Before making any decision about how to repair or restore your canoe, you would do well to get, or at least look at -- "The Wood and Canvas Canoe: A Complete Guide to its History, Construction, Restoration, and Maintenance" by Rollin Thurlow and Jerry Stelmok, and/or "Building the Maine Guide Canoe" by Jerry Stelmok.
The first is often called the "bible" of canoe repair, restoration, and maintenance; the second is an excellent study of the wooden/canvas canoe and its construction,
You might also want to look at "The Old Town Canoe Company" by Susan Audette and David Baker, a great history of the Old Town company and its canoes. These are available from the WCHA store, are often on eBay, or from Amazon.
The brass plates on your canoe are almost certainly there to cover damaged wood at the ends of your decks and/or stems and gunwales. Damage (rot) is common there from storing a canoe upside down on the ground -- a practice that is ok for a few days on a camping trip, but is not a proper way to keep a canoe for any length of time.
A painter is a rope or line used to tie a canoe to a dock. A painter ring is where the line is tied to the canoe.
It is unusual for cane to be pinned in place with dowels or pegs. Sometimes the binding cane (the cane that runs around the edges of the cane) is pegged in place at the four corners of the caned area of the seat -- but I have not seen pegging or use of dowels to hold cane in place. Recaning is not particularly difficult, and cane suppliers also have instructional material available -- two cane suppliers I have used are H.H. Perkins Co., <http://hhperkins.com/faq.php> and Frank’s Cane and Rush Supply <http://www.franksupply.com/caning/hand-caning.html#strandcane>
The black decal, not the red, is the appropriate deck decal for your canoe -- see
http://store.wcha.org/Decals/
Re-canvasing and repainting and revarnishing a canoe is considered routine maintenance. Most prefer to use traditional canvas and filler for the outside, and good marine varnish (e.g., Epiphanes, Petit Captain's) for the interior. Most stay away from polyurethanes and epoxy clear finishes for the interior, because they can be difficult to redo and/or to touch up, and eventually (depending on how often and how hard the canoe is used) refinishing will be called for. Good marine varnishes have ultra-violet inhibitors -- ultra-violet rays will destroy ordinary varnish in very quick order.
Very few canoes have great value as antiques -- their value is as something to be used and enjoyed. Almost anything reasonable you might do can be undone -- if you paint your canoe a crazy color, you or someone else can repaint it. The basic approach most here take is to use materials similar to that used originally. No harm is done by using some modern materials -- epoxy is often the glue preferred for most gluing, because for the most part, you want things that are glued together to stay together, but other modern glues, -- Titebond II and III are also commonly used. Except, perhaps, for a museum restoration, nobody uses the glues used in 1928. If you cover a seat with nylon webbing, it can be removed and the seat can be recaned -- or a completely new cane seat can be installed. But weaving cane is not too difficult. If dacron is used instead of canvas, it can be removed in the future if desired and canvas used again.
And specific to your boat -- the brass plates that are probably not original can be left in place -- if you like them -- if they are doing the job of holding the tip of the canoe together. But now would be a good time to repair and restore the canoe ends, while you are removing the old canvas and refinishing the interior, if you wish to bring the canoe back to a more original appearance.
If your concern about the value of the canoe comes from a desire to sell it, many would advise selling it without restoring it. Restoring a canoe rarely improves the sale price beyond the cost of the restoration -- the restoration can even cost more than the increase in value. And if sold unrestored, the buyer gets to restore it the way he wants.
Greg