In the 1930s in Canada, the author and lecturer Grey Owl became a well-known advocate of wilderness conservation and environmentalism. He was known as the son of a Scottish father and an Indigenous (Apache) mother, and achieved international attention for his articles, books, lectures, and films about the depletion of natural resources and the decimation of species. He was particularly focused on the beaver, which is Canada’s national animal, but was nearly extinct by the 1920s due to hunting. His career as a writer and environmentalist began around 1929, when he published his first article. He followed up in 1930, publishing a whole series of articles in the magazine Canadian Forest and Outdoors. The name Grey Owl began to be noticed.
Grey Owl made the film The Beaver People in 1930 — it featured two beavers he’d rescued from traps and nursed back to health, as well as Grey Owl himself and his wife, Anahareo. She had been born Gertrude Bernard, and had Algonquin and Mohawk ancestry, but by the time she and Grey Owl became companions, she went by Anahareo exclusively. They had met when Grey Owl was working as a guide near Lake Tamagami, and were eventually married by a Lac Simon chief. It was Anahareo who convinced Grey Owl to consider the fates of the animals he, at the time, was routinely trapping and hunting.
In 1931 Grey Owl gave his first public lecture, at the convention of the Canadian Forestry Association. His film was shown for the first time as well, and the event was reportedly an enormous success. Grey Owl would dress in his full tribal regalia, and talk about the damage caused to wilderness environments and what could be done about it.
Later that year, Grey Owl released a second film, The Beaver Family, and late in the year published his first book, The Men of the Last Frontier. Over the next few years he published Pilgrims of the Wild, Tales of an Empty Cabin, and the children’s book The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People.
By 1935, Grey Owl was sent on a lecture tour of England by his publisher. He showed one or more of his films and spoke. The tour was so successful it was extended into 1936, and one reviewer said “He talked directly to his audience, and used no notes. His animated dialogue and his second, third and fourth films magically transported his listeners from the narrow streets of Hastings to the vast, unbroken Canadian forests.” He gave over 200 lectures during the tour.
His success led to another lecture tour, in 1937 and 38, throughout the US and Canada as well as England. It was another success, and a critic described it as “his greatest triumph.” At some point during the British portion of the tour, he gave a Royal Command Performance to King George VI and princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.
The heavy touring schedule, though, affected Grey Owl’s health, and he was hospitalized for exhaustion and died of pneumonia on April 13. He was only 49 at the time. But there’s another chapter of the story of Grey Owl. After he died, the North Bay Nugget newspaper published a story they’d known about for three years but hadn’t used. Grey Owl, they revealed, was actually Archibald Stansfeld Belany, who had been born in England to an upper-class family. His father was English, not Scottish, and his mother was English too. Archie Belany didn’t have any Indigenous ancestry at all. He had actually been a woodsman in Canada, but only under his own name. Apparently he began to construct his story (which included having been born in Mexico, which he never visited) during 1908 when he was working at the Temagami Inn in northern Ontario.
All of this was news to his wife Anahareo, who only ever knew him as Grey Owl. She and Grey Owl — or Archie — had divorced in 1936, though, and Archie had remarried. His second wife didn’t know his real story either. Except that she wasn’t his second wife at all; she was his third. He’d married Ivy Holmes in 1917. She knew him very well as Archie Belany; they’d been childhood sweethearts in Hastings, in England. In fact when Archie, as Grey Owl, married Anahareo in a ceremony presided over by a tribal council, the reason he’d shied away from a “more officlal” ceremony was that he was still married to Ivy, and stayed that way until 1922.
Archie Belany/Grey Owl was in fact the first pretendian, or at least the first famous one. It’s a term describing anybody who falsely claims Indigenous identity. It’s considered a rather extreme form of cultural appropriation, and also called Indigenous identity fraud. There have been others since, sometimes in order to receive government benefits. Only one (Sacheen Littlefeather aka Maria Cruz) has come close to the fame Grey Owl achieved. Cruz was the person who attended the Academy Awards ceremony in 1973 on behalf of Marlon Brando and declined the award to protest the portrayal of Indigenous peoples in Hollywood movies. After Littlefeather/Cruz died in 2022, her sisters pointed out that their father had been from Oxnard, California and the family had no Apache ancestry at all.
