Les castors du roi

In this painting, Monkman slyly pokes fun at King Louis XV (1710-1774), an important figure in the French colonization of North America well into the 1700s, who commissioned many paintings of exotic French colonial hunting scenes, but excluded any examples of the North American fur trade that was central to the economy of New France. Monkman focuses on amiskwak (beavers), still of spiritual and ecological importance for many Indigenous nations to this day. The mass culling of beavers for their pelts to meet European demand caused widespread ecological devastation. Here, Monkman underscores the centrality and significance of amiskwak in the Great Lakes region.