Following the successful completion of Rendezvous with the Wild a national campaign and book to raise awareness about the beauty and fragility of the Boreal Forest centered on ten canoe northern canoe trips, James anchored an evening of stories, slides, and music...
A young man called Angulalik Pedersen, from the western Nunavut Community of Kugluktuk, won a scholarship to attend high school at Upper Canada College in Toronto. A dream that emerged in the south was to one day take a few of his classmates to his home town. James...
A rollicking good canoe story about the 26' voyageur and its crew from the Canadian Canoe Museum who came to represent Canada in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Flotilla on the Thames River on Sunday, June 3rd, 2012. Going back to the drafting of the British North...
When legendary Canadian solo canoeist Herb Pohl died tragically on Lake Superior in 2007, friends found on his desk a rough memoir about 40 years of wilderness travel that he intended to publish in a book he wanted to call The Lure of Faraway Places. James knew Herb,...
One of the most often quoted poems in the annals of expeditionary learning is Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses wherein an old sailor is looking back on his life and says "All experience is an arch wherethro' gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades forever and...
This presentation, developed originally as a keynote for the annual conference of the Canadian Heritage Rivers System, is James's celebration of the river-as-teacher in his own life, growing up on the Speed River in southern Ontario but then moves on to a...
As a Patron of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society's Boreal Program, James participated in the organization and execution of a special project to raise public awareness of the value and fragility of the Boreal Forest. Of ten river trips involving a host of...
After more than thirty years of work and travel in the Arctic, James started heading to Antarctica in with Students on Ice in 2007. This is the story of his venture into the magic and majesty of his first encounter with Austral ice, during a time of great change. ...
Holling Clancy Holling's 1942 classic children's book character, the little carved Indian in a canoe called "Paddle to the Sea," captivated generations of readers, including Canadian filmmaker, Bill Mason, who went on to make a movie about Paddle that became the most...
Following his first trip north as a labourer for ESSO in the summer of 1977, building metal buildings in Inuvik, James has spent part of every year somewhere in the Arctic. His recent circumnavigation of the world at the Arctic Circle has added to that experience and...
One of the most remarkable characters in the pantheon of canoeists is unquestionably Bill Mason, subject of James Raffan's acclaimed best-selling biography, Fire in the Bones. As with all of his projects, James dived into the research with abandon, committed to total...
James's research into all of his book topics takes him always into the Archive of the Feet, which means onto the ground and into the experiences of whatever or whomever he is writing about. This was particularly the case as he entered the life of Sir George Simpson,...
In 2010, James embarked on a project to travel around the world at the Arctic Circle to put a human face on climate change. Nearly three years of travel, living and travelling with people in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska and Canada, has produced a...
This is James at his informed, entertaining and irreverent best talking about his favourite two subjects: Canada and canoes. Originally prepared for a lecture tour for the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and since presented in across Canada as well as in various...
This is the remarkable story of a man's journey to retrace the his father's steps in a bark canoe in Northern Saskatchewan. As a young Anglican minister, Bill Buxton's father spent the summers of 1939-40 teaching in the Cree Community of Pelican Narrows during...
Originally prepared in response to an invitation to speak at the Kendal Mountain Film Festival in England's Lake District, this presentation presents three of James's best stories from a lifetime of work and adventure in Canada's north. The first is about an...