North West Canoes Anchoring, c. 1870.Frances Anne Hopkins/Canadian Canoe Museum/Supplied
There is only one way to describe how Keith Montreuil feels about the incredible things going on this beautiful spring day at the Canadian Canoe Museum: He’s speechless.
On a May morning in the museum in Peterborough, Ont., Montreuil’s mouth is open, his eyes full. The 39-year-old teacher from nearby Alderville First Nation rubs a calloused hand along the rough gunwale of an ancient-looking birchbark canoe that his family believes, and the museum hopes to verify, was built by his great-great-grandfather Zach Smoke nearly a century ago.
Montreuil searches in vain for words in a massive building filled with canoes and, until next spring, an art exhibition, Canoe Perspectives, celebrating the canoe.
Finally, after a few tears come a few words.
“A lot of what I know is oral history from my grandfather, who got it from his grandfather,” Montreuil says, periodically choking up at having the opportunity to touch this part of his family’s history. “I am so very, very grateful for this moment.”
It is a “moment” Montreuil treasures, as his family history becomes part of the record of a country made possible by the humble vessel that required no fuel but human effort and endless curiosity.
The old vessel is but one of more than 600 canoes and kayaks in the museum collection, each one a work of art with its own story. They are joined this year by Canoe Perspectives, which opened May 14 and runs through to next April. The exhibit features 40-plus paintings from the private collection of Scott and Grit McCreath of Calgary – the largest private collection of original Canadian art featuring the canoe.
Algonquin (in Homage to Tom Thomson), 1997.Ken Danby/Canadian Canoe Museum/Supplied
The exhibit is a major part of the museum’s celebration of its second anniversary in its new home, an architectural triumph situated on the shores of Peterborough’s Little Lake, on the Trent-Severn Waterway.
Founded in 1997, the museum spent the first 27 years of its existence in an empty outboard engine factory, landlocked in the south end of the city. A proper museum and its collection of paddling watercraft – including one birchbark canoe believed to be more than 230 years old – is, thankfully, finally a reality. It’s also a success: In 2025, the new building had 116,000 visitors, the majority from beyond the local area, and it generated some $10-million for the local economy.
“We are the little engine that could,” says Jeremy Ward, curator of the museum. Between Ward and executive director Carolyn Hyslop, they have a combined 54 years of service to the museum.
Landing the McCreath Collection is considered a great coup for Ward and Hyslop. Scott and Grit McCreath, married 55 years, began their collection in Calgary when Grit decided to buy a painting for Scott’s 60th birthday.
In the two decades since, the collection has grown to 90 pieces, featuring canoe works of art from all provinces and territories, with the singular exception of Yukon.
That first painting, Denizens of Ottawa, is a work by Lucius O’Brien, a native of Barrie, Ont., who was named the first president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1880. He was also the first contract artist hired on by the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was keen to have a pictorial tribute to its cross-Canada rail line.
Grit McCreath, a lifelong educator and past chancellor of the University of Saskatchewan, could then hardly afford the painting, which cost $310. But she wanted something to remind her husband, an investment adviser, of his early years paddling many of the mighty rivers of northern Saskatchewan.
“That was the start of this crazy, crazy collection.”
The couple was hooked. They now had a hobby for life.
She would pay a local dealer $25.83, in 12 instalments, from her teacher’s salary until she had paid off that first painting. Keen to add further canoe art to their walls, the couple turned to Rod Green, a dealer in fine art who has worked with several of the major western Canada galleries, and who has been pivotal in building the impressive collection.
Despite the ever-rising costs, the collection steadily grew. “We had art before we had a dishwasher,” Grit McCreath says, laughing. “I can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed this journey. I think it’s an addiction.”
For Scott McCreath, an admittedly shy man, the collection is about all types of canoes but the emphasis is on his personal favourite: the birchbark canoe that First Nations created to hunt and travel the vast water capillaries of this country. “Honour the birch tree,” he likes to say. “We owe a lot to the birch tree.”
Wikwas Timanikan (Birch Bark Canoe). Made by César Newashish, 1970sCésar Newashish/Canadian Canoe Museum/Supplied
John Jennings would agree. The history professor emeritus at Peterborough’s Trent University has written that “Canada exists as it does today because of the canoe. In the United States it was the horse that determined the national boundaries; in Canada, the canoe.”
The author of The Canoe: A Living Tradition, Jennings further believes that “The Mounties have been given away to Hollywood and Disney. Our brand of hockey’s been debased. The canoe is the closest thing we have to a national symbol.” Indeed, the museum is home to artifacts that bolster that idea: Pierre Trudeau’s buckskin leather paddling jacket is on display in the main museum, as are canoes that Adam van Koeverden paddled in the Olympics in 2004 and 2008.
Phyllis Willliams, past chief of the nearby Curve Lake First Nations and a member of the museum’s national council, said in a remark about what the place means to her that “the museum is a reflection of the history of Canada and its people, a starting place to learn about the contributions and experiences of Indigenous peoples and the merging of nations and cultures in the early years.”
Those early years are illustrated by the oldest painting in the exhibit. At more than 200 years old, Montreal Canoe with a View of Otter Head Rock on Lake Superior is a pencil and watercolour portrait by John Wedderburn Halkett, a Scottish lawyer who became a shareholder in the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1820, he travelled to the Red River Settlement in what is today the province of Manitoba and returned home with a painting of the huge canoe that carried him and the company traders to the West.
Many of the gathered artists in this unique exhibition that spans three centuries are familiar names in Canadian art. Cornelius Krieghoff’s Crossing the River at Quebec in Winter is on display. Frances Anne Hopkins – a mother of eight boys who often accompanied husband Edward, secretary to the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, on journeys – is represented by North West Canoes Anchoring.
A founding member of the Group of Seven, Franz (Frank) Johnston painted his Indians on the Albany River around 1940, decades before language became more sensitive in Canada. The Canadian Canoe Museum acknowledges that the exhibit “may contain cultural portrayals, stereotypes, and titles that are outdated or offensive.” While original titles are left alone, the dates serve to provide some context.
Portage, 1930.Illingworth Kerr/Canadian Canoe Museum/Supplied
Other familiar names include David Milne with Earth, Sky and Water V, Maritimer Tom Forrestall with a canoe hanging upside down for the winter in Out of Season, Alex Colville with Study for Woman, Dog and Canoe, and Ken Danby, who offers Algonquin (in Homage to Tom Thomson). Danby, like his hero Thomson, also died in Algonquin Park, some 90 years after the mysterious passing of Canada’s most famous artist. Also represented is Calgary’s Amy Dryer with a modern oil painting, Figures, of Tom Thomson paddling his canoe with fellow Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer in the bow.
One of the more recent and most evocative works is Waskesiu, by Alan Bateman, son of the internationally recognized realist painter Robert Bateman. The branch doesn’t fall far from the tree.
To accompany the paintings, the museum has included several of its own artifacts in the exhibition. Robert Bateman’s Minto canoe – which he commissioned from the legendary May Minto of Minden, Ont., who spent the Second World War working on bomber fabrication – is on display among the paintings. Also present is Bill Mason’s paintbox, along with his unfinished sketch of Grand Chute rapids on western Quebec’s Dumoine River.
“I have always believed that the Canadian Wooden canoe is one of the greatest achievements of mankind,” Mason wrote in Path of the Paddle. “There is nothing that is so aesthetically pleasing and yet so functional and versatile as the canoe. It is as much a part of our land as the rocks and trees and lakes and rivers. It takes as much skill and artistry to paddle a canoe well as it does to paint a picture of it.”
The collection has spawned its own book, Canoe: A Collection of Canadian Art by Anne Ewan and Rod Green, which will be published this fall.
That, however, will not mark the end of canoe art for the couple.
As Scott McCreath, who provided a foreword to the book with his wife, said to Green during a preview of the exhibition: “If you find any more, let me know.”