| Grey Owl: Voice for Canada's Wilderness |
 |
 |
| Written by Mathew Jackson |
| Monday, 01 May 2000 02:27 |
|
We found his tiny log cabin in good repair, nestled against the west bank of Ajawaan Lake in northern Saskatchewan's Prince Albert National Park. Standing in perpetual silence, the diminutive cottage remains a symbol of Canada's boundless north country—a salute to a canoeist who gave birth to Canada's conservation movement through his words and deeds, as much as through his misdeeds and lies. After walking for 14 miles under the frown of a turbulent sky, my friend Renee and I rounded a corner from beneath a canopy of scented jackpine and suddenly saw it. As we walked across the plank porch and finally through the lonely, creaking door, we could almost feel the spirit of the mysterious man known as Grey Owl—eloquent writer, fiery conservationist and canoe ranger—still permeating from its wooden walls. "Far enough away to gain seclusion, yet within reach for those whose genuine interest prompts them to make the trip, Beaver Lodge extends a welcome to you if your heart is right," Grey Owl once wrote from his cabin. He lived there for most of the 1930s, under the employ of the Canadian Parks Service, writing international bestsellers while flirting with worldwide fame and his own loneliness. His Iroquois wife Anahereo came and went, detesting his all-consuming devotion to his books, three of which were penned at Ajawaan. In truth, pet beavers Rawhide and Jelly Roll proved to be Grey Owl's most loyal company, going about the business of maintaining an active beaver lodge in his living room during the summer months. It is not an exaggeration to say that Grey Owl was a red Indian like no other. Hidden beneath a carefully contrived facade, he was in fact not an Indian at all, but rather an Englishman from Hastings named Archie Belaney. He was a European who was not satisfied with merely studying the North American Indian—he wanted desperately to become one. His masquerade was so complete and well-acted, in fact, that his British publisher and future biographer, Lovat Dickson, refused for forty years after Grey Owl's death to believe he was anything but the Mexican-born Apache half-breed he had claimed to be. There is little doubt that the remarkable transformation of Archie Belaney into the man known as Grey Owl is one of the most poignant in Canadian history. There were undeniable signs even as he attended English grammar school as a youngster that he was unique. While most good little British boys were preoccupied with such things as cricket and football, little Archie invented the Belaney gang who practiced war-whooping around the school yard, wielding tomahawks with bird feathers stuck in their hair. As an adolescent, Archie practiced throwing knives and tried to impress his first love by feeding frogs to his pet snakes. In his aunt's attic he would sometimes demonstrate an Indian war dance for her. At the age of 18, finally free of his aunt's well-meaning shackles, Archie sailed for Canada's north country. He quickly found that he had a gift for canoeing, and while working as a chore boy at one of the local inns near Temagami, he ventured into the wilderness whenever opportunity permitted. Wherever he went he carried a notebook to jot down Indian words, and before long had mastered more than two hundred words of Ojibway. With this new vocabulary he was able to romance the first of his five wives, an Apache girl named Angele. Shortly after their marriage he teasingly told her that he would make a white woman of her. "No Archie," she replied, "I make Indian of you." As the years passed, Archie grew practiced at inventing and reinventing his family's history, changing it to suit his audience. He also became adept at changing wives. He fathered a child with Angele, left her, and married a Metis woman named Marie Girard from another frontier town in northern Ontario. With Marie he established himself as a white man with perhaps a streak of Indian in him, and by this time was claiming his father was a Texas Ranger who was murdered by a Mexican, who in turn was killed by Archie. Soon he left a pregnant Marie to join the Canadian military during the First World War. Later, after recovering from war wounds in Britain, he married an English woman named Ivy Holmes, then promptly left her too. Canada's wilderness was calling. An excellent canoeist, Archie's skills as a paddler are what likely saved him from self-destruction as a bingeing alcoholic, helping him to find work as a ranger in an Ontario forest reserve. Paddling a canoe, Archie was at his best, and he spent two summers traveling between ranger stations throughout the remote park. On his canoe outings he began to notice the effects timber barons were having on the northern forests, and angrily composed on birch bark his first statements as a conservationist: "God made this country for the trees—Don't burn it up and make it look like hell!" He began to dye his hair black and redden his skin with henna, while at the same time inventing Indian war dances and singing war songs that neither the Iroquois nor Ojibway could understand. His journey to that of being the world's most famous Indian conservationist came full circle when Archie finally met and married Anahereo, the full-blooded daughter of an Iroquois chief. It is she who would join him on his trapline in northern Quebec in 1925, claiming that Archie "looked like the ever so thrilling hero of my youth, Jesse James, that mad, dashing and romantic Robin Hood of America." As taken with her as she with him, Archie listened when she talked of the tragic demise of the beaver they were now trapping to earn a living. She instilled in him a strong environmental ethic, nurturing a belief that the beaver's death would also mean the end of Canada's northern wilderness. Thus while living in Quebec, rather than continue slaughtering beavers for fur, Archie decided to live off his tiny military pension while starting a beaver colony. He and Anahereo had rescued two young beaver kits after their mother had been killed in one of his traps, and from that moment on Archie became committed to the cause of the beleaguered beaver. His trapline out of the way and with nothing better to do, he sent a story about the life of the Canadian trapper into the British magazine Country Life. To his surprise, it was so well received that a book was soon requested. Above all else it is Archie's relationship to his pet beavers, which he named McGinnis and McGinty because they reminded him of two industrious Irishmen, that would contribute to his later status as a world-renowned writer and lecturer. He was dubbed the "Beaver Man" by locals, and to help pay the bills Archie sold ten-cent admissions to see his pets. Rising from his life as a mediocre trapper, Archie focused on transforming himself into a distinctly Indian scribe, perhaps realizing the general public would thus credit him with a natural insight otherwise denied his white brethren. On November 12, 1930, he signed his name Grey Owl for the first time, and by the following year had publicly declared himself an authentic "Indian writer." In the eyes of the public, Grey Owl was fast becoming a symbol of conservation with a genuine feel for wildlife, a reputation that did not go unnoticed by a certain man in the Canadian Parks Service. James Harkin, the energetic and visionary Commissioner of National Parks, was one of few individuals at that time who shared Archie's concerns about nature and the environment. Already having worked to protect several species of wildlife—including the wood buffalo, muskox and caribou—Harkin saw the potential for making a documentary film about Grey Owl and two new beavers whom Archie had named Rawhide and Jelly Roll. Excited about Harkin's intention to "provide a living argument for conservation," Archie agreed to participate. So at a time when the federal government had seriously considered slaughtering wolves by dropping strychnine pellets from aircraft, Grey Owl and Harkin found themselves fighting for the preservation of the natural world. It was a message that few people had heard before. With the positive press Harkin's film about Grey Owl had spawned, the commissioner had a second idea. He approached the federal government to suggest employing Grey Owl within the National Parks Service. He argued that if Grey Owl were living in one of the national parks it would bring in valuable tourist dollars, while at the same time "securing publicity for the National Parks and for wildlife conservation." Enchanted with the idea, the Parks Service formally invited Grey Owl to become the "caretaker of park animals" in Manitoba's Riding Mountain National Park. With writings, films and lectures, they counted on Grey Owl to stage a publicity coup for the Parks Branch. He did not disappoint. Later that year his first book, Men of the Last Frontier, was released by his publisher in England. It quickly flew off the shelves, scoring highly with fans and critics around the world. "Grey Owl is no stuffed Indian," wrote the New York Times. The more Archie wrote the more Indian he became in the eyes of the public, despite writing with a literary flair that had put him near the top of his class in English grammar school. Enjoying his growing popularity as a voice for wilderness, Grey Owl went to incredible efforts to cover his tracks. When submitting manuscripts to his editors in England, he would purposely misspell words. On one occasion, after being asked how he had learned the language of the beaver, he told a newspaper reporter: "I did not have to learn it. It comes down to an Indian through the ages—instinct." By this time, Archie was as "Indian" as he ever would or could become. Archie's second and third books were as popular with the public as his first; Pilgrims of the Wild sold fifty thousand copies in the United Kingdom alone. His third book, a children's book titled Sajo and the Beaver People, has since been translated into eighteen languages and at the time earned him praise as "the best writer on animals in any language." Copies flew off shelves at a rate of two thousand a week. Incredibly popular overseas, on his first grueling lecture tour across Britain Archie attended 300 speaking engagements within a span of only four months. Three to four times a day he spoke to crowds so large that the police had to be called in to control them. On his second tour, he even gave a private lecture to the royal family at Buckingham Palace. Like so many truths about Archie Belaney, facts remain difficult to separate from fiction. While trumpeting a message hailed around the globe as "visionary," his vices continued to haunt him. He drank excessively and ate poorly, and on his last British tour was seen swallowing white pills by the handful. Although he hid this side of himself well, it would ultimately lead to his death a mere two months before his fiftieth birthday. In April of 1938 he died at his cabin on Ajawaan Lake—alone. Sitting down on the wooden porch attached to the front of his cottage, I find myself staring out at the colors of forest and sky reflected on Ajawaan's glassy surface. I can't help but think that these waters reflect the true spirit of Grey Owl himself—a complicated patchwork of bright blues, soothing greens and dark grays—blended so perfectly that one can hardly discern where one shade starts and the others end. As with Grey Owl himself, there seem no obvious lines to separate the landscape's changing moods and personalities. At the far side of the lake, I almost imagine a V-shaped ripple gliding across the water's surface—one of Grey Owl's beavers returning home. I can't help but think that while this man might have been many things, there is little doubt of the good he was able to accomplish during his brief stay in Prince Albert. "And a temple it is, raised to the god of silence," he once wrote, "of a stillness that so dominates the consciousness that the wanderer who threads its deserted naves treads warily, lest he break unnecessarily a hush that has held sway since time began." If he were alive today, he would no doubt be arguing for the protection of this sacred hush until the end of time. Originally Published, Paddler March-April 2000 |
Share This Page!
