Beaver by Rachel Poliquin

Author:Rachel Poliquin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Reaktion Books

The joke never ends in Canada. Canada has always been beaver country, all puns intended. Moose, loons, polar bears and caribou are national icons, but beavers embody Canada, and stuffed beavers can be found in almost every museum, park and nature education centre across the country.

The Canadian icon and female genitalia have never come together so intimately as in Wendy Coburn’s The Spirit of Canada Eating Beaver, a bronze sculpture of a reclining nude woman with a beaver at work between her legs. The sculpture is an eroticized and modernized reference to Joyce Wieland’s famous sculpture The Spirit of Canada Suckles the French and English Beavers, in which Canada, depicted as a reclining nude, nurses two plump little beavers.

Wieland’s sculpture was part of her 1971 show True Patriot Love, the first major exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada given to a living Canadian female artist. Wieland developed a distinctly feminized patriotism for Canada that unravelled the myth of the Founding Fathers while also speaking to fears for national unity between French- and English-speaking Canadians. (Terrorist acts by French-Canadian separatists in 1970 led to the prime minister invoking the War Measures Act.) By reworking the legend of Rome’s twin founders, Romulus and Remus, who were saved and suckled by a she-wolf, Wieland feminized the nation as an all-giving, all-loving mother who simultaneously and without bias nourished both French and English Canada.

Three decades later, Coburn’s The Spirit of Canada Eating Beaver sidesteps the sovereignty debates between French and English Canada and transcends the feministic critic of the Founding Fathers. By eroticizing Wieland’s maternal image, Coburn celebrates ‘a homoerotic non-procreative sex which salutes one of the nation’s earliest commodities and oddest amphibious rodents’. Time-worn national debates fall away into sensuality. The currency of beaver pelts was once as good as gold. But ‘to women who “do” women’, as Coburn puts it, the beaver’s cultural currency ‘is pure pleasure’.24

Jin-me Yoon, Souvenirs of the Self (Banff Park Museum), from the series Souvenirs of the Self, 1991–2001. Searching for Canadian identity in stuffed symbolism.

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