Learning to Listening to the Beaver's Tale

A late November day, found us hiking on land near Washago, Ontario  that had just been donated to the Couchiching Conservancy .  The lower part of the trail wound through huge white pines, hemlocks and a few ash trees. We walked on the soft forest floor of reddish brown needles.  Then we began to climb a hill past errant glacier-placed boulders where the oak trees grew.  Most of the leaves had fallen but the forest floor was full of wintergreen leaves still succulent and dark green with their cheerful red berries.  We picked some berries to chew and savour the fresh wintergreen blast of flavour as well as some leaves to make tea with later on.

The ponds on the upper part of the trail had started to freeze and the curving, wavy patterns on the ice made me stop and look, imagining what currents or underwater plants caused the formations.  After awhile, we walked until we got to a little dock with one cottage chair on it.  I stood and breathed deeply, feeling peaceful in this serene place.  

Then I became aware of a sensation on my back as if a weight were draining off.  I felt wave after wave of tension wash down my back. I felt very grateful for this release that was seemingly just happening.  I had experienced the same sensation the week before standing in a different forest.  That time it felt as if I had laid down a big heavy backpack.  Perhaps my sixty-year-old body has learned to relax in the woods while my mind takes in all the sights and sounds and my artist’s brain begins to explode with ideas and images.

Beaver lodge

After awhile, we started to walk back down the trail but something in the opposite direction seemed to be calling me.  I walked off the path and through the trees, my feet crunching on the fallen brown oak and maple leaves, to the top a little knoll.  Childlike curiosity moved me onward.  My partner had come with me in my exploration and as I stood there trying to figure out what had pulled me forward, he pointed out an old beaver lodge just below me on the edge of the pond.  

Oh, I thought, the beaver has something to tell me.

I stood and waited, breathing in the forest air.  After a few moments, it came to me in a strange sentence.  “Beaver pelts were the currency of colonization.”  I was keenly aware of this piece of Canadian history because my partner and I have been auditing a MOOC (Massive Open On-line Course) from the University of Alberta called Indigenous Canada.  The 12 week free course has expanded our knowledge of this history by including the perspective from Indigenous people.  We have been learning things we never were taught in school about the fur trade, treaties and current issues and working to integrate this new knowledge into our sense of the history of this land.

Fresh beaver cuts

We had learned that beavers were nearly hunted to extinction because of the demand from Europe to make hats from their pelts.  The decline in the fur trade once the animals became scarce set the Indigenous people up for poverty, starvation and then once weakened, being forced by the government of the time into signing treaties that were never honoured and into moving onto reserves that were too small and too separated from each other.  I remembered seeing Kent Monkman’s painting The Massacre of the Innocents (you can see this painting by clicking on the title) in which Europeans are killing beavers everywhere.  For Monkman, the beaver s in this painting are actual beavers as well as a symbol of the Indigenous people who were slaughtered through disease, and starvation. 

It used to be that when I saw a beaver, I thought of the animal on the nickel, of hard work, of pristine nature, of some vague notion of being a proud Canadian.  That beaver was the symbol of what  author Junot Diaz calls "Canada’s narrative of innocence."  But now the beaver told me a different story.  Extirpation, species extinction, genocide are the hard truths and legacies of the colonialism brought by my ancestors.  The reasons they did this are I suspect, part of the bigger European history of invasions, imperialism and war.  That history radically changed this country and perhaps seemed "business as usual" to the colonizers.  Justice Murray Sinclair has pointed out that even though genocide only became illegal in 1948, not being illegal doesn’t make something right.

Beaver trail on the soft ice

And here, now, was a beaver lodge, off the marked path, hidden from view.  The beavers came back.  We see evidence of them all the time. The assimilation and genocide of Indigenous people was equally unsuccessful.  Indigenous people are healing, recovering their cultures, languages, traditions and becoming a strong voice for protection of the land and water. 

As I learn more about the history of this land, I try to imagine not just 150 years and not just 400 years of the French coming to this area of Ontario.  I try to imagine thousands of years of Indigenous presence here in relationship with all of nature.  When Canadians go to Europe they come back impressed with the thousands of years of history that they can imagine since temples, roads, buildings, archaeological digs and museums give them a visual example of past human presence.  

Here in Canada, there are some archaeological digs whose contents get put, often disrespectfully, in glass cases in museums.  But we have to imagine thousands of years of human presence on this land that was in so much harmony with nature that virtually no physical evidence remains for us to see.  The history is in the stories, in the culture, in the languages, in the traditions that were passed down for all those years.  Perhaps we can’t “see” the evidence of the history of this land.  Perhaps we have to listen to it instead.  Listen to the sound of the languages that came from this land.  Listen to the stories that came from this land.  Listen to the worldview that came from this land.  It is not what we were taught in school.  It is a different way of knowing, of connecting with the past. Somehow, standing by the beaver lodge, some of this knowing came to me as I stood quietly and listened to the land, to the water, to the lodge. 

Evidence of a beaver breaking through the ice

We hiked back down the hill, through the oaks, through the white pines and balsam firs to the car that we had left parked beside the old cabin.  There were two women sitting on folding chairs on the porch eating their lunch.  One of them called out to us and introduced herself.  She was one of the people who had donated the land to the conservancy.  We went over to chat with her and learned that she lived in the nearby town now.  She shared stories of her time on this land, of carrying the canoe up each spring and back down in the fall. She told us the story of how they built the dock, carrying the wood up the hill to the pond.  We were eager to hear her stories.   We told her how much we loved this property and we told her the story of seeing a trumpeter swan on the pond on our first visit.  She had never seen a swan there before.  She hadn’t seen any other people visiting the land so she was happy to see us enjoying being there.   It was good to connect with one of the people who had turned this piece of land into public property again.  Land that was taken from the First Nations with treaties that were never honoured and sold numerous times was now available for anyone who wanted to visit it.  This is not repatriating the land to the original people although one woman in Ontario is trying to do just that, but perhaps it is the next best thing or perhaps it is a stepping stone in a history that we are not only writing but righting.