Kawartha Lakes Spirit Walks
The Canadian Canoe Museum
Across cultures and throughout Canada, canoes have been used to cross from one world to another. In a Micmac creation story, Glooscap arrived from away in a white stone canoe, as did Dekanahwideh the 'Heavenly Messenger' who brought peace to the Iroquois Confederacy.
Canoes are associated with birth, marriage and death rights, a symbol of transit from one world to another. The Neutral Indian legend about The Maid of the Mist, in which a young woman is sacrificed in a canoe to give thanks for the harvest -- this too, was fundamentally about the canoe as vehicle for moving from one world to another.
In the folk tale La Chasse Galerie, a flying canoe transport lumbermen from a lonely camp back to their loved ones in town. For others, including former Prime Minister Trudeau, Canada's beloved filmmaker and environmentalist, Bill Mason, and many other recreational canoeists, the canoe was and is, a connection to wilderness.
Ojibway artist and educator Rick Beaver writes: 'In Indian tradition, it is believed that we are able to travel to the land of spirits to converse with them and to return with messages that help us back here on Turtle Island. The canoe is often the vehicle which carries us across the seas of space to the land of spirits.' So it is with the idea of canoe as connector that our experience begins.......
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