The Strange Career of the Canadian Beaver: Anthropomorphic Discourses and Imperial History

Abstract

This article traces the shifting representational history of the "beaver" in the Canadian imaginary through analyzing a range of images from explorers' narratives, to commercial discourses, mass media representations to the ubiquitous sexual slang. I argue that dominant representations of the national rodent have suggested important social territories, like the norms of industry, bodily decorum, sexual respectability and racial progress. At the same time, I also explore how the subterranean language of sexual slang is the logical underside of the narratives found in more "legitimate" representations.

The fantastic black panther in the writing of Charles G. D. Roberts : Forging Canadian national identity from primeval nature

“…We are familiar, of course, with the positive examples of this such as the friendly beaver, industrious, diligent and devoted, lending his image to the logo of the Canadian Pacific Railway as early as the 1880s as part of the explicit nation-building exercise. The original logo was obtained from the Sleeman Brewery in Guelph, Ontario, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century -and the brewery purchased the logo back from the railway in the 1990s as part of its effort to brand its beer using the national icon of the beaver, confirming many of the arguments developed by Margot Francis (2011). Francis takes a considerably more critical perspective in her exploration of the beaver within an "anthropomorphic discourse of Canadian imperial history" (34).…”

Inconification and the nationalized inukshuk

“…What perhaps makes the inukshuk unique as an emerging national symbol is that it appears not as a deliberate monument to the pomp and majesty of the state as statuaries and imposing Victorian edifices might (Osborne 2001); nor does it have the overplayed, hyper-masculinized cachet of hockey (Weinstein et al 1995;Lorenz and G. Osborne 2006); the overt connections to English-Canadian hegemony as the beaver and the maple leaf (M. Francis 2004;Wright et al 2002); or, the highly politicized baggage associated with other appropriated Aboriginal cultural symbols as the totem-pole, the killer whale or the tipi (Heyd 2003). Rather, the inukshuk emerges as a more democratic, grassroots, even viral symbol that can be made out of any solid material and which requires little skill to construct.…”