I used to think paper cutting was just something grandmothers did with safety scissors and construction paper.
Then I saw my first Ojibwe birch bark biting—a delicate, symmetrical pattern created by folding thin sheets of birch bark and biting designs into them with teeth—and honestly, it felt like watching someone crack a code I didn’t know existed. The technique, practiced primarily by Anishinaabe women for centuries, produces intricate geometric and naturalistic patterns that look uncannily similar to the paper cutting traditions that emerged independently across Europe and Asia. Anthropologists have traced birch bark biting back at least 400 years in the Great Lakes region, though oral histories suggest it’s much older. What’s fascinating—wait, maybe fascinating isn’t the right word—what’s *unnerving* is how this Indigenous art form anticipates design principles that European paper cutters wouldn’t formalize until the 17th and 18th centuries. The symmetry, the negative space, the narrative density packed into a six-inch square of bark: it’s all there, fully realized, before Scherenschnitte became a thing in Switzerland or jianzhi workshops opened in Chinese villages.
Contemporary paper cut artists don’t always know they’re borrowing from Ojibwe aesthetics, but they definately are. Look at the work of artists like Béatrice Coron or Bovey Lee—those layered, narrative-driven compositions that play with positive and negative space. The DNA is there.
How Teeth Became Tools and Tools Became Cultural Memory
Here’s the thing: birch bark biting wasn’t initially considered “art” in the Western sense. It was functional, ceremonial, sometimes medicinal. Women would create bitten patterns to decorate makakoon (birch bark baskets), to mark clan affiliations, or to pass winter evenings in a way that combined storytelling with muscle memory. Each bite required calibrated pressure—too hard and you’d tear through multiple layers, too soft and the pattern wouldn’t register. Elders taught children by letting them feel the resistance of bark between their molars, adjusting their jaw tension until the bite produced a clean crescent or star. The patterns themselves encoded information: floral motifs might indicate seasonal harvests, geometric designs could reference migration routes or family lineages. When European settlers arrived with metal scissors and paper in the 1800s, some Ojibwe artists adapted their techniques to the new materials, but many resisted, arguing that the relationship between body and bark—the intimate, physical act of creation—couldn’t be replicated with tools.
Turns out they were right, at least partially. Modern paper cut artists use X-Acto knives, laser cutters, even CNC machines. The precision is remarkable, but something gets lost. The slight irregularities in a bark biting, the way one side of a pattern might be imperceptibly sharper because the artist’s canines were stronger on the left—these imperfections carry what museum curators now awkwardly call “embodied knowledge.” You can see it in the work of contemporary Indigenous artists like Kelly Church or Sarah Agaton Howes, who’ve revived bark biting practices and exhibited them alongside European paper cuts to highlight the differences.
When Colonialism Ate the Credit (And Museums Finally Noticed)
I guess it makes sense that the art world ignored birch bark biting for so long.
Indigenous women’s crafts have historically been categorized as “folk art” or “ethnographic specimens” rather than fine art—a classification that conveniently erased them from design history textbooks. When the Museum of Arts and Design in New York mounted a major paper cutting exhibition in 2009, Ojibwe bark bitings were mentioned in exactly one wall text, tucked in a corner near the gift shop. It took until 2017 for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to organize a dedicated exhibition tracing the technique’s influence on global paper cutting traditions. The show included bark bitings from the 1850s alongside contemporary works by artists like Pat Kruse (Ojibwe) and Melissa Trevizo (Akimel O’odham), demonstrating how the aesthetic principles—radial symmetry, iterative patterning, narrative layering—had migrated across cultures and centuries. Some scholars now argue that Jesuit missionaries, who lived among Anishinaabe communities in the 1600s, may have carried descriptions or samples of bark bitings back to Europe, inadvertently seeding the paper cutting boom that followed. It’s speculative, sure, but the timeline checks out, and the stylistic overlaps are hard to dismiss as coincidence.
Why Your Favorite Paper Artist Might Owe Royalties to a Birch Tree
The influence shows up in unexpected places. Kara Walker’s monumental silhouette installations—those brutal, gorgeous narratives cut from black paper—use negative space in ways that echo bark biting compositions, even if Walker herself hasn’t explicitly cited Ojibwe sources. Rob Ryan’s whimsical paper cuts, with their dense, nature-heavy imagery, similarly employ design strategies that Anishinaabe artists perfected generations ago. There’s no direct line of transmission, necessarily, but there’s a shared visual language, a common grammar of voids and presences. Some contemporary Indigenous artists are reclaiming that grammar aggressively. Church, for instance, creates bark bitings that incorporate English text and pop culture references, forcing viewers to confront the way traditional techniques can hold modern, sometimes uncomfortable, content. Her piece “Decolonize Your Mind” (2018) uses classic floral patterns to frame the phrase in bitten birch bark—a collision of old and new that makes you reconsider what “traditional art” even means.
Anyway, the Ojibwe artists who pioneered this technique never got museum retrospectives or design awards. Most remain anonymous, their work attributed generically to “Anishinaabe women, circa 1880s” in collection databases. But their influence persists, quietly shaping how we think about pattern, symmetry, and the relationship between material and meaning. Every time someone picks up a pair of scissors and folds a sheet of paper, they’re participating in a lineage they probably don’t recognize—a lineage that started with teeth, bark, and the radical idea that beauty could be bitten into existence.
