It would be incorrect to say, “I’d like to launch my canoe, but there are so many inukshuks lining the shore I fear for the safety of my shins.” As plausible as this sentence is, the correct plural of inukshuk is inuksuit.

Pluralizing inukshuk was once something you rarely had to do, but enough would-be adventurers now so enjoy piling rocks into human-like figures that the lonely inukshuk has become a plurality.

Killarney Provincial Park in ontario has reacted by declaring them granite non grata. The backlash really got going when an inukshuk was adopted by the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. Anti-corporate wilderness travellers declared inuksuit to be unfashionable eyesores.

What’s the problem, you ask? The inuksuit were confusing hikers in Killarney, where trails are marked with stone cairns. other objections are ecological in nature (the rocks are habitat for critters that are entitled to a cold, wet place to live) and cultural (southern inuksuit represent a co-opting of Inuit culture).

To these I add the tragic tale of how they slowed my progress down Quebec’s Noire River.

On day two we began noticing somewhat organized piles of rubble peeking out from rocky points. My trip mate—let’s call him Destructor—decided they had no place on the river and vowed to eradicate them.

The inuksuit ballooned in number as we paddled and Destructor began criss-crossing the river on an increasing frequency. our pace slowed as he tried to squeeze blood from stones.

As Destructor showed, the real menace is that inuksuit might divide the paddling community into two groups: one that likes to create while they recreate and another that won’t abide signs of a human presence near portage landings. But recent events show paddlers can’t afford to be fragment- ed like feuding religious sects.

To see why, consider John and Jim Baird. John Baird is Canada’s minister responsible for transportation. He’s the man who has dismantled the Navigable Waters Protection Act (NWPA), a 126-year-old law that protected both waterways and each Canadian’s right to paddle them. It was a law that said rivers were important for six generations of Canadians, and now it doesn’t.

Last summer Jim Baird and his brother Ted paddled the Kuujjua River on Victoria Island in Canada’s high Arctic. There they saw real inuksuit and stone cairns, some 300 years old, that had been built not because of an excess of ego or spare time, but because they served important functions in a severe land.

At Minto Inlet they stopped at a squat, man-sized cairn that housed a message from a party that had passed that way 157 years ago while searching for the Franklin Expedition.

The Bairds left the cairn standing of course. Victoria Island isn’t the sort of place that tolerates those who act rashly on the land or dismiss the past.

The law John Baird knocked down was only 31 years younger than that stone cairn. By pointing to a temporary downturn in the business cycle as the reason the NWPA had to go, Baird demonstrated all the wisdom of a pile of rocks, but none of the steadiness.

Until the NWPA is reinstated, inuksuit may be the only things standing guard over the places we paddle. Perhaps we should embrace them as our own, and consider them new recruits in an army of resistance gathering where they are most needed. 

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.

One of the great joys of working at The Canadian Canoe Museum is opening the mystery packages that float in over the transom every so often. The most recent of these was a large padded envelope from St. Albert, Alberta, which contained a story that was as thought-provoking as it was sad.

Inside was a matted sepia photograph showing a crew of healthy young men from the Grand Trunk Boating Club in Montreal paddling a 30-foot war canoe called the Minne-wa-wa. It was dated July 2, 1892. There is a mix of characters in the boat— smiling lads in dark singlets showing off their muscles, a couple of aboriginal guys, probably from the Mohawk territory of kahnawake, and even a few older chaps in ties and dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up for regatta action against rival clubs on the mighty St. Lawrence River. There are club caps and fedoras. It’s a crew looking proud and happy after a big win.

The story took a turn when I opened a booklet that came with the photo. What looked like a prize ribbon fell out onto my desk. It said “Minne-wa-wa War Canoe,” but instead of being brightly coloured the rosette on the ribbon was black. And in the program the truth was told.

The crew had paddled from their home boathouse near what is now the base of Montreal’s Champlain Bridge to a regatta downriver at Isle Sainte-Hélène. They triumphed in the race, but on the way home they capsized and six of the crew of 17 drowned. The caption indicated that the photo had been taken about an hour before the accident.

That got me thinking about memory and what we as canoeists choose to remember and share with each other. Who knows what kind of footwear these paddlers had on, or how well suited their clothing was to swimming, or if they could swim at all? And they were certainly not wearing floatation devices (which, of course, was the order of the day for canoeists right up to the late 1960s).

So there was the Minne-wa-wa upset with multiple loss of life in 1892 in Montreal. But, with no apparent appreciation of this unnecessary loss of life, the same thing happened again in 1926 on Balsam Lake in Ontario—war canoe upset, multiple deaths. People then wondered how such a terrible thing could have happened. And then more or less the same thing happened in 1978, when four big canoes upset on Lake Temiskaming resulting in the deaths of 12 boys and a master on a high school canoe trip. 

It’s never been so easy for far-flung but like-minded canoephiles to communicate

In this issue’s Tumblehome column, our resident sage James Raffan enthuses that the active chatter on Internet forums allows far-flung canoeists to connect with each other.

Of course, they don’t always agree. Last fall the Canadian Canoe Routes forum debated the removal of the bronze cross on Algonquin Park’s Petawawa River that commemorated Blair Fraser’s 1968 drowning.

The anonymous vandal apparently thought he was defending wilderness by taking a hack saw to a three-foot cross in a park that is 78 per cent tree farm.

True, not everyone who has slept in a tent needs to be immortalized in the wilderness after death, but Blair Fraser wasn’t just any paddler.

Fraser, Eric Morse, Sigurd Olson and a half-dozen others made up the latter-day Voyageurs, a group of prominent Canadians and Americans who, in the 1950s and ‘60s, retraced the fur trade routes of the real voyageurs.

This would be commonplace now, which is just the point. Back then it was a new idea to embark on gruelling wilderness canoe trips for recreation. They became media darlings. The Toronto Star even chartered a plane to intercept them on the Churchill River.

“The media’s interest could scarcely have been greater had the Archbishop of Canterbury been discovered making a northern canoe trip with the Pope,” remarked Morse in Freshwater Saga.

Though the Voyageurs were just out for a good time, the timing was such that they spearheaded a growing appreciation for the cultural history of a nation that had, at its core, a landscape explored, settled and still best-travelled by canoe.

Without the kick start Fraser’s Voyageurs gave to conservation, paddlers would have had a harder time convincing the rest of the country that wild waters are central to our history, our future, and worth preserving. This fight continues. The cross in the photo above isn’t Fraser’s cross, it’s for a paddler who drowned on Lake Superior’s White River. But it might soon also be commemorating the waterfall just downstream. It is the second of three hydro sites proposed for the White, the first site was finished last fall.

Fraser’s continuing relevance can also be read into Amy Stuart’s report on what Canada’s high urbanization and immigration rates mean for canoeing. Fewer and fewer Canadians are growing up with a family tradition of canoeing. Will canoeing be marginalized by changing demographics?

If the answer is no, it’s because of something Fraser identified 40 years ago. In The Search for Identity (a book of political history, not new-age introspection) he wrote of the Canada he knew. “This land is still empty. …its portages still well marked, its lakes and streams still clean. Most Canadians have never seen this wilderness and never will. It is too far away. But it is typical of something that is within the easy reach of every Canadian, urban or rustic—an empty area of forest or plain in which a man can still en- joy the illusion of solitude. This is the quality that makes Canada unique and gives root to Canadian patriotism.”

An idea—and a paddler—worth remembering. 

This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Curiosity eventually led me to the developer’s website, which showed aerial photos with schematic overlays of rubber weirs, impoundment areas and an underground penstock that would burrow beneath the old portage trail and channel the river’s flow into twin turbines. I heard that an all-terrain vehicle shuttle had replaced the portage around the Umbata construction site. I wrote a lengthy, passionate letter to my MPP, and received a stock reply in return.

Countless smaller, “run of the river” projects like Umbata, and larger, Hydro Quebec-style mega-developments could become even more common on Canada’s rivers in the years to come, especially if Transport Canada gets away with gutting the Navigable Waters Protection Act. In a 2005 report, Ontario’s electricity planning agency highlighted 190 potential waterpower sites across the province.

It’s true that in the age of climate change, harnessing the low-emissions energy of falling water sounds like a logical way to meet electricity needs. But the trouble is, argue environmentalists like Janet Sumner, the executive director of CPAWS Wildlands League, feeding the grid with more hydroelectricity does nothing to curb our swelling appetite for power. Hydropower catchwords like “green”and “renewable” don’t soften the loss of some of Canada’s finest wilderness rivers.