User:Wethan/sandbox

Trapping
Belaney's passion for nature and all living things facilitated his trapping career. Belaney decidedly went to Toronto to earn money in the retail industry in aims of travelling farther north. Before heading to Northern Ontario to stay with the Guppy Family in Lake Timiskaming, Belaney was notably eager in becoming a guide and was always educating himself on nature. Before becoming a trapper, Belaney sought after first hand experience to learn the basic skills of a woodsman and apprenticed Bill Guppy. Bill Guppy taught Belaney how to snowshow, the basics in trapping and also how to place several types of traps. Following with the Guppy family, he moved to Lake Temagami (Tema-Augama), Northern Ontario, where he worked as a chore boy at the Temagami Inn. For two years, Belaney worked as a chore boy and also made a trip back to England.

Upon his return to Lake Temagami, Belaney’s fascination with the Anishinaabe Ojibwe was only greater. Belaney sets about learning their language and lore while dating a coworker Angele Egwuna. Angele furthered Archie’s knowledge in trapping and fishnets, and also provided a network of Ojibwa elders who bestowed invaluable advice in Ojibwa environmental values. Belaney passionately embraced the cause of the Objibwa Indians, and in turn the Ojibwa treated Belaney as one of their own. In 1909, Belaney spent a winter with the Ojibwa trappers, and proudly remembers his formal adoption as an Ojibwa trapper. In Donald B. Smith's From the Land of Shadows, it is documented that Belaney's greatest lesson was the fragility of the environmental ecosystem, which is influential in his conservationist views. On August 23, 1910, he married Angele Egwuna, an Ojjibwa woman from whom he learned much about the people.

Conservationist Views
Initially Grey Owl’s efforts and conservation were focused towards the beaver up North; however, with the publication of The Men of the Last Frontier, his conservation efforts came to include all wild animals. While he had at one time been a trapper, he came to believe that “the trap, the rifle, and poison” would some day result in “the Dwellers in the forest to come to and end too.” He expresses in Pilgrims of the Wild how our rush to exploit natural resources for commercial value overlooks “the capabilities and possibilities of the wild creatures involved in it.”   It was this “commodification of all living things that was responsible for the destruction from the beaver.” While he was against the commodification of wild animals, his theory was not for the preservation of all living things, but for the conservation of them. Grey Owl expressed that if there were “temporary at least” protection for fur bearing animals, then we would “see the almost human response to kindness” from animals. He expresses the conception of people to place themselves outside of nature as one of the problems, and instead he called for people to remember “that you belong to nature, and not it to you.” His publication of Men of the Last Frontier was first called The Vanishing Frontier, and subsequently named Men of the Last Frontier by the publishers, which he felt “missed the the entire point of the book” as he “spoke of nature, not men.”. The changing of the title exemplified for him the conception of people “that man governs the powers of nature.”.