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The French River and Georgian Bay:

Big Eddies and Ice Fields in Spring Waters

“Historians worth their salt are storytellers.”[1]

— John Boyko

I have been writing about my travels for forty years now. This little outing on the French River has always stood out because of the intense similarity of two moments: one at a rapid, the other a common ex­­perience dealing with lake ice canoe travel. Like many trips, it was also memorable for friendship, glorious weather, and the joy of time away experienced as time found. Now, over twenty years since the trip, there is an added quality of … well … concern. Am I honouring the Indigenous people who first travelled here in their homeland? Am I a player in a decolonizing movement that should connect all canoeists, as the canoe is part of our national story? When we tell a grand narrative, such as the Canadian national story with the canoe as a centrepiece, we will always leave out aspects of the overall story. Young Canadian scholars (younger than I, certainly) are asking canoeists to be aware of what is so often left out when folks like me speak or write about the joys and trials of our canoe trips.[2] The question decolonizing literature would ask is, are canoe trip travel writing and the white Anglo canoe tripper complicit in the oppression of Indigenous peoples? I hope to answer this here. I do think it is good that we are thinking about such things more now than we did twenty years ago. But first, some canoe trip writing — more trails and more tales that explore Canada’s past.