too!). I will invite to such events people I know who are experts in their fields: bowmaking, arrowmaking, stone knapping, etc. Please, I need your help in this. If you can talk with your tribal elders about it, I would be most appreciative--anything you find out will be credited to you. Chi miigwech! Thomas