When Grey Owl died on April 13, 1938, of pneumonia aggravated by drink and physical exhaustion, a long and knowing silence about his identity could be broken at a provincial newspaper, the North Bay Nugget, the editor of which had sat on the confusing and tangled story of an Englishman called Archie Belaney who had become a world-famous “Indian” known as Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin, a name given to him by the Ojibway people and rendered into English as Grey Owl. The shock of this revelation or exposure quickly scuttled the worldwide fame of Grey Owl whose message of conservation and the protection of wildlife was lost in the uproar caused by this exposure of his impersonation of a Native person. Revealed as a fraudster, he sank into obscurity, although his books continued to enjoy some currency thanks to publishers reprinting them from time to time. Revelations about Grey Owl’s identity and origins notwithstanding, it remained a matter of some irony that thirty or forty years after his death major reference works were still uncertain about his correct name. This was due in part to the fact that, for example, even when he had become known as Grey Owl he was still figuring in some official sources as Archie Grey Owl or Archie Belaney, the latter name appearing on government heques issued to him to the end of his days as an employee of National Parks of Canada.

Grey Owl was born on September 18, 1888, in Hastings, a seaside town in England, and was christened Archibald Stansfeld Belaney. The family had strong Scottish roots from which the name Stansfeld derives, and had risen in the course of the nineteenth century from modest beginnings as farm folk to success and prosperity through education and business acumen. By the middle of the century, the family could boast of clergymen, writers, and businessmen, remaining understandably silent about an acquitted murderer. Grey Owl’s father having proved to be a hapless adventurer who disappeared as a remittance man in America, and the mother deemed unsuited for raising a son, young Archie was given into the care of two maiden aunts and his maternal grandmother to be raised as an upper-class youth growing up in a large house in prosperous circumstances. An early photograph shows the young adolescent in a dutifully posed Victorian composition complete with a white flaring collar, a bow tie, a watch chain, and a fob across his thirteen-year-old middle, hair short and neatly in place, and a carefully placed dog at his feet.

All in all, one could not imagine a more striking contrast to a photograph we have of Grey Owl taken a dozen years later when he had become absorbed into the life of the Canadian North and of the Ojibway people who had befriended him. There we see an Archie unrecognizable as a white man, with feathers in hair that hangs in long braids, clothed in Native garb, and preparing to do a war dance with his Ojibway friends. The transformation was complete, and Archie Belaney was a few years and a world war away from emerging on the global stage as Grey Owl, Native author and spokesperson for the indigenous way of life, and prophetic critic of the destructive incursion of white civilization into the pristine but resource-rich wilderness. It was a role for which he had prepared his friends and associates with stories of being a half-breed born near the Rio Grande of a Scotsman father who supposedly served as a scout in the American army and an Apache woman. It seems that he took in most people except for his Native friends who sensed at once that he was more of a teller of tall tales than a Native half-breed, even while they welcomed him into their midst, taught him wilderness skills, and let him take one of their women for his first wife. It is also true that while Grey Owl was becoming an accomplished trapper, packer, and canoeman, he was also witnessing the effects of indiscriminate lumbering, the stampedes of prospectors in search of silver and mineral deposits, and the uncontrolled trapping of fur-bearing animals beginning to drive some species to near extinction.

At age thirteen Archie Belaney is decked out in all the finery befitting a young Victorian lad.

Growing up a solitary child, Archie had become immersed in fantasies about the “Red Indian of North America,” a fascination widely shared by many European youngsters of his day. Roaming the countryside near Hastings, finding his way into wooded areas, he imagined himself a Native. He felt an affinity for creatures of the forest, bringing home various animals that his loving and indulgent aunts allowed him to keep as pets. But fantasy began to nudge reality and, while still in his middle teens, he began to talk about going to America to experience the life that had dominated his imaginings. At the age of seventeen he managed to persuade his aunts to let him go to Canada where, he explained to them, he planned to start life as an immigrant settler. Worried that Archie was going the way of his wastrel father, they were nevertheless accepting, and Archie left England for North America.

To transform himself into Grey Owl, Archie Belaney combined what he knew about Ojibway life with his own romantic notions of Native people, complete with buckskins, beads, tomahawk, and eagle feather.

After an initial stint in the men’s haberdashery department of a large department store, Archie headed north into the wondrous and rumour-laden world of the Cobalt, Ontario, silver strike to begin his great adventure of assimilation into Native life and the ways of the North. At first boarding with a local family living near Lake Temagami, he applied himself to learning the crafts of wilderness living and tried to make a go of things as a novice trapper. Perhaps unable to secure a necessary grubstake from local merchants for a start in his new life, or perhaps for other reasons, he did make a quick return visit to Hastings in 1907. He was soon back in Canada, however, having learned that his father had been killed in a brawl and feeling СКАЧАТЬ

Pilgrims of the Wild. Grey Evil Owl Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Pilgrims of the Wild - Grey Evil Owl страница 2

Pilgrims of the Wild. Grey Evil Owl
Чтение книги онлайн.