Beavers in Theory and Practice: Beyond a National Symbol

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This post introduces a series marking the 50th anniversary of the passing of Bill C-373, “An Act to provide for the recognition of the Beaver (Castor canadensis) as a symbol of the sovereignty of the Dominion of Canada,” edited by Blair Stein.

Beavers have been part of the Canadian consciousness—settler and Indigenous—for an extremely long time, but they weren’t officially declared a national symbol of Canada by the federal government until March 24, 1975. In light of the 50th anniversary of the passing of Bill C-373, “An Act to provide for the recognition of the Beaver (Castor canadensis) as a symbol of the sovereignty of the Dominion of Canada,” The Otter will publish a series of posts about beavers over the next four weeks.

It might be surprising that we haven’t done this yet. After all, beavers are everywhere in Canadian environmental history! If we are to believe early twentieth-century historians such as Harold Innis, a sovereign Canadian settler nation simply could not exist without beavers and the trade in their pelts. They’ve been on our currency for nearly 100 years, the namesake of one of Canada’s 10 greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century, and our source of satirical news since 2010.[1]

A color photograph from the 1950s. A white male pilot, clean-shaven, is wearing a white jumpsuit, a plaid coat, and a cap. He's standing in front of the silver tail of an airplane. It's winter; there's snow in the background.
Bush pilot Cliff Labey standing in front of his De Havilland Canada “Beaver” aircraft, Buffalo Narrows, Saskatchewan, March 1955. Rosemary Gilliat Eaton / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada

There are some traces of the beaver in The Otter’s back catalog. Our 2020 “HBC at 350” series was obliquely about beavers, especially since trade in beaver pelts was gave the company the alleged right to access and claim vast swaths of what we currently call Canada in the first place. Four beavers adorn the company’s coat-of-arms, and their in-house magazine was called The Beaver. George Colpitts analyzed the HBC’s 19th century record-keeping practices to trace both actualfluctuations in beaver populations and how HBC scientists interpreted those fluctuations. John B. Zoe reflected on his family’s relationship to the HBC in Tłı̨chǫ nèk’e, along the north-western arm of what we currently call Great Slave Lake. The HBC has had something of an ambivalent relationship with beaver and their Indigenous human kin; because it depended on sustainable beaver populations, the HBC sometimes relied on Indigenous environmental management techniques when creating beaver preserves.[2]

In many ways, the marginality of beavers in The Otter’s archive mirrors their marginal place in Canadian environmental history. We kind of expect them to always be there, humble and unassuming, a shorthand for Canada and Canadian-ness. The presence (or absence) of beavers in certain times and places was how both settler and Indigenous Canadians imagined their relationship to food and trade staples, climate, and settlement. The 1970s Canadian Whole Earth Almanac used a “space beaver” as its unofficial logo, a “symbol for an alternative Canada” as Jeff Miller has recently written. Beavers build, 1970s countercultural environmentalists claimed, but they also get in the way by damming and slowing rivers, making them a symbol of “extreme resilience in a hostile climate.” 

As Colin Coates will tell us later in this series, Bill C-373 started off as a bit of a joke, a tongue-in-cheek response to a New York state Senator proposing that the beaver become the state animal of New York. There was an assumption, it seemed, that beavers already were the ultimate Canadian icon and that their inclusion on Canadian heraldry, propaganda, and currency gave Canadians de facto sovereignty over beaver-as-symbol. 

Over the next month, contributors to this series will think critically about humans, beavers, and their relationship to them. They will explore beavers as more-than-human beings, as builders of their own environments and, yes, as images that appear on Canadian nickels, coats-of-arms, and postage stamps. They will think critically about beavers in theory—as a symbol—and beavers in practice—as actual living beings. Most importantly, they’ll expand on beavers inside and outside their assumed Canadian contexts. 

[1] Norman Ball, “Mind, Heart, and Vision: Professional Engineering in Canada 1887-1987 (National Museum of Science and Technology, 1987.)

[2] Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (UBC Press, 2006), 64-93.

Feature Image: An 1852 postage stamp. Credit: Library and Archives Canada; Copyright: Canada Post Corporation

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Blair Stein

I'm an Assistant Professor in the History department at Grand Valley State University in western Michigan. I teach history of science and technology and I write about the links between geography, technology, and modernity in twentieth-century Canada, with a special interest in aviation.

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