Celebrating the beaver’s history in Mattagami

The closing ceremonies of the Olympics paid a cutesy tribute to Canada’s national symbol by wheeling a grinning, super-sized beaver across the ice.

March 18, 2010: Volume 37 #6, Page A14

But it’s Mattagami First Nation, a 450-member reserve just outside Gogama, Ont., that really knows how to celebrate the beaver—by stringing it up over an open fire.

Now in its seventh year, Beaver Fest is a one-of-a-kind, grassroots festival that celebrates Mattagami’s traditional hunting and trapping culture. It’s likely the only festival in the world where you can taste the crackling outside and juicy meat of a winter-caught beaver after it’s been roasted over an open fire for six hours. And that’s why on April 24, hundreds of people will descend on Mattagami for the one-day festival.

But Beaver Fest is about much more than the main event.

Many of the youth in this 450-strong band move off the reserve for school and jobs in nearby Sudbury and Timmins, making it harder to connect to the land. Today just 300 members live on the reserve, overlooking the 64-kilometre long Mattagami Lake.

Worried about the declining interest in traditional hunting and trapping among youth on the reserve, Leonard, his partner Linda Penasse, and another couple, Evelyn Boissoneau and the late Willard Harnack, came up with festival seven years ago.

In a couple of weeks, Leonard, his son Larry and Joe Gerner, a trapper from Gogama Fur Council, are taking some high school students from Mattagami out to trap the beaver for this year’s festival. They hope the experience will entice more kids to embrace traditional practices. And if it’s anything like this city girl’s experience of trapping with Leonard and his son Larry last March, it should do the trick.

On the Beaver Trail

Peering into the clear, spring-fed lake, Larry Naveau checks to see if a beaver has been caught in the conibear trap.
-Crystal Luxmore - Special to Wawatay News

“That’s your snow machine there,” said Leonard, pointing to the large purple and black, growling beast of a Ski-doo he’d wrestled up for me from a neighbour. A virgin snowmobiler, I swallowed hard. “Um, OK, where’s the brake?”

Minutes later my nerves disappeared, replaced with stomach-flipping elation as I zipped across the lake watching the dance of a million sun beams on its wide, snow white surface. The sun followed us, winking through the thick stands of pine, birch and poplar, as we bumped along the deserted trails in search of beaver.

For the first 17-years of his life, Leonard spent six months deep in this bush. The oldest in a family of seven, he was his father’s right-hand man, trapping and hunting for food and fur.

Some years his parents would take the entire family out on the trapline in October and stay there all winter, living in cabins. They’d catch fish and hunt deer, smoking some of the meat to eat in the winter. Nearly every family in Mattagami lived that way then, says Leonard.

Today it takes Leonard 40 minutes to get to his family’s trapline on snowmobile. It used to take two days, with Leonard snowshoeing miles ahead of their four-dog team, to pack down the deep snow. “Wherever the dogs got tired, that’s where we camped,” he says.

But out on the trapline, not much has changed.

Father and son had scouted four beaver houses on Cubot Lake the day before, looking for telltale signs of gnawed trees and snow domes on the lake’s edges.

We park the snowmobiles about six metres away from the first den, where the ice is still thick. Leonard bangs a heavy metal bar against the ice listening for hollow sounds. He hears them near the edges of the rounded den. He and Larry chop through two sweet spots with axes, ice chunks flying. Using oversized ladles, they scoop the beaver’s trash out of the hole, flinging naked poplar twigs, stained orange, onto the surface.

On thin ice now, each man lies on his stomach peering into his hole, looking for the passageway. Staring past their reflections in the clear, spring-fed lake they pass a long L-shaped stick between them, poking at the den’s walls until each finds a doorway.

Designed for an instant kill when a beaver, otter or marten swims through and hits the trigger, the jaws of the conibear trap snap around the animal’s neck packing 90 pounds of pressure. The Naveau’s use large metal pliers to spring the traps, mount them to the bottom of long pieces of thin, dead trees, and fix them under water in front of the passageways.

We set nine traps that day. The next morning we return and notice one poplar set has been pulled to the side, catching our prey almost instantly.

“Could be a castor there, eh?” says Leonard. “Amik, amik! You call that amik in Ojibwa,” he yells cheerfully chopping through the ice. “I think we got one! You want to pull it out?”

“Sure.” I yank on the poplar and it’s so heavy I’m convinced there’s a moose down there. Breathing hard I pull the dripping beaver to the surface and I’m surprised by how cute—and how dead—it looks. “Ooooooh,” I let out a low, agonized groan,
“Cruel trappers eh?” says Leonard before picking it up by its hind legs and slapping it repeatedly on a patch of white snow to dry off its fur.

Over the next two days we catch nine beaver. Leonard and Larry keep the smallest one to eat, a sickly one is fed to the dog, the large beaver are given to friends on the reserve to eat, and six of the best kits are skinned and frozen until the festival.

Eating Beaver

The festival starts around 10 a.m. Demonstration and sales booths line the walls of the large community centre. Local trapping councils encourage you to run your hands along their tables full of lynx, marten, wolf, fox, beaver and otter pelts, while grey-haired trappers guide the little hands of children along the soft, pink underside of an otter or marten, teaching them how to skin.

A beer garden, moose stew and bannock will keep you full until the feast and the fiddle and banjo harmonies from the award-winning Canucky Bluegrass Boys, will keep you entertained. When the beavers are cooked, usually around 5 p.m., Mattagami residents put out a homemade spread. Turkey, ham, bannock, and salads – lots of salads – are served alongside plates full of red hot “amik.”

In an age where food is now so far removed from the consumer that it’s slaughtered in a meat packing plant, chewed up, dyed and reshaped into “nuggets” a chance to bite into sustainable, locally-caught game is a rare and ethical choice. Cruel trapper? Only if you catch your food in the supermarket’s frozen food section.

Crystal Luxmore is a freelance journalist based in Toronto. Her great, great-grandfather, James Miller opened an HBC post on Mattagami and started a family there.