MAXTON — The maiden voyage of the dugout canoe dubbed “Wisdom” was a success, according to Kevin Melvin, the project leader for the canoe’s first launch held Saturday at the Lumbee Tribe Cultural Center.

During Saturday’s ceremony before the launch, Melvin told a crowd of spectators representing multiple tribes, he was worried that something had been done wrong and the canoe would sink when they tried to sail it. However, submerging it in water is a part of the finishing process.

“When it came time to sink it, it wouldn’t sink,” he said. “A buddy of mine went and got some cinder blocks, and we put those inside it. It was still about 4 inches out of the water and wouldn’t sink. It took it two weeks to get waterlogged enough to sink.”

The dugout canoe was sunk in the culture center lake in January and has been out of the water for a few weeks. It is 18 feet long and weighs about 1,500 pounds.

Before it became a canoe, Wisdom was a 120-year-old tree located with the help of the Nature Conservancy. The tree was processed into a 6,000-pound log and transported to the building site.

That’s when Melvin and his band of community collaborators got to work. Participants came from each of the state’s eight recognized tribes and the Catawbas in South Carolina. Every Saturday for eight months, they’d scrape, sand and burn that log as their ancestors would have, using few modern tools.

It was a time-consuming process, and while the builders were doing the burning out, they’d often have to sit, wait and keep watch over it, Melvin said. During those times, they’d all talk and tell stories of their cultures and pass on knowledge from the elders.

These conversations are what sparked the idea to name the canoe Wisdom. Melvin said,

“One day, I was thinking about all I’d learned from this journey,” Melvin said. “I’m not just talking about learning about building a canoe. I was thinking more of the wisdom shared as we talked and told stories, and that’s when the name came to me.”

As part of the launch celebration, indigenous games, arts and crafts and canoeing were available throughout the afternoon. The launch ceremony began at 1 p.m. with a sage purification ritual and an invocation calling on the creator to help Native Americans reclaim their traditions and heritage. There was also a drum circle.

Representatives from the Waccamaw-Siouan tribe and the Lumbee tribe serenaded the crowd with a verse from a canoe song all the tribes are still working on together. Each tribe is creating a verse for the song in their native language.

A little before 2 p.m., Melvin and a young boy selected from the crowd carefully seated themselves in the canoe and picked up their paddles. As they glided through the water, cheers and clapping from the shore followed them.

The canoe and the song are two of the five components of the Life by the River project. Life by the River is a program by the Museum of the Southeast American Indian that focuses on North Carolina’s Native People’s connection in relationship with their ancestral waters. Other parts of the project include a documentary, an exhibition, and a small-scale replica canoe that will be used in simulations in the museum.

Eventually, Wisdom will travel across the state with the goal of floating it in each NC tribe’s ancestral waters, from rivers, streams and lakes to Carolina Bay.