Coming in late to the Grey Owl story...
Dec. 12th, 2012 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heliopausa
Okay, I guess everyone but me already knew this story, but I have only just found out about this man, born in England, but reinventing himself when he was about twenty, creating a whole new identity as an Ojibwa man, Grey Owl (and it's all in wikipedia). I find the whole business of people deciding they want to be, or are, someone totally other -- Princess Caraboo, Lobsang Rampa -- fascinating, and morally complex. (Obviously not all that complex where it's just a way to to get money or fame, the lost inheritance or whatever. I'm meaning the people who really want to be someone totally different, and just declare that they are.)He made a living trapping animals for furs, but (quoting wikipedia) "In 1925, then 37-year-old Grey Owl met 19-year-old Gertrude Bernard (aka Anahareo, or Pony), a Mohawk Iroquois woman who was to be very influential in his life. She encouraged him to stop trapping and to publish his writing about the wilderness. They had a passionate eight-year affair, beginning with their Anishinaabe wedding ceremony. Through her influence, he began to think more deeply about conservation. Anahareo encouraged his writing and influenced him by saving and raising a pair of beaver kits."
And hence the photo (from www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com) But apart from this being a beguiling photograph, I was taken with the idea that it was because of this man that Beavers got into Narnia. Grey Owl ran a long and passionate campaign about the need to protect beavers against extinction through over-trapping, and toured England in the later 1930s, very successfully -- he was introduced to King George VI and family, and much feted, and his conservation message was very widely spread. I'm guessing that it was because of that publicity that Lewis felt fond enough of beavers to put a Beaver couple so prominently in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and maybe even because of Grey Owl's urgent conservation message that he noted in Prince Caspian that they had died out.
