The Men of the Last Frontier. Grey Evil Owl
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to stay in character and in costume, speaking mock-Ojibway, resorting to hair dye for the black pigtail and henna makeup for the (pale) face. Pony left him, fed up with his absences and drinking, and he impulsively married again, to a beautiful French-Canadian girl, but he never settled down. Travelling constantly, as if pursued by demons, Grey Owl experimented with film and made several excellent movies, documenting his life in the North but exhausting himself in a two-week-long film shoot of a canoe trip down the Mississagi River. He toured Canada. He toured America, theoretically the land of his birth. He toured England and got in trouble with the BBC for his blunt views on fox hunting. He met other celebrities and was welcomed by Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir, John Buchan, Canada’s other popular author. He knew royalty and made money: it seemed on the surface a rich and productive career, but he was living a lie. Fuelled by alcohol, he fought with his friends and was belligerent to strangers: about U.S. Customs, where the blue-eyed Indian was questioned keenly about his past, he ranted “I was the only true American on that ship.” Journalists were beginning to wonder about those pale eyes, his elegant prose style, his classical education. A man in a bar called him a fake. The Department of Indian Affairs in Canada began investigating his background.
Drained, ill, and alone, he at length retreated to the Ajawaan Lake cabin in Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan, where he died on April 13, 1938, at the appallingly young age of forty-nine. It was pneumonia, they said, but the man was simply used up. A few weeks later the North Bay Nugget, an Ontario newspaper, broke the story they had long been sitting on, exposing Belaney’s Anglo Sussex past. There was plenty of evidence, including that missing toe from the war years. Now the whole world knew the truth.
Today, some eighty years afterward, the Indian play-acting seems harmless, even admirable, and even at the time, Grey Owl was not pilloried. We were fooled, read the headlines, more amused than horrified. Whether a Scot or Ojibway or half-breed, he had written good books and entertained, and he was celebrating the Indian and the wilderness in an honest and popular way. He well served the beaver, he charmed the young, and brought a man of the wilderness into a Depression that needed a hero. His deception still fascinates, as in the recent book, Great Canadian Imposters (part of an “Amazing Stories” series). The Caucasian secret identity is also the key to the plot of Richard Attenborough’s 1999 movie Grey Owl, replete with stunning photography of the radiant Quebec woods and offering an idealized hero, pure of heart, word, and deed, but troubled within. A very white Pierce Brosnan, looking like Richard Nixon, enacts the hero, uncomfortable in pigtails and deerskins, pretending to be a white man pretending to be an Indian. The actress playing Anahareo is forced to deliver lines like: “Why do I have to do the loving and leaving?” Everybody seems miscast, including the beavers.
Whatever its authenticity, Grey Owl’s Indian act filled a need of the day, which was also met by Pauline Johnson paddling her canoe and lecturing in beads (she had Mohawk blood but was hardly a Savage Princess), or Chief Buffalo-Child Long-Lance, of mixed blood from North Carolina, who outrageously played the Native chief in Alberta and got away with it. Ernest Thompson Seton’s Indian obsession led to the Woodcraft Movement and his college of Indian wisdom in New Mexico. There had been, through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a long tradition of Indian epics (Hiawatha), Indian operas (Natoma by Victor Herbert), novels (Ramona), classic photographs (Edward Curtis), Indian love calls (When I’m calling you — ooo — ooo), and a rich legacy of Hollywood westerns, all the way up to Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse, and Dances with Wolves.
A circular announcing Grey Owl’s lecture at Toronto’s Massey Hall in 1938.
It is probable that Belaney’s Cree and Ojibway friends knew all along that he was faking it, but why would they sabotage their champion? A lot of people — aunts, journalists, buddies, critics — suspected. What distinguishes Belaney now, and what saves him from being a period curiosity, is the work itself. His five books are solid literary achievements, quite readable, although not yet, scandalously, canonized as CanLit. His most popular titles — Pilgrims of the Wild, The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People — sold well at the time and are still in print. He was an evocative prose stylist soaked in the English classics: The Men of the Last Frontier is buttressed with echoes and epigraphs from Robert Louis Stevenson, John Bunyan, the Bible, the Greeks, Lord Byron, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His life is a paradox. On one level he seemed driven to relive his own father’s sad biography, with the drinking, brawling, and abandoned families. By the end, Archie had acquired at least four wives, perhaps five, as well as several children. Yet somewhere along the way, wastrel Archie became a creative force in the world, a charismatic performer, and a writer with an important message.
We now, more than ever, have to heed his warning, delivered long before Greenpeace or Al Gore or PETA. Grey Owl forcefully reminds us that we are creatures of the natural world and cannot trifle with our environment. In this first book, he has no hopes that we will listen. The epilogue of The Men of the Last Frontier shows us a forlorn white man and an Indian, looking out over farms, foresters with axes, skylines, massed machinery, and smokestacks belching a “dark canopy” over all. Belaney tells us flatly that “all wild life is over.” This in 1931! What would he have made of today’s oil spills, melting glaciers, flash floods and forest fires, clear-cuttings, polluted waters, declining fish stocks, trashed oceans, climate change, poisonous greenhouse emissions, the scandal of our environmental indifference? Across the Alberta border, not far to the northwest of Grey Owl’s Prince Albert lakeside cabin, now stretch the black domains of the Athabasca Tar Sands.
“The Canadian romance of nature is over,” Grey Owl tells us long ago in his poetic and timely first book. Protect it, or lose it, he warns. We have done our utmost to lose it, but perhaps the time has finally come to attend to the message of this strange, self-destructive, deplorable, but somehow magnificent fake. It was Grey Owl’s gift to see both the darkness and the light in the probable fate of the natural world, and in this, his first book, The Vanishing Frontier (as it should have been called), he begins a lifelong argument to persuade us to look after our salvation as a species and as a planet, and to do it now.
Further Reading
The essential biography of Grey Owl is Donald B. Smith’s splendid From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl (Western Producer Prairie Books, 1990) to which I am much indebted. It is in paperback (GreyStone, 1999) and is a must-read. For a good shorter version of the life, Jane Billinghurst’s Grey Owl: The Many Faces of Archie Belaney (GreyStone, 1999) is well worth a look. Lovat Dickson’s early biographies, Half-Breed (P. Davies, 1939) and Wilderness Man (Macmillan of Canada, 1973), are a bit dated but still enjoyable and informative, by the man who was Belaney’s publisher after Country Life and who knew him well. There is a wealth of other materials: a photography book of Grey Owl country, a prose poem, appreciative essays, memoirs, and several biographies.
Later books by Grey Owl after The Men of the Last Frontier include his entertaining bestseller Pilgrims of the Wild (Dundurn Voyageur Series, 2010), which dramatizes the beavers and includes a valuable biographical introduction by Michael Gnarowski. The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People, long a children’s favourite in many editions, is nonetheless a satisfying read for adults. (The title is Sajo and the Beaver People in the United States.)
For the role of the Indian, Daniel Francis’s The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Arsenal Pulp, 1992) is stimulating, as is Betty Keller’s account of the Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson, Pauline (Douglas & McIntyre, 1981). Cheryl MacDonald’s Great Canadian Imposters (James Lorimer, 2009) is more scholarly than its title suggests and includes a short biography of Chief Leroy, as well.
Ernest Thompson Seton’s last chapter in The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore (Doubleday, 1921) offers a sixfold “Message” from Indian experience (as the prophet of outdoor life, the beautiful, the sacred) with comparisons of Native philosophy to the thought of Socrates and Jesus, among others: the cult of the idealized Indian at its most intense.
The Richard Attenborough movie Grey Owl (1999) is available on DVD. The photography is exceptional. I recommend Anahareo’s lively Devil in Deerskins (New Press, 1972), if it can be searched out. I met her at the