Festival du Voyageur and the modern fur industry

Festival du Voyageur, which wrapped up its 57th annual run this past weekend, is hard to pin down.

It is Western Canada’s largest winter festival and francophone event. It celebrates Indigenous history and culture. It used to hold staged gunfights or “skirmishes” and a casino.

It can be easy to forget that Festival du Voyageur is at its core a celebration of Canada’s fur trade history. Without the fur trade, there would be no Canada as we know it. Among other things, it was the engine of French settlement in North America and gave birth to the Metis Nation. At the same time, the fur trade had profound and lasting negative impacts on Indigenous communities and devastated local populations of beavers and other animals. Any event that commemorates a history as deeply contentious as that of the fur trade — especially one that draws tens of thousands of people each year — must do so responsibly.

Festival du Voyageur agrees.

“It’s my hope that people leave Festival understanding both the good and bad of the fur trade and they’re able to make their own decision about how they feel about the fur trade today,” executive director Breanne Lavallée-Heckert told me prior to the festival.

“The fur trade today” to be clear, is vastly different from — though certainly rooted in — that of the 17th to mid-19th century. Just as Festival du Voyageur has a responsibility to present the history it celebrates in an honest, nuanced way, it has a responsibility to properly contextualize the historical fur industry by clearly distinguishing it from what it has become today — especially since the festival seems to be a perennial social safe haven for the donning of fur.

For one thing, production today is not so much the trapping of wild animals as the removal of animals from the wild to be trapped in cages, bred, and killed. In other words, the vast majority of fur in the modern industry is sourced from fur farms, which range in size but invariably involve the intensive confinement and suffering of animals. In Canada, minks and foxes are the main species farmed for their fur and the extreme deprivation and distress they experience in captivity has been well-documented.

Fortunately, fur is falling fast. According to Humane World for Animals, the number of animals farmed for their fur worldwide fell from over 140 million in 2014 to 20.5 million in 2024. This trend is likely to continue as more countries — 23 to date — ban fur farming and more players across the fashion industry (over 1,600 brands, designers, and retailers currently) denounce fur.

Lavallée-Heckert — who is Metis and comes from a family of trappers — made it clear that neither she nor Festival condones killing animals solely for their fur, in line with about 80 per cent of Canadians who oppose this practice, as shown consistently in public polling over the last several years.

“I absolutely don’t agree at all with anyone killing an animal just for their fur, and I don’t think any Indigenous person would ever say otherwise,” said Lavallée-Heckert.

This policy is reflected in their fur procurement practices; the furs on site at Festival and used in their year-round educational programming are largely donated and they do not purchase furs from fur farms.

However, this principled stance does not seem to have manifested in any other way, at least not from the perspective of the festivalgoer. At Fort Gibraltar, the reconstructed voyageur-era fort central to Festival’s educational programming, the only proactive element inviting visitors to consider the modern context was a scavenger hunt of sorts for “hidden objects”— a copper kettle, a washboard, a two-man saw, and so on — that prompted participants to name their modern equivalents. When I asked historical interpreters about the modern equivalent of the 19th century fur trade, I did not get anything approaching an informed response.

Further, while the souvenir shop sells upcycled products handcrafted from vintage furs, it also sells coyote and fox tails, full rabbit and muskrat pelts, and other fur products, at least some of which were from animals presumably killed primarily — if not solely — for their fur; contextual information on these items to help one make an informed, ethical decision was not forthcoming.

Many visitors wear fur to the festival because it’s “part of the esthetic,” said Lavallée-Heckert. But without putting any guardrails on this for the public, the organization is sanctioning the consumption of fur no matter the source or how the animals were treated.

Festival du Voyageur has a moral obligation to inform visitors about the modern fur industry and make its own stance known by fully integrating its principles into its practices.

Tracy Groenewegen is a community correspondent (South Osborne) for the Community Review.