Ordinary Heroes: Trapper turned Conservationist Archie Belaney, aka Grey Owl
“Ordinary Heroes” is a series of interviews about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Some people wiser than me claim that to live a life that is truly lived, a life that is beyond existing, a person must find their one gift, their one great talent and give it to the world as a gift.
The great part of this choice is that the person who gives away their gift gets to live an extraordinary life.
I hope this tale of these ordinary heroes doing extraordinary things will inspire you to do the same.
Today’s “interview” is with a [in]famous CDN who passed away in 1936 after a life devoted to saving the Beaver, which had almost been driven to extinction at that time. His story, like life itself, is rife with contradiction and paradox. This “great” Canadian is an example of a man whose life was a contradiction but he is one of my flawed heroes: Archie Belaney, aka Grey Owl.
Interview #1: Here is what the BBC has to say about this great, but controversial, man who was the world first “rock star conservationist”. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-24127514
One hundred and twenty five years ago, a great conservationist – and imposter – was born in East Sussex. Known as Grey Owl, he was one of Canada’s first conservationists and is said to have saved the Canadian beaver from extinction.
But his beginnings in south-east England were a world apart from his public image as a celebrated writer and speaker on both sides of the Atlantic. Born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney on 18 September 1888 in Hastings, he grew up enthralled by stories of Native Americans and moved to Canada aged 17 in search of a new life. He married a girl from the Ojibwa tribe and learned the language, trapping and canoeing. He kept his true identity a secret, however, telling inquisitive traders and trappers he was the son of a Scotsman who had married an Apache. He was then enlisted to fight for the Canadian army during World War I, where he served as a sniper but was wounded and returned to his aunt’s house in Hastings. There, he married a local woman but he abandoned her soon after for reasons unknown – a recurring theme in his personal life, much of which remains unclear. At the end of the war he returned to Canada and on his travels, Archie Belaney was rescued from snow blindness by an Ojibwa chief called Ne-Ganikabo, or The One Who Stands First. He studied under Ne-Ganikabo for four years, becoming skilled in wilderness survival techniques, and adopted the name Grey Owl. He also married again – to an Iroquois woman called Anahareo in 1925. It was a marriage that would change his life. Two years later, after a long trapping season, he trapped a mother beaver and the kittens were left in the lodge to die but Anahareo convinced him to take the baby beavers home. The episode led him to stop trapping animals and begin his writing and conservation work, warning of the dangers of the logging and fur industries and how they threatened Canada’s native beavers with extinction.
His first book, The Men of the Last Frontier, attracted rave reviews and his journey to fame began. Published in 1931, it is partly memoir and partly about the vanishing Canadian wilderness. However, all trace of his past life in Hastings was erased. The book’s foreword states: “It should be explained that the author is a half-breed Indian, whose name has recently become known throughout the English-speaking world. “His father was a Scot, his mother an Apache Indian of New Mexico, and he was born somewhere near the Rio Grande forty odd years ago.” All this is untrue. The fame of his books led to Grey Owl being invited to carry out lecture tours of Canada, England and the United States in the 1930s and he became arguably the first celebrity conservationist. This is 1930s Canada, it seemed to have inexhaustible forest,” he said. “His personal life was a mess but he had insight, he had vision. This man had a message. Everybody’s green now. He was green when there was nothing to it.
His message was ‘you belong to nature, it does not belong to you’
Clive Webb, professor of modern American history at the University of Sussex, said it was “very easy” to dismiss Grey Owl as a fraud.”I think you do have to separate some of his personal shortcomings from his great work as a conservationist,” he said. “It is precisely because he has assumed that identity that he has an apparent authenticity that he would not have possessed if he was just any other white European settler who’d moved to Canada in the 19th or early 20th Century.” My comment: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Grey Owl understood deeply that to save ourselves we all had to ‘become indigenous’, at least to the degree that we live as part of the natural world instead of seeing Nature as a “thing” to satisfy our desires.
Interview #2: Wikipedia
Belaney wrote that it was Anahareo’s influence that led him to think more deeply about conservation and that she encouraged his writing and influenced him by saving and raising a pair of beaver kits.
After accompanying him on a trapline, Anahareo attempted to make him see the torture that animals suffered when they were caught in traps.[29] According to Grey Owl’s Pilgrims of the Wild, he hunted down a beaver home where he knew a mother beaver to be and set a trap for her.[30] When the trap caught the mother beaver, Belaney began to canoe away to the cries of kitten beavers which greatly resemble the sound of human infants.[31] Anahareo begged him to set the mother free, but he could not be swayed from his position because they needed the money from the beaver’s pelt.[30] The next day, he went back for the baby beavers which the couple adopted.[30] As Albert Braz stated in his article “St. Archie of the Wild”, “Indeed, primarily because of this episode, Belaney comes to believe that it is ‘monstrous’ to hunt such creatures and determines to ‘study them’ rather than ‘persecuting them further.
His first book as Grey Owl was called The Men of the Last Frontier, published in 1931, and it traced the devastating story of the beaver as well as posed some very valid concerns about the future of Canada and its forests. His The Men of the Last Frontier was a call of desperation for the people of Canada to awaken from their immobility and resist the destruction of their country as the forests were being turned into deserts for profit. My comments: It is a really fun read!
In 1972 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) produced a documentary special on Grey Owl, directed by Nancy Ryley. In 1999, the film Grey Owl was released. It was directed by Richard Attenborough and starred Pierce Brosnan. The film received mixed reviews and received no theatrical release in the United States. My comment: The film does not capture the complex, contradictory persona of Grey Owl.
Let Nature be your teacher
Let Love be your guide
Let Destiny bring you the Truth
Interview #3: Comments by people how met him
“I was quite aghast when he said he was going to go as an Indian Chief to lecture in England. I said why not go as the woodsman that he was. He said: they expect me to be an Indian. I’d stand on my head if I knew that people would listen.” – Grey owl’s spouse Anahareo
“Grey Owl could hold an audience in the palm of his hand. The whole country got into a fever about him. That’s all that you can say.” Lovat Dickson
Interview #4: People reflecting on the Impact Grey Owl had on the Conservation movement in Canada
“No other Canadian writer had a greater reputation in the 1930s, both at home and abroad than Grey Owl.” His four books, articles, and movies with the beaver made him a public figure on two continents. – Alec Lucas, the founding co-ordinator of McGill’s Canadian Studies Program
Interview #5: a short CBC film about Grey Owl saving the beaver from 1932
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_aHKf6T8Go
I will now leave you with a few lines from his book The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People to give you a flavour for his writing style; very old fashioned and image rich.
I will tell you about an hunter and his young son and daughter, and of two small kitten beavers that were their friends. And you shall hear of their adventures in the great forests of the North, and in the city too; of what good chums they were, and how one of them was lost and found again, and about the dangers they were in and all the fun they had, and what came of it all. And now we will clean forget the motor-cars, the radio and the movies and all the things we thought we could not do without, and we’ll think instead of dog-teams, of canoes and tents and snow-shoes, and we’ll journey to that far-off, magic land. And there you’ll see great rivers, and lakes and whispering forests, and strange animals that talk and work, and live in towns; where the tall trees seem to nod to you and beckon as you pass them, and you hear soft singing voices in the streams. And we’ll sit beside a flickering camp-fire in a smoky, dark-brown wigwam, while you listen to this tale of Long Ago.
My you live your life as passionately and as single mindedly to save Mother Earth as Grey Owl did, but in your own unique way.
Appendix
The Men of the the last Frontier, Pilgrims of the Wild, The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People, and Tales of an Empty Cabin – Grey Owl’s 4 books
Half-Breed (1939) – publisher Canadian Lovat Dickson
From the Land of Shadows, the Making of Grey Owl, a biography by Don Smith, Ont. Historical Society
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