From Voyageurs to Bush Pilots

Abstract

From Britain’s establishment of the first Hudson’s Bay Company charter in 1670 that laid open the Canadian wilderness to the European fur trade, through the post–World War II (WWII) explosion of American hunting and fishing tourism that laid waste to Aboriginal lands, peoples, and habitats, Canada’s colonial history reveals its own “cowboy” mythos of frontiersmen–heroes and the practice of killing and selling animals for profit. This autoethnography explores themes of resonance and resistance to the American cowboy mythos through Canadian icons of entrepreneurial frontiersmenship and their dominion over indigenous life, both human and animal. By interlocking autobiographical, dramaturgical, and cultural/fokloric narratives, I weave a critical historiography of growing up in a small Ontario bush town where “cowboys and Indians” carried unique geopolitical implications.