NoraSawyer.com

Tales of an Empty Cabin, by Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin (Grey Owl). Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, NY, 1936. 323 pages.

One of the first things I did upon going back to school was take advantage of the San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute’s special student membership rates. I love this old, private library in the middle of San Francisco’s financial district, with it’s quiet reading rooms and narrow stairways with brass railings that wind up through the stacks and make me feel like I’m aboard some sort of non-metaphorical frigate.

But one of the things I like best about the Mechanics’ Institute is its odd collection, which includes books written by the ghost of Oscar Wilde, as well as volumes on cocktail-crafting written by mid-century flâneurs. This collection, as it turns out, is pretty thin on  the Canadian Children’s Lit front, with two exceptions: an annotated edition Anne of Green Gables, and a copy of Grey Owl’s Tales From an Empty Cabin, which has been on the shelves since 1937.

(Another thing I love about the Mechanics’ Institute? They still stamp books when you check them out. There’s my stamp at the bottom of the third column, just inches away from the stamp from the first time the book was checked out, in January 1937 — Probably pretty soon after it was purchased, if the stamp on the opposite page means what I think it does. And don’t worry — I renewed my book online. It isn’t overdue).

And while I’m showing you scans of the book’s interior, I might as well show you Grey Owl himself, as he appears opposite the book’s title page.

If you’re thinking that Grey Owl looks more like Bill Nighy than any non-Englishman has any business looking, you’re on to something. Grey Owl, revered in his lifetime as an ambassador for both Canada’s First Nations culture and conservation, was born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney near Hastings, England, a fact not made public until after his death.

The revelation dimmed Grey Owl’s star for quite some time, until renewed interest in his conservation work revived his popularity in the 1970’s. But Grey Owl remains a controversial and difficult figure, embodying both the lingering effects of the British colonization of Canada and the preservation of First Nations culture.

I’ll admit I approached the book with a measure of scorn (So you’re an Indian, are you, Archie?). But reading the stories in Tales from an Empty Cabin, I found myself being drawn further into Grey Owl’s world, into Canada’s disappearing frontier and the people — be they First Nations families clinging to their traditional ways, white fur trappers, or Englishmen in search of a more authentic existence — who made it their home. Grey Owl’s stories capture that, with a sensitive, if sometimes a bit grandiose, voice that conveys a genuine love for Canada’s disappearing traditions and wilderness.

Grey Owl was a complicated man, one who learned the Ojibwe language and was accepted into their culture, living as one of them for many years. Was he a fraud because he lied about his origins (claiming to be the child of a Scottish father and an Apache mother), or did his authentically Canadian — if not First Nations — life transcend his English origins?

This is a difficult book, not just because the prose is written in a style that probably seemed dated fifty years ago. But it is a good book, and one that tells us stories that do belong in any examination of Canada’s history, even if not all those stories are ones the author intended to tell.

Young readers in love with the wilderness and interested in life in the woods before the invention of the SUV will enjoy this book, as will older readers interested in questions of identity, nationhood, and storytelling. Recommending this book, however, seems tricky — it’s not exactly First Nations, though it does tell stories from and about First Nations cultures. It’s not exactly for children, though children may very well enjoy it.

Ultimately, I think this is a book that finds its own readers, be they bored children spending a rainy afternoon in an old summer home, or students of history on the lookout for something that captures a moment in a nations history summed up in the life of one man. The prose is complicated but readable, and it does deserve to be read, on its own or within the full context of Grey Owl’s history.