One of Canada’s most enduring cultural symbols is the canoe. It forms a link in our collective stream of memory from first nation peoples who originally designed the bark craft to voyageurs who today paddle Canada’s waterway highways recreationally in modern canvas, fiberglass and aluminum canoes. A product of the forest, used to explore the waterways and vault landscapes, the canoe is unquestionably the quintessential vehicle that ushered people to the interiors of a grand new country. Its very essence evokes spirituality, solitude, and patriotism, deep personal feelings reverentially recorded by adventurous Canadians:

Following one canoe pilgrimage into the sanctuaries of Canada’s vast wilderness, the Rt. Hon. John Turner, former Canadian Prime Minister, observed devotionally: “Before us had been a big unspoiled, majestic country of treeless land and water, game, and birds in their undisturbed habitat. Wildlife bloomed everywhere. I wondered how long this river would remain untouched and unspoiled. How much longer would this solitude last? What a privilege to have run these waters.... We had travelled one of the last frontiers of the world. Because we love the country, we are careful to leave it as we found it, with no signs of our passing. I have never felt more Canadian than when alone with my thoughts in the remote northern vastness.”
 

Canoe used by Albert Edward, Prince of Whales, in 1860, the year the eldest son of Queen Victoria made his historic tour of Canada. [Photo, courtesy Hugh MacMillan]

One of Canada’s great promoters of wilderness travel by canoe, the late Eric Morse, the first and only Canadian ever made an Honorary Director of the Explorers Club International, theorized that “... as much history could be learned from a canoe as from a history book.”

Pierre Berton has proposed that Canadians “... are a nation of canoeists, and have been since the earliest days, paddling ... up the St. Lawrence, across the lakes, over the portages of the Shield, west along the North Saskatchewan through the Yellowhead gap and thence southwest by the Columbia and Fraser rivers to the sea. When somebody asks ... how Canada could exist as a horizontal country with its plains and mountains running vertically, tell him about the paddlers.”

According to C.E.S. Franks, “Canada is a northern nation. A strong element of nordicity in the Canadian landscape of the imagination is essential for it to be our homeland. Canoeing, properly placed in its historical and cultural context, is contributing to this important component of nation building.”

Each time he paddled down one of Canada’s fur-trading routes, Blair Fraser, Ottawa editor of Maclean’s who tragically drowned in a canoeing accident on the Petawawa River in 1968, felt that canoe trips were akin to passing through “an empty area of forest and plain in which a man could still enjoy the illusion of solitude. This is the quality that makes Canada unique and gives root to Canadian patriotism.”
 

The subject of this Arthur Heming (1870-1940) painting on canvas is the rapids-running incident on the French river during Alexander's Mackenzie's 74-day journey of discovery on the Pacific Ocean [Photo, courtesy Government of Ontario Art Collection, Toronto]

Another former Canadian Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Pierre Elliot Trudeau, conjectured that canoeing generated the virtue of patriotism: “Canoeing forces you to make a distinction between your needs: survival, food, sleep, protection from the weather. These are all things that you tend to take for granted when you are living in so-called civilization, with its constant pressures on you to do this or that for social reasons created by others, or to satisfy artificial wants created by advertising. Canoeing gets you back close to nature, using a method of travel that does not even call for roads or paths.”

Contending that the “... canoeist should know the ironic role of the canoe in the evolving Canadian culture...,” Bruce Hodgins believes in “the canoe’s mythological purity as a symbol” and understands all too well that the canoe, per se, has unfortunately “led to the continuing destruction of wilderness and the degradation of environment.”

Queen’s University professor James Raffan in Wild Waters (1986) fondly reminisced after one wilderness venture: “Around quiet campfires on the Coppermine, smoke from gnarled wood tweaked our imaginations as we talked of native people and read from the journals of Samuel Hearne and Sir John Franklin. Like never before I felt a part of our Canadian past. I realized that the river routes that reticulate this land from sea to arctic sea bear the very essence of who we are. By paddling the Coppermine, stripped of school and its interpreters, I was experiencing the land much as Hearne, Franklin, and its native custodians had left it centuries earlier.”

Larry Turner