This post is the conclusion to 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.
The NiCHE is the NiCHE, in part, because The Otter is not The Beaver. As Alan MacEachern reflected in 2013, the name The Otter was eventually chosen “in part to riff off The Beaver,” the former name of Canada’s History Magazine which had recently been relinquished… “and in part – of course – for the pun.” This series began by asking questions about where, when, why, and how the beaver has mattered to Canadian environmental history. Now, perhaps, we must question the answers. Over the years, where have Beavers filled historical “niches” for The Otter? How have beavers written the story of NiCHE?
The beavers of an earlier Otter appear much as one might expect them to in a trail log, tucked into the margins of field notebooks, reflecting trends in a field tilting increasingly towards the animal. In earlier days, beavers record The Otter’sdrive to “story” the narrative differently, and better; to approach the discussion of a network of human and nonhuman agencies in that process — an ethos NiCHE continues to this day. These efforts led people to each other: “as we paddled the Yukon River among eagles, beavers, and cliff swallows, past subdivisions and sewage outflows,” Emilie Cameron reflected, “relationships formed as we ate, slept, and walked together.”[1] Beavers were on the move, taking on a more active posture on The Otter which would continue for years to come.
Canadians do love the image of a national animal and as Colin Coates has suggested in this series, they’re willing to fight for it. Claire Campbell’s 2014 reflections on Pearson’s public call for designs for a new Canadian flag in 1963 capture this well: “most [designs] are pretty unsubtle in their symbolism,” she explained. “60% contain maple leaves […] 11% contain beavers.” Perhaps it was a good marketing move, as Kevin Brushett’s discusses in From the Grassroots: The Company of Young Canadians, Local Activism, and Sustainable Development in Canada, 1965-1975 (2020) for Pearson to claim that volunteers in the Company of Young Canadians (CYC) would be referred to by the sobriquet “Eager Beavers.” Perhaps too it was aspirational, a way for Canadians to imagine themselves as perfectly engineered to their environments; “Beaver” was the most popular crowd-sourced choice for the postwar Trans-Canada Air Lines airliner that would eventually be called “North Star.”
Likewise, “childhood memories of beaver-logo-ed summer visits” followed Claire Campbell on A Visit to Banff in 2011 during her trip to speak about the first volume in NiCHE’s “Energy, Ecology & Environment” series, A Century of Parks Canada: 1911-2011, where she reflected on animal imagery as “a great snapshot of the character, and dilemmas, of Parks Canada,” foretelling important conversations about the role of animals in Canadiana and the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North in the years to follow.
Such discussions of Canada’s relationships with animal imagery threw other motifs into sharp relief. Writers for NiCHE started thinking critically about how we look at Beavers and where we see them — within and beyond our work. Hans Carlson’s A View From Eeyou Istchee (2011) signaled a shift towards “seeing” the beaver as part of Cree bush camp life: there are “spruce bows and bearskins on the floor, a child in a cradle swing, a beaver pelt being sewn into a stretching frame. But text messaging is a part of camp life now too, as are the presence of white people sometimes.” The beaver can likewise be seen through the lens of George Colpitts’s 2017 The Reconstructed Longhouse and Environmental History, in which he reflects on how Georges E. Sioui, “drawing on his Huron-Wendat heritage, suggested that longhouse village builders […] took as a model the sedentary beaver,” in parallel to larger “social and spiritual [practices] that resonated from outside to inside the village, and within the longhouses themselves.”
Much discussion on the politics of observation of quintessentially “Canadian” wildlife has followed, taking the beavers of The Otter beyond the margins (and indeed, the fur trade) towards engagement with diverse modes of animal commodification. Parks, “[platforms] for the presentation of regional, national, and international nature” in Canada, Sean Kheraj pointed out in New Perspectives on Parks (2010), include and rely on wildlife. As Dolly Jørgensen has pointed out in this series, Canadian beavers even made their way to zoos in parts of the world in which Indigenous beavers had been made virtually extinct[4] . Nordic zoos sought castor Canadensis in the early 20th century, and by the end of the century they had been classified as an alien, invasive species. Such discussions can also be felt in the NiCHE archive: George William Colpitts accounted for the architectural planning for a distinctly Canadian, multispecies ecology of Calgary Zoo planning in his 2023 Bittersweet Lessons from 1973: Calgary’s New Polar Bear Enclosure.
The beavers of NiCHE were on the move.
Analyses of the relationships between national identity, the Canadian gaze, and beavers as beings under observance of the public eye made a fitting entry point for the beavers of the silver screen.
Beavers in moving image came into focus through key pedagogical recommendations. Claire Campbell reflected in 2014 on her use of National Film Board productions such as The Log Driver’s Waltz (1979) in the classroom as a vehicle for discussing “masculine heroes of resource extraction” in Canadiana.” Moving image made its way into critical reflections on public engagement with Canadian history: Andrew Burke’s 2019 “Nation, Nature, and Nostalgia: Hinterland Who’s Who” explores the ways “educational and political” film shorts produced by the National Film Board in collaboration with the Canadian Wildlife Service in the 1960s and 1970s “communicate a very specific idea of Canada grounded in the imagined connection to [the natural] world.” Here, too, was the Beaver, but it was not alone: “the original set of four black-and-white 60-second shorts,” Burke explains, featured the beaver alongside “moose, gannet, and loon.” “Odd and evocative in ways that exceed both their pedagogical intent and ideological effect,” he expands, the films “played on ideas of nation and citizenship.” Ten years after Claire Campbell’s reflection, the moving beaver reached Shannon Stunden Bower, who reflects on her use of the 1972 The Other Side of the Ledger to encourage student engagement with how “contemporary efforts to address historic wrongs can involve understanding the past in new ways.” “I’ve found that students respond particularly well to the film’s opening scenes,” she wrote, including “the presentation of two live beaver to Queen Elizabeth II.”
Like Grey Owl’s pet beaver, “Jelly Roll,” the beavers of The Otter had their own stories to tell.
Given this history, where don’t we see beavers as historians? As Lori Lee Oates writes in Mega Dams Part Two (2022), governments have failed to engage negative impacts of hydroelectric development on Indigenous life ways, “destroying habitats and food sources such as fish, caribou, moose,” and, indeed, disrupting the “beaver”—a point further emphasized in Tabitha Robin’s “Hunger, Healing, and Indigenous Food Sovereignty” (2021).[2] Justin Fisher’s 2022 reflections on Cumberland House further described impacts of hydroelectric water management (and mismanagement) on communities of Cree and Métis people — on flooding, forestry, fishing, and Beaver populations. “If we decided to release beavers into the area and let them draw on their own hydrological expertise,” Alan MacEachern gleefully suggested in his 2018 “Canada’s Anthropocene: A Roundtable“: “how Canadian of a solution is that!”[3]
Perhaps our concerns are also shaped by the spaces where beavers no longer exist or where beavers touched histories we cannot reach. The Otter approached that, too: “many environmental histories share an abundance narrative,” wrote Daniel Macfarlane (citing the near-extinction of the beaver in New France) in his 2016 writings on The Otter. “Abundance stories are Sisyphean,” he explains: “our economic and cultural inability to prevent the next example, to push the proverbial rock over the crest, to sustain both the people and the nature of our homes […] in North American freshwater history writ large, scarcity is the dominant narrative.”
This is true. Works exploring the dualities of abundance and dearth continue to grip at the focus of animal histories, and the beaver makes frequent appearances in Otter posts about them.[4] Clifford A. White’s “Buffaloed at Bamfield: Chronicling First Person Journal Observations of Long-Term Ecology” refers to how the beaver’s absence exacerbates the introduction of “exotic species tolerant of high grazing pressure” and risk altering stream processes which, in turn, could damage distinctive ecosystems. Daniel Macfarlane’s later, 2023 writing explored the nineteenth century settler gaze through the writings of Arad Thomas, and, in accounting for animals which are not part of the picture, again finds the Beaver: “he added a number of other animals to this extirpated list,” Macfarlane explains, “and asserted that streams used to be twice as large and had a more consistent year-round flow, while fields that grew crops had once been extensive marshes […] The beavers were all destroyed by the first hunters.” Colpitts’s 2018 “What Peter Fidler Didn’t Report” responds to the ways the “‘non-transfer’ of knowledge” can itself be telling — a narrative also involving beavers. He divulges: “What is remarkable in [Fidler’s] official journal is really what isn’t in it.”
Soon, The Otter didn’t just see beavers, but heard and felt them.
Beavers’ deep relationships to Canadian generational time situates them in deeply significant ecological “niches.” This, too, is reflected in Otter posts: giant, Pleistocene beavers join maple trees in disrupting views of Canadian nature and environment as “a static backdrop” for settler colonial histories in the 2024 “New Book – Before Canada: Northern North America in a Connected World.” Referring to the history of Dënesųłıné families who lived in Wood Buffalo National Park at the time of its creation, Ave Dersch added further dimension to relationships between these Pleistocene beings and Indigenous lifeways, reminding readers that every aspect of these landscapes are part of a “special topography,” often marked by “Pleistocene megafauna like giant beavers.” Likewise, Adrian Deveau’s “Consultation with the Devil” reminded readers of how beaver pelts wrote the commodity chains which shaped both regional geographies and, in turn, gave forth specters of regional (and national) folkloric identity.
The beaver’s “voice” positions them as powerful historical actors and often, agents of resistance to outside pressure (within and beyond Canada’s borders). By 2022, Daniel Laxer’s book, Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760–1840, asked us to listen beyond the materiality of the animal commodity chain, taking scholars along North American rivers to listen for entangled, “voyageur songs” of Indigenous people, furriers, rivers, and beavers themselves. In 2020, George William Colpitts, too, referred to the ways the Beaver’s regional impacts could be traced in both commodity chains and regional biology in tactile ways: “fur traders perceived differences in beaver […] subtle differences in habitat, the quality of forage, and even local Indigenous hunting practices could affect the nature of an animal’s fur. Beavers’ differences mattered to furriers, and so shaped Canada’s regionalism. By the 2020s, the beavers, who had never really been in the margins in the first place, had entered the chat.
Perhaps too, they have begun chatting amongst themselves, as Marianne Hoffmeister Castro has demonstrated in her CASTOR project, a typeface built out of beaver gnaw-marks. As she suggests, we do not have the right to enter the world of the beaver; their “beaver-ness” should not be fully available to us, but we should still relish “unexpected joy of not knowing.”
After twenty years, Beavers are still populating our website with impunity. They accompany NiCHE contributors and community members in our writing, on our field trips, fly by in place names on our road trips, populate our politics and our practice, and add really good sticks to Jessica DeWitt’s beloved Environmental History Worth Reading series.[5] Like other rodents in empire’s history, beavers tended to find the same biopolitical boundaries as other keystone species, often showing up in places and roles we don’t expect. This series reminds us of the was they will continue to fell our methodological weaknesses, challenge our senses, and further enforce NiCHE’s fierce adoration for all things beaver which has accompanied The Otter since it was almost The Beaver.
The Otter we well may be, but the beavers are fine, thanks.
[1] A version of this passage is also published under Laura Jean Cameron’s Transnational Discussions at NiCHE Northern Workshop, 17 July, 2009.
[2] See also: Ruth Morgan’s 24 June 2021 review of The Nature of Canada reflects on the European settlement that reshaped Indigenous landscapes, noting that beavers’ labour as “ecological engineers” influenced the transformation of Indigenous land into an “essentially European complex of species.”
[3] Note: Alan’s reference here is best taken in full context of original post. Note the line: “many of the proposed practical solutions and mitigations and the planning thereof sound intriguing to me, and yet there is resistance from so many quarters.”
[4] Also see: Sandy Hunter, Cod, Colonialism, and the Anthropocene 31 January, 2023 and Karim Tiro’s Whither the Salmon? 23 July, 2018. Sandy Hunter’s post was originally published as a ‘Snapshot’ in Environment and History (28.3, August 2022) and on the White Horse Press Blog.
[5] See: #EnvHist Worth Reading: July 2023 (featuring Madeleine Muzdakis’s piece for My Modern Met, #EnvHist Worth Reading: June 2023 (featuring Isobel Cockerell’s article for .coda).
