Discussions

The world of nature suffered a great loss with the death of the First Nation Apache Indian named Grey Owl who died on this date at the young age of 49.  
 
His death should not have been a surprise to those who knew him because for years he had pushed himself to the point of exhaustion and was a heavy drinker of Libacious Beverages.  
 
Grey Owl was a wildly popular speaker in both Canada and England: he spoke to large audiences about his life in the wilderness, while living in Clear Lake and Prince Albert National Park’s.  
 
He always gave the same message: “We must respect all living things”. He was ahead of his time, and preached conservation at every lecture, even though he was generally under the influence when he was speaking, but even so he was always convincing in his message.  
 
He made his biggest headlines after his death when it was revealed that he had spent his life as a lie. He was not an Apache Indian after all, but an Englishman named, Archibald Belaney.  
 
He was born in the English Channel port of Hastings in 1888. His mother was a teenage bride whose reprobate husband soon went on his way. His father’s sisters, (Two strict maiden Aunts) raised him in England.  
 
As a boy, Archie made up complex fantasies about his missing father, mixing him with his own love of animals and his interest with the First Nation peoples of North America.  
 
In 1906 at the age of seventeen Belaney arrived alone in Northern Ontario with a fictional ancestry, which described himself as a Mexican born son of a Scottish frontiersman and an Apache woman.  
 
Grey Owl really did marry in 1910, his wife was an Ojibwa native named Angele Egwuna, she was his first and only legal wife: they had a daughter named Alice. After one year of marriage he had begun to drink heavily and like his father abandoned this family.  
 
The Canadian Public was embarrassed and outraged by the above revelations, and everything connected to Grey Owl immediately became suspect, especially his support of the environment.  
 
Grey Owl may have been a fraud, but his message is more needed today than in his time, when only the Beaver were near extinction.  
 
Canada’s current respected Environmentalist is Dr. David Suzuki who at one time taught at Brandon University. Unlike the Green Peace Group backs his arguments with scientifically proven facts.  
 
I don’t think we will one day discover he was a fraud because I think he really has Japanese ethnic origins.  
 
One time Dr. Suzuki had an embarrassing moment when visiting the House of Commons restaurant for a luncheon he’d been invited to.  
 
He was dressed in a sports shirt and wearing blue Jeans, but the Maitre d’ refused him entry because his clothes did not pass the Dress Code.  
 
Dr. Suzuki was taken by surprise and explained that he’d eaten there just one week earlier. The Maitre d’ explained that on that occasions the management had abandoned the Dress Code rules for that day because of parliamentary meetings with First Nations people. He had mistaken Dr. Suzuki as being a member of that group.  
 
Source: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0012020