Article body copy When I first see the canoe, in May, it takes a moment to distinguish the long, shapely slab of cedar from the patch of earth that has spent more than a century trying to reclaim it. Covered in moss and ravaged by decades of slow rot, the narrow boat lay in the same spot where Indigenous Alaskans had carved it from the trunk of a western red cedar. They did this in the place where the tree fell—first by cutting it into two pieces, then by fashioning the canoe from the lower...