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Paddlers make pitch for canoe museum

Gibsons

What better way to show one’s love for the water than waking up at the crack of dawn on Valentine’s Day to canoe with more than 60 paddlers out of Gibsons, led by Wesley Nahanee of the Squamish Nation.

“Per capita, we probably have more canoeists and canoes than virtually any community in the country, and there aren’t many canoe cultures in this country that were paddling on Valentine’s Day,” said Gibsons Paddle Club founding member Ed Hill.

If there is a national symbol for connecting Canadian communities, it’s the canoe. Used for thousands of years by Aboriginals across the country, historically for transport, travel, trade, war and many other things, the canoe is what made navigating this enormous country possible in the early Colonial days.

“Canoes have been part of the Coast heritage as long as there has been a human population here,” said Lorne Lewis, first president of the Gibsons Paddle Club.

Three different types of canoe were on the water Saturday: one of Polynesian origin, one of Anishinabek origin — the conventional canoe of Eastern origin (or Voyageur canoe) — and the West Coast dugout style.

The connectivity, which was at one time only possible by canoe, has entered the digital age. James Raffan, a director of development from the Canadian Canoe Museum (CCM) was out on the water on Saturday morning to open ties between the CCM — located in Peterborough — and canoe enthusiasts in Western Canada.

“What good is [the canoe museum] to the people of Gibsons Landing, B.C. or Yellowknife or Chicoutimi if you don’t know it exists?” asked Raffan at a reception for the paddlers held at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery. “The country has come to a place where, I think, what you know needs to be shared more broadly.

“The Canadian Canoe Museum is in the process of reinventing itself, trying to figure out how you connect people in a digital age, not only to that collection, but how do you get the incredible stuff that’s going on in a place like Gibsons, to be known by people who can’t physically come here?”

The CCM now has a collection of 650 canoes and more than 1,000 artifacts. Plans are underway to create a virtual museum, accessible online for Canadians everywhere to share the knowledge of one of Canada’s oldest and most culturally important pastimes.

“In the East, you re-create events that happened in the past,” said Hill. “In the West, Wes [Nahanee] and his people never died as a canoe culture. It was on a string at one point, and from that it has grown, and we are part of that growth now.”