Archibald Belaney (Brosnan) was a British man who grew up fascinated with Indigenous peoples of the Americas culture—so much so that in the early 1900s he left the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for Canada, where he reinvented himself as Archie Grey Owl and lived in the wild as a North American Indian Animal trapping. Eventually, Belaney becomes an environmentalist after renouncing trapping and hunting.