Meet Canada’s Canoe Museum

The canoe has always been part of Canada’s national mythology — but it’s a complicated history. For thousands of years, these watercraft provided essential transportation through the vast wilds of North America for the continent’s Indigenous peoples.

Then those same vessels became tools of colonial expansion during the Voyageurs’ fur trade era, displacing native communities and fueling the extraction of natural resources. Finally, it arrives in the modern era, where it’s mostly known for recreational activities “dominated by middle-class white people,” as sports and leisure historian Jessica Dunkin wrote in the 2019 book Symbols of Canada.

That’s quite the circuitous journey — even for a vessel designed specifically for navigating them.

But there’s likely no place on Earth better equipped to tell the canoe’s story than the upgraded Canadian Canoe Museum. Though the museum’s been around for 27 years, it finally raised enough money for a massive expansion last year. It now offers a generous space for paddle lovers, who can explore its collection of 600+ watercraft on a beautiful lakefront property in Ontario.

Photo: Canadian Canoe Museum

A uniquely Canadian museum

From the enormous exhibit hall to the hands-on workshops to paddle tours on the water, the museum aims to bring together the canoe’s rich and varied history.

“You can go in one door and paddle out the back. It’s like a family reunion for your boat to be able to go there and see what its parents and grandparents look like,” said James Raffan, a Canadian educator, author, and adventurer. “But it’s not just about celebrating canoes. It’s also about figuring out how to relate better to each other.”

While the U.S. has the soon-to-expand Minnesota Canoe Museum, and the Canoe Heritage Museum in Spooner, Wisc., both are relatively small operations. So the Canadian Canoe Museum provides a represents a unique draw for American tourists with its depth of history and canoe variety.

It also took years to raise $45 million for the museum’s new 65,000-square-foot building, said Megan McShane, communications coordinator for the museum. Donations came in from around the country, with about half the money coming from private foundations and individuals and the other half from various government funding.

Photo: Justen Soule for Canadian Canoe Museum

Tears of happiness

The donations allowed curators to realize their ambitious plans for showing off the canoes they’d spent decades collecting. Long lacking the space to properly showcase the collection, their love for the watercraft is clearly evident when seeing the “heart” of the museum: a 20,000-square-foot room filled with more than 100 canoes and kayaks.

The large building also includes a cafe, gift shop, space for workshops and certification programs, and even a dock for canoe and kayak rentals during the summer.

The five-acre site is located about a two-hour drive east of Toronto and includes a connection to the Trans Canada Trail.

“The collection is surprising and even quite moving for a lot of people,” McShane said. “We are hearing from people who are in tears of happiness. It really hits people.”

A long lineage

The exhibited canoes show the long arc of the vessel’s history.

You can admire the orca-and-salmon artwork adorning a double-masted, Nuu-chah-nulth dugout canoe dating to the Pacific Northwest in the 1890s. Even older is the Hudson Bay Company Timber Frame, dating to 1876. Used for many years at an Ontario fur trade post, this massive 42-foot canoe is the largest artifact in the collection.

There’s also the “winged” racing canoe of Sheila Kuyper. The Olympic gold medalist made big strides for women canoeists after Canada became the first country to include women in national competitions in the mid-1990s.

From top left is the Hudson Bay Company’s 42-foot Timber Frame canoe, followed by the Nuu-chah-nulth dugout on the top right. A Baffin Island kayak’s innards are shown below, along with the race canoe of Canadian Olympic gold medalist Sheila Kuyper. Photos: Canadian Canoe Museum

Not merely a tradition

The museum aims to show that canoe-making isn’t merely a tradition. It continues to evolve — even among the first people to invent them.

To that end, the Canadian Canoe Museum has commissioned the construction of several new watercraft directly from First Nation builders. That includes a kayak built by an elder from southern Baffin Island, and a “rough water” canoe from the Mi’kmaw, a people native to Northeastern Canada.

Once all these varied forms of canoes are right next to each other, you can start to see the design features that influenced each other, said Raffan, a longtime paddler of Canada’s backcountry rivers.

“There are many examples of how the idea of the canoe gets reinvented depending on who’s doing it,” Raffan said. “If you want to know where your Pyranha whitewater boat came from, you can see the lineage here.”

A group on one of the museum’s Voyageur Tours. Photo: Canadian Canoe Museum

Paddle tours & workshops

While admiring canoes is one thing, actually taking one out onto the water is something else entirely.

That’s why the museum’s organizers chose a lakefront location, complete with docks for renting canoes and kayaks during Ontario’s warmer summer months. There’s also the Voyageur Canoe Tours, which take visitors on guided trips through nearby waterways while discussing the vessel’s history.

It’s an opportunity to offer tourists and watersports lovers a deeper understanding of their connection to the outdoors — and the many peoples who share in it, said Museum Curator Jerry Ward.

“Being in the wilderness is also being in somebody’s backyard,” Ward said. “There is a real shift in understanding the complex history of people in this country over the last few millennia.”

A flotilla of paddlers during the museum’s celebration of National Canoe Day on June 26, 2024. Photo: Canadian Canoe Museum

Upcoming events

Promoting interactivity is important to the museum’s organizers, who have been busy adding more workshops for hands-on learning. Upcoming events in March and April include classes for carving your own canoe paddle, weaving a traditional basket, or building a wanigan, a traditional storage box for backcountry canoe trips.

“When you drive home with a finished canoe paddle you made yourself — the sense of empowerment is amazing,” Ward said. “You’re tired after two days, as you should be. But here’s the cool part: At the end of these courses, we get our boats down to the water, and try these paddles out. And the grin they have on their faces when they come back is so massive. It’s more than the paddle. It’s that experience, right?”

About a year has passed since the museum’s grand opening. As the museum has welcomed an increasing number of visitors, Ward said many of them are simply looking for ways to escape the noise of modern life and reconnect with nature.

“The canoe is just a boat that departs where there are no roads,” he said. “I think there’s a real hunger for that.”

This article first appeared on GearJunkie.