by Nikki Rajala | Feb 3, 2021 | Voyageur
Singing. Sea shanties, sung by sailors on long journeys, have had great press lately — so you can see the tradition of work songs lives on! But wait — there’s more. The technique worked with voyageurs as well. Voyageurs, those jaunty hearty French-Canadian...
by Nikki Rajala | Jan 19, 2021 | Featured
Did you like reading the story of the Flying Canoe? Here’s the backstory: In print, the tale of the Flying Canoe, La Chasse Galerie dates back to 1891 but it was an old tale then and told across Canada.Some sources date it to Europe, and other versions have...
by Nikki Rajala | Jan 12, 2021 | Featured
What’s better on a cold night than to get cozy and hear an old story?. Here is a popular French-Canadian story — the tale of the Flying Canoe. (also known as La Chasse Galerie, The Bewitched Canoe and The Wild Hunt.) It’s New Year’s Eve at a far-flung...
by Nikki Rajala | Nov 18, 2020 | Featured
At school programs, girls usually ask, “What about girls in the fur trade—were they ever ‘voyageurs’?” Oui, mademoiselle — but not as paddlers. Nearly all women in the fur trade were Aboriginal, invaluable allies who scraped beaver pelts, dried fish and...
by Nikki Rajala | Oct 21, 2020 | Voyageur
As it’s coming on wintry weather, did you ever wonder — What were the voyageurs doing 200 years ago in this season? But of course you did. By October they’d returned to their posts with loads of new goods from the rendezvous, ready to start trading. What...
