“Canoes are part of Canada’s culture,” says Carolyn Hyslop, Executive Director of the Canadian Canoe Museum. “Our museum celebrates the canoe’s role in Canadian history and consciousness, while also connecting visitors to themselves and to the land and waters.”
For thousands of years, canoes and kayaks were essential to the way of life of Indigenous peoples. Later, European explorers adopted them to push ever deeper into the interior of our vast continent. The fur trade was entirely dependent on canoes. Today, they are an iconic part of the cottage or camp experience. Canoes are, pure and simple, Canadiana.
“Strip all the lines off a map and it quickly becomes obvious why canoes have such historical importance to Canada,” says Jeremy Ward, the Museum’s curator. “Canada is a landscape of water—strings of rivers connecting lakes and oceans. Canoes bound the country together and are central to our cultures, both Indigenous and contemporary.”
The museum was founded upon the private collection of the late Kirk Wipper, a faculty member of the University of Toronto’s School of Physical and Health Education and an individual often called a pioneer in the development of outdoor education in Canada. Wipper, who co-founded the Canadian Recreational Canoeing Association, had a lifelong passion for the outdoors in general and canoeing in particular. In 1957, he received a circa-1890 dugout canoe as a gift. From that single watercraft grew Canada’s largest private canoe collection. Wipper stored his growing fleet at Camp Kandalore, the Dorset summer camp he founded that, predictably, was primarily focused on canoeing and outdoor immersion.
Eventually, the collection, by now numbering more than 150 diverse craft, had outgrown the camp’s facilities. Wipper needed to find a new home for them. He was encouraged to relocate the collection to a permanent exhibition space in Peterborough, and thus the Canadian Canoe Museum was founded in 1997.
The Canadian Canoe Museum was a success, but there was one concern: the facilities were limited, permitting the display of only twenty percent of the collection at one time, while the remainder was stored in a warehouse. That problem was solved in 2024 with the move to a new home, on Head Lake in Peterborough, and into a brand-new, purpose-built facility better able to fulfil the museum’s aim of teaching visitors about Canadian history through the lens of the canoe. The museum lies along the historic Trent-Severn Waterway by the famous Peterborough Lift Lock, one of the highest hydraulic lift locks in the world.
Everything about the 6,000-square-metre building’s thoughtful design is intended to foster connection to the land and its peoples. It makes generous use of timber, for example, to tie the museum into the wooded landscape of central Ontario. Signage is in French, English and the language of the Anishinaabe First Nations who have traditionally inhabited the Great Lakes region (other Indigenous languages are used when related to a culturally specific watercraft). There’s even a wood-burning fireplace, so that visitors are greeted by the scent of smoke. “Museums,” says Hyslop, “should be a sensory experience and the smell of a campfire transcends every historic user of canoes, from First Nations to fur-traders to campers.”
Capturing the diversity of canoeing culture is at the heart of the museum’s mandate. As such, among the 600 canoes in the collection—100 of which are on display in the Exhibition Hall at any time—cover a wide range of designs and styles. The displayed watercraft represent cultures, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, from coast to coast to coast and therefore share a rich diversity of stories and histories.
The most famous Indigenous canoes are, of course, the famed bark canoes of eastern North America. These canoes are crafted of bark (generally, but not exclusively from birch trees) over a wooden frame. Birch bark was ideal because, uniquely, it wraps around the tree rather than running up and down, making it easy to work with. Seams in the canoe are sealed with tree resin to ensure that they are watertight. The result is a lightweight but robust craft equally ideal for portaging and for travelling on even large bodies of water such as the Great Lakes.
While we tend to think of birch bark canoes as being indistinguishable from one another, there is in fact great diversity of shape, design, and construction methodology based on distinctive cultural traditions. One of the bark canoes in the museum collection was crafted by Beothuk of Newfoundland, a tangible reminder of an extinct Indigenous people.
A kayak from Baffin Island represents the skin-on-frame watercraft common in the Arctic regions of the world, from Siberia to North America’s north to Greenland. Kayaks (and the larger umiaks) are made from stitched together seal hides stretched over a frame made from driftwood or whalebone that is stitched or pegged together. Seal oil coats and waterproofs the seams.
This method of boat building isn’t confined to the Arctic, however. The Mandan First Nations of North Dakota crafted boats out of bison hides. In Europe, hide-on-frame watercraft were once common. British coracles, for example, date to pre-Roman times.
Dugout canoes, shaped from hollowed logs, are a hallmark of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. There the people used them to fish and hunt whales and seals, providing the foundation for a distinctive culture looking towards the oceans for their existence. The Canadian Canoe Museum possesses several of these large canoes among its collection.
Among the museum’s permanent collection are many examples of non-Indigenous craft. Canvas-covered canoes represent the largest grouping in the collection, each one a work of craftsmanship. Wood canoes—manufactured using a range of methods, including cedar strip and board and batten—are well represented as well, including by some of the earliest examples of workshop and factory-built canoes. Wood canoes are of particular relevance because Peterborough was once a world-renowned hub for canoe manufacturing. Finally, the collection includes modern canoes of composite construction.
Several of the craft have ties to celebrated figures in Canadian history. One canoe belonged to author Farley Mowat, whose writings beautifully captured the majesty of Canada’s north. Singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot donated two of his prized canoes, a cedar canoe in which he paddled through thousands of kilometers of wilderness, and the craft he sung lovingly about in Canary Yellow Canoe (“In my canary yellow canoe, my yellow canoe, I want to go tripping in my canary yellow canoe”).
Other canoes of historic provenance include one that was used during the 1911-12 Coppermine Expedition to explore and map Canada’s Arctic around Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake and the lower Coppermine River. Author George Mellis Douglas, a member of the expedition, wrote about his experiences in the best-selling 1914 book Lands Forlorn.
The watercraft aren’t all from Canada, either. The collection boasts canoes from all over the world, including Kenya, Samoa, and the Amazon basin. “The incredible thing about the canoe is that its basic form is almost universal, it’s been used the world over for thousands of years,” enthuses Ward.
The museum experience isn’t confined to merely viewing diverse canoes. The move to its new, five-acre home allows people not just to see canoes, as was the case at the previous location, but also paddle them on the sheltered waters of Little Lake. You can opt to rent a canoe (lifejackets included) yourself or join a guided tour aboard a recreated 36-foot voyageur canoe, ‘canot du maitre’, during which your guide relates natural and human history of the region (try paddling 50 to 60 strokes per minute, as the voyageurs did).
The museum’s enrichment isn’t limited to on-water programming. “I’m really proud of our Campfire Circle, where people can learn fire-building techniques and campfire cooking skills, or just talk,” says Hyslop. “For so many people this is their first campfire experience. It’s rewarding to see the smiles on their faces.”
Special events and workshops are held throughout the year, ranging from paddling workshops and basic camping skills to black ash basket weaving, paddle carving, and gourmet campfire cooking courses.
The Canadian Canoe Museum is very much rooted in the present and yet it is built upon stories of the past, stories that emerge from diverse cultures and yet reveal—through canoes, of all things—the common threads that unite us.
Web: canoemuseum.ca
Location: 2077 Ashburnham Drive, Peterborough, Ontario
Admission: Adults $22.60, Seniors $20.34, Youth and Students (youth 5-17 and students under 24 with valid student ID) $16.95, Kids under 5 Free
Phone: 705-748-9153
