Kids help build canoe

Hands-On LearningA tree trunk found in a Richmond landfill may help hundreds of students build a link to the Powhatan Indians.

Using a 12-foot-long, 4-foot-diameter white oak log, James River Park naturalist and historian Lorne Field is leading an effort to build a dugout canoe, Powhatan Indian style.

If all goes according to plan, Field will have enlisted the aid of about 1,000 volunteers--many of them Richmond-area students--by the end of the school year to burn, scrape, hack, shape and trim the log into a canoe.