A Review Essay
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The enigma of emily carr A Review Essay LESLIE DAWN Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr Gerta Moray Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. 400 pp. Illus. $75.00 cloth. Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon Charles C. Hill, Johanne Lamoureux, and Ian M. Thom (Vancouver: Douglas & MacIntyre, with the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006). 336 pp. Illus. $75.00 cloth. o Canadian artist has gen- struction of personal and na tional Nerated, or produced, more textual identities and the place of Aboriginal material than Emily Carr. That this peoples and cultures within them. is still true is evident from the two The exhibition catalogue contains books on the artist that appeared in eight essays by ten contributors from the summer of 2006. The National various disciplines, arranged more Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver or less chronologically. Ethnologists Art Gallery produced Emily Carr: Peter Macnair and Jay Stewart open New Perspectives on a Canadian by reinvestigating Carr’s 1907 tourist Icon, the catalogue for the latest excursion to Alaska, during which Carr retro spective. Concurrently, she formed the project for painting a UBC Press pub lished Gerta Moray’s documentary record of the poles of the long awaited monograph Unsettling Aboriginal villages of the Canadian Encounters: First Nations Imagery Northwest Coast. Contributing to the in the Art of Emily Carr. The two discussion on the veracity of Carr’s complementary studies combine the later autobiographical writings, they formats of lavishly illustrated coffee compare her published recollections table books with scholarly writings with archival records and the remaining that attempt defini tive statements on fragments of Carr’s missing Alaska this protean artist. Both address the journal, a humorous pictorial narrative con tentious and complex concerns of the trip that Carr drew for her sister. cur rently surrounding Carr, which Their findings demonstrate that, at the now implicate such issues as feminism, time, Carr had neither the extensive postcolonialism, cultural appro priation, experiences nor the deep appreciation modernism, primitivism, the con- of Aboriginal art which she later bc studies, no. 152, Winter 2006/07 97 98 bc studies ascribed to herself. This would support writings as well as on an invented the contention that, when she wrote her correspondence to search for clues to memoirs in the 1930s, she exaggerated the identity of Sophie Frank, Carr’s her early knowledge of and sympathy long-time Aboriginal friend. They too for Aboriginal peoples. question both Carr’s claim to having a Macnair and Stewart also reidentify special rapport with Aboriginal peoples the American artist whom Carr en- and the accuracy of her memoirs. They countered in Sitka and who served as problematize her relationships with a model for her enterprise. Unnamed Frank and the Russes, a Haida family in Carr’s memoirs, her biographer, who figure prominently in her writings Maria Tippett, proposed Theodore as hosts and guides. They report that Richardson.1 Macnair and Stewart the latter relationship ended when Klee suggest a lesser painter, James Everett Wyck was published because the Russ’es Stuart, who is more in keeping with felt Carr’s account was “full of lies.” Carr’s description. Their research Bear and Crean also propose that Carr underscores the importance of critically adopted the position of a white, male rereading both Carr’s own fictionalized missionary because she was motivated accounts and the embroidered bio- by the precept that both poles and their graphies based on them, and taking owners were disappearing and that she neither at face value. treated her sources without “proper In the catalogue’s second essay, respect.” curator Johanne Lamoureaux reap- The intervening years between 1913 praises the next major stage of Carr’s and 1927 remain, as usual, neglected. development: her engagement with Only briefly represented in the works French modernism during her study illustrated, they have received scant trip to France in 1910⁄11. The author coverage. This lacuna supports the asserts that this episode has been (incorrect) contention that Carr marginalized in order to support only returned to painting after her the myth that the Group of Seven “discovery,” staged by the ethnologist developed independently of French Marius Barbeau and Eric Brown (the influence. Instead, Lamoureaux shows director of the National Gallery of how Carr’s totem pole project was Canada [ngc]) at the 1927 Exhibition inflected, albeit indirectly, by both of Canadian West Coast Art: Native primitivism and cubism. Although and Modern – a focus of the current Lamoureaux’s semiotic terminology exhibition and catalogue. Bypassing may alienate the average reader, her this transitional period, during which study offers new insights into Carr’s Carr exhibited internationally, the fascination with, and representation ngc’s curator of Canadian art, Charles of, Aboriginal poles. Hill, devotes his lengthy essay more to Working from their artistic per- the context of the 1927 exhibition than formance piece, First Nations artist to Carr herself. Although surrounded Shirley Bear and writer Susan Crean with a scholarly apparatus, the essay employ an innovative combination of is, as its postscript states, “deeply in- script and essay based on Carr’s own debted” to other sources.2 While glos- sing the research contained within 1 Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1979), 2 Hill lists Anne Morrison, Marcia Crosby, 74. Sandra Dyck, and Leslie Dawn. The Enigma of Emily Carr 99 them, Hill appears, however, to have to the Gitxsan village of Kitwancool excised any conclusions that might (now Gitanyow). The community discomfit the ngc or other government was a well-known site of resistance institutions. For a more complete and to colonization. It restricted access to complex, if more contested, account the the area: both Barbeau and Kihn had reader would be better served turning been expelled in 1924, as had, at various to the originals. times, surveyors, settlers, and others. Also lacking is any commentary on Crosby addresses Carr’s recollections of the many illustrations of Northwest her trip and her encounter with Chief Coast Aboriginal art, presumably in- Miriam Douse Gamlakyeltqu (who cluded because the pieces were part offered her hospitality) in terms of the of the 1927 exhibition. This glaring intersection and gap between personal omission echoes the most reprehensible memory and public history. aspects of the original project by Crosby’s presentation raises several reaffirming the perception held then interesting questions. Carr reports that that the Aboriginal material had no she informed her host that she wanted intrinsic cultural meaning, that it was an to paint her poles because Aboriginal empty shell awaiting appropriation by youths were no longer interested in non-Aboriginal artists and institutions their traditional culture. Her remark as “Canadian” subject matter. was astonishingly impolitic. Gitanyow Hill does include the contribution of leaders took every opportunity to the American artist William Langdon educate non-Aboriginals on the con- Kihn, whose striking portraits of tinuity and vitality of their culture Aboriginal peoples, done in western and the validity of their territorial Canada in the 1920s while working with claims, as when they had forcibly Barbeau, testify to the continuity of instructed Kihn and Barbeau. Yet, Northwest Coast cultures by showing although Carr respected her host, living individuals in their traditional she did not remember nor report on a regalia. Having his long-neglected resourceful and powerful community work brought back to light is a welcome (or individuals) defying government addition. Note, however, that Kihn’s laws, maintaining its culture and Portrait of Ts’ilwa, George Derrick territories, and strategically organizing of the Raven Phratry, Medicine Man its activities; rather, Carr’s memoirs from Gitanyow, which Hill spells present the people of Gitanyow as inconsistently and cites as “whereabouts largely assimilated and motivated by unknown,” is in the Glenbow Museum the informal satisfaction of creature in Calgary. comforts, while her pictures show the Haida scholar Marcia Crosby takes village as being deserted. a different strategy from that of her Crosby also demonstrates that, polemical 1991 essay, whose frontal thematically, Carr’s Aboriginal nar- assault on the popular image of Carr ratives are morbid – especially prom- provoked many of the current debates.3 inent is the death of children. As a Here, Crosby examines Carr’s 1928 trip metaphor for the imminent extinction of Aboriginal cultures, this trope 3 Marcia Crosby, “Construction of the underwrites the assertion that their Imaginary Indian,” in Vancouver Anthology: art had no future and was vital only The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan 1991 as a subject for non-Aboriginal artists. Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks, ), fi 267-91. This, in turn, justi ed Carr’s own 100 bc studies appropriations, which is what forms the change racist colonial attitudes towards theme of Crosby’s 1991 essay. British Columbia’s indigenous peoples. Andrew Hunter follows a line he Moray proposes that Carr’s Aboriginal has been pursuing for some time: that productions “challenged stereotypes” the Canadian national landscapes and “redressed the historical record” preferred by Tom Thomson and the between Aboriginals and settlers Group of Seven were anything but and “championed” and “vindicated” untouched and were already logged the Indian, that she worked “in part- over and mined out.4 But in turning to nership” with Aboriginal peoples and Carr, he misses an essential point: in even asserted the “endurance of Native the mid-1930s Carr would have believed traditions.” that the national landscape was figured While Moray acknowledges that within representations of virginal Carr may have been enmeshed in nature as it was consistently presented colonial discourse, any discussion as as such. Her early 1930s landscapes to how or where this was present in featured precisely such imagery.