We’re sharing some of our favorite skin-on-frame photos from the last 15 years while we build the tiny house. (Check out @actuallytiny).
I’ve been thinking a lot about the kayak in this picture lately. Built 16 years ago this less than faithful reproduction of a certain historic Greenland kayak remains to this day my single favorite Greenland kayak ever.
Despite that I ended up leaving this one on the design shelf because as my reproduction abilities increased so did my ethics surrounding preserving the integrity of the lines of historic boats.
I never had much success blending traditional and modern kayak design anyway. I would just end up with a kayak that still didn’t paddle how I wanted but no longer had the rich historic detail of a true replica. This is what ultimately led me to split my approach between producing close replicas and designing modern skin boats from scratch.
It’s been a good approach with one discipline informing the other and I’ve been lucky enough to design some decent paddling modern skin boats and also to find some historic replicas that people find tolerable, sometimes even enjoyable to paddle.
I do wonder about this forgotten kayak from time to time though. My less than perfect reproduction skills led to accidental features that I think are more in line with what most people want in a Greenland kayak. This kayak was more stable, more maneuverable, and rolled better than its truer reproduction. The lines were nice and it’s still a lot more historic than most of what’s out there. So I have to ask myself again what’s keeping me from building it?
It’s not the re-interpretation of historic kayaks that bothers me so much as a creeping sense of cultural appropriation that comes with the unacknowledged modification historic craft. Even before the Tahe came out, I could see there was a hungry market for exactly this sort of kayak by people with little to no actual historic interest in Greenland kayaking. That never felt good to me but I’m also not sure there is a real ethical argument to be made here. Also, it was a nice kayak so I should probably build it again.
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
