Northwestern students engaged in a native maple tree tapping workshop Sunday afternoon hosted by NU’s Native American and Indigenous Student Alliance, In Our Nature and Fossil Free Northwestern.

Environmental policy and culture Prof. Eli Suzukovich III and anthropology Prof. Elspeth Geiger started with a presentation in Parkes Hall about maple tree tapping before leading about 25 participants outside to collect sap from trees outside the building. 

“This curiosity about a deep tradition and this desire to know about it just really strikes me as honestly indescribable,” Geiger said. “It’s really hard to point (out) exactly how proud it makes me feel.” 

Suzukovich said one goal of the workshop was to teach students how the practice of tree tapping provides insight into the health of the tree and its surrounding climate.

Through the workshop, Suzukovich said he hoped that students would look at the campus ecosystem differently and have a “deeper relationship” with it. 

“For a lot of people who eat maple syrup it’s actually seeing the process and seeing that it’s obviously important so people understand where their food comes from,” Suzukovich said.

Collecting maple tree sap is a long-held Indigenous tradition that uses a tree’s natural resources without damaging it. The workshop also focused on the history of the practice.

According to an article from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, tapping maple trees “helped sustain Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.” Additionally, the article stated that the tradition was lost by many during the American colonial period and that it has only recently begun to be reclaimed by many communities.

Weinberg junior Meadow Neubauer-Keyes, the Associated Student Government Sustainability Committee chair, said she believes in the importance of building relationships between native, non-native people and the land.

“It’s really important to me to learn about Indigenous relationships and historical and contemporary relationships to the land where we live now,” Neubauer-Keyes said.

While outside, Suzukovich gave a quick hands-on tutorial to students on collecting the sap. Suzukovich worked with students to drill a small hole into a maple tree, before cleaning out the sawdust and connecting tubes to the hole. Participants then attached a bucket for collecting the sap to the tree using duct tape. 

Weinberg senior and NAISA ASG senator Lula Fox said she valued the “collective experience” of coming together with community members to collect sap in the cold.

“One thing that we as students can do with the privilege of having the resources from this university is (to) set up programs like this,” Fox said. “We can democratize information regarding Indigenous practices and help participate in the revitalization of it, so that it doesn’t fully become not practiced anymore because of colonialism.”

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