Grey Owl didn’t quite make it his 50th birthday.

Yet somehow, despite a rather large drinking problem…he managed to become an iconic Canadian symbol and our “…apostle for the wilderness.”

In spite of being a ‘properly’ brought up British boy, once Archie Belaney moved to Canada, he recreated himself as an idealized ‘Indian’. His was the classic cigar-store Indian, right down to his showy headdress and buckskin outfit. He was not representative of any particular tribal nation but more of a Hollywood mish-mash of the romanticized Indian.

He coloured his hair with black ash and wore it in two long braids. Secretly, he darkened his skin with berry juice.

He was ‘revealed’ as a fraud after his death.

We don’t have to go too deep to think that a young British boy, abandoned by his parents (they moved to the U.S., leaving little Archie with two aunts), might have many reasons to create a new story of his existence.

But then, aren’t we all our own creations?

I don’t doubt that Archie’s transformation to Grey Owl was very real to him.

 

 

He lived true to the life he claimed. He lived in his little log cabin, which included the lakeside wall taken over by a beaver lodge. It must have been a rather odiferous occupation in that small house, enough so, that his Mohawk-Iroquois wife, Anahareo, insisted on another cabin being built up the hill where she could live without any rambunctious beavers.

In a newly-colonized Canada, where extraction of resources and conquest of the indigenous peoples was the norm, Grey Owl ’s noble voice spoke of novel ideas of conservation, ideas that were a revelation to the new Canadians.

Is it any wonder that the National Parks Service (later called Parks Canada), made him their iconic representative and employee, built him a cabin on Parks land and sent him over to Europe on speaking tours?

Years ago, I read a wonderful book called The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru. In that novel, the protagonist morphed from rich to poor, male to female and anything else he had to do to survive bizarre and extreme circumstances. I loved how Kunzru explored the process of how we build our identities.

 

 

Hopefully, most of us do not have to build our personalities under such extreme situational conditions.

But create ourselves we do.

We take the genetic roulette we are given and then make up our identities in response to our surroundings and to the story we tell ourselves about our lives.

Perhaps all Archie Belaney did was to be a little more dramatic about it than the rest of us.

Was he a fraud? I’m still not sure, but somehow I don’t really think so.

I ask myself, is it up to me to decide who or what someone thinks they are? Do I get to tell you whether you should declare yourself more Métis than Mennonite? How can I possibly know your innermost responses to the world? How could I ever recreate all the conditions and experiences, biological and otherwise, that brought you to this point in your self-ness? Do I get to determine whether you identify more female than male? And while we’re on that topic, why on earth would I be frightened or threatened by your choices?

Aren’t we all just trying to be our most authentic selves and doing the best we know how?

 

 

Clearly, Grey Owl wrestled with his own demons. He had several wives (at least two of them at the same time). He was, as previously mentioned, a serious drinker. And, although he was on the Parks payroll, there were other Parks employees who were quite tired of having to bail him out of jails and drunken fights.

Yet he also represented Canada well. He spoke with a quiet confidence for the cause of conservation and was a passionate advocate on how we could all do more to connect with Nature, to be more careful, to be more considerate of our environment.

 

 

Yes, he co-opted a First Nations identity. But he also learned and lived with the Objiway for many years and his Mohawk/Iroquois wife, Anahereo, was hugely influentiantial in his views.  In how many marriages do we tend to tilt toward one spouse’s identity over another?  We raise our children Catholic versus Jewish, with Ukrainian food over Armenian, favour this side’s cousins over the other’s.

Our personalities are not fixed. They are mutable and plastic. Certainly there is the basic genetic foundation we are born with, but after that, so much is determined by our reactions to how we are nurtured (or not), and most certainly, by the stories we tell to ourselves about who we are.

We only have to look at the variations in a forest to see this at work. There, we see the spindly tree in the shadow of its brother. Or the crooked tree reaching for the light, bent and twisted by the dominating parent tree. Some are short, some are sick and stunted, some are tall…

But isn’t it wonderful that there is such wildly divergent variation? Side-by-side, all those weird and wonderful trees are a completely glorious new entity.

I like to think that Archie was, in the end, truly Grey Owl. I like to believe that he created himself to be all that he hoped was the best of the indigenous culture that had fascinated him since childhood; a way of life that became his fixation, his focus, his purpose, and, ultimately, his escape.

Clearly Archie did something right…we’re still calling him Grey Owl.

 

 

To experience and understand a little more of Grey Owl’s life, head out to Prince Albert National Park, where you can take a wonderful trip to see his cabin with Waskesiu Marinas.

An update with further reading from the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.