By 1927, Emily Carr had given up her boarding house and was making a living breeding bobtails (sheepdogs) and making and selling pottery knick-knacks decorated with ‘Indian’ designs to tourists keen to acquire a piece of the cultural heritage of the Northwest Coast; unfortunately, such pieces were a cultural charade about which Emily herself had understandable later regrets, writing in her autobiography, Growing Pains, that ‘I hated myself for prostituting Indian Art’, even if ‘I did keep the Indian design pure’. But if her little manufactory, which included a kiln she built herself, was at least profitable enough to give her time again for painting and exhibiting in her hometown of Victoria and in Seattle, Washington, as an artist of the West Coast she was still ignored by the growing ‘national’ art establishment centred in the Ontario cities of Toronto and Ottawa, and in Montreal, the commercial powerhouse of neighbouring Quebec. (As Winnipeg-based artist Keith Berens suggested to me, this East–West split is still a feature of Canadian cultural life, which even in the age of the internet may not be a surprise given the cultural class system that exists even in a country as small as the UK – London and everywhere else – let alone one the size of Canada.)
Then in September of that year, 1927, Emily was paid a visit by Eric Brown, who as director of the National Gallery in Ottawa had been responsible for the rise of the Group of Seven as standard bearers for Canadian art at home and abroad, and was now putting together items to be included in an ambitious show about the arts of the Northwest Coast in what would then have been a daring mix of work by both Indigenous artists and European-trained painters living and working in the region. Blown away by the strength and originality of Carr’s work, he requested that she send to the Ottawa exhibition some forty of her paintings and watercolours of Aboriginal villages, mostly those arising from the momentous trip of 1912, with Emily herself receiving paid passage to the opening in December.
Emily Carr sketching on the beach at Tanu, Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands), 1912. Image F-00254, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
If administrators forgetting to send out sufficient invitations made the opening night itself something of a letdown, the trip east did at least introduce Emily to the great and the good of Canadian art, including various members of the Group of Seven then residing in Toronto. Chief among these contacts was Lawren Harris, whose work was a revelation to Emily, as she recounts, having returned home, in her journal entry of Christmas Day 1927, collected in the posthumously published Hundreds and Thousands: ‘Lawren Harris’s pictures are still in my brain. They have got there to stay. I don’t believe anything will oust them…. They are the biggest, strongest part of my whole trip East. It is as if a door had opened, a door into unknown tranquil spaces.’
Harris would be a huge influence over the next few years on Carr’s art and her thoughts about both art and religion. In particular, he was one of two men who encouraged Emily further in the move away from representation that she had begun to make in France before the First World War, so that by 20th January 1928 she is writing that ‘surface representation does not satisfy me now. I want not “the accidentals of individual surface” but “the universals of basic form, the factor that governs the relationship of part to part, of part to whole and of the whole object to the universal environment of which it forms part.”’ (The quoted passages are from The New Art by London critic Horace Shipp, giving a flavour of Emily’s reading at the start of what would be the most fertile decade of her life.)
The second influence on Carr’s work in the late 1920s was the Seattle artist Mark Tobey, who would later become a leading abstract painter in the mid-century Northwest School. Some twenty years her junior, Tobey had recently returned from studying in Paris and was already a far more experienced painter and thinker about painting than Emily. He taught her how to create space and intensity in her canvases by simplifying detail and emphasizing contrast, as can be seen in Totem and Forest (1931), how to use light to create volume and atmosphere, as in Blunden Harbour (c.1930), and, above all, how to unify the rhythm and movement of a canvas to express the underlying meaning of the form; this last quality in particular became an obsession with Emily over the next decade of supreme achievements, finding ultimate expression in her paintings of the forests of Vancouver Island, such as Tree (spiralling upward) (1932-33) (all three images can be seen in the first blog post in this series). But following the very welcome recognition and encouragement of the National Gallery show, she turned again to the subject that had inspired those paintings, and in the summer of 1928 set out on the longest and most ambitious journey she would ever make to the First Nations villages of the Northwest Coast and the BC interior.
Emily Carr, Big Eagle, Skidigate, B.C. c. 1930, Watercolour on paper, 76.2 x 56.7 cm, 1980.034.001 , Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Donated in memory of Dorothy Plaunt Dyde
This experience, informed by the advanced lessons in modernist painting from Tobey, led to some of the most experimental pictures she would ever paint, images such as Big Eagle, Skidegate, whose angular sky echoes not only the planar fragmentation of European cubism but also the stark angularity of the eagle carving itself, as if landscape and environment were a pathetic fallacy of the mood of the carved figure, or vice versa. Though the end result is not a wholly unified vision, it is undoubtedly just such a vision that Carr is trying to achieve in this and other paintings of the period, a universal harmony impressed upon her by Harris but also one she was beginning to see more readily in the worldview of the peoples whose art was now again the focus of her work. Making allowances for Emily’s rather romanticised explanation of the function of totem poles in the cultural and spiritual life of the peoples who made them (which nevertheless was rooted in her own extensive reading of the leading anthropological sources of her day as well as her own first-hand experience), the following long passage from ‘Greenville’, a story from Klee Wyck, her book of recollections of encounters and friendships with Native people of the Northwest Coast, gives an idea of her drive towards the integrated vision of life she perceived was held in common among those cultures and which would gradually become a governing motivation for the remainder of her own productive life:
Suddenly … there, tipping drunkenly over the top of dense growth, were the totem poles of Gittex. They looked like mere sticks in the vast sea of green that had swallowed the old village. Once they, too, had been forest trees, till the Indian mutilated and turned them into bare poles. Then he enriched the shorn things with carvings. He wanted some way of showing people things that were in his mind, things about the creatures and about himself and their relation to each other. He cut forms to fit the thoughts that the birds and animals and fish suggested to him, and to these he added something of himself. When they were all linked together they made very strong talk for the people. He grafted this language on to the great cedar trunks and called them totem poles and stuck them up in the villages with great ceremony. Then the cedar and the creatures and the man all talked together through the totem poles to the people. The carver did even more—he let hisimaginings rise above the objects that he saw and pictured supernatural beings too.
Klee Wyck was the name given to her when as a young woman she had visited the First Nations village at Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island, an epithet whose acquisition Emily gives an account of in ‘Ucluelet’, the first story of that memorable little book:
The tired old woman leaned forward and began to stroke my skirt. “What does Klee Wyck mean, Mrs. Wynook?” asked the Missionary. Mrs Wynook put her thumbs into the corners of her mouth and stretched them upwards. She pointed at me; there was a long, guttural jabber in Chinook between her and the Missionary. Finally the Missionary said, “Klee Wyck is the Indians’ name for you. It means ‘Laughing One’.”
Kitwancool Sketchbook. An image from one of Emily Carr’s sketchbooks. Press images: From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia. Press Image / Dulwich Picture Gallery
Feeling increasingly less hidebound by social conventions for which she had never had much respect, Emily was certainly more comfortable than many of her peers among the Native communities of the region, and her book is rich in insights into the lives of the people whose help she solicited on her great journeys. But even so, she seems not to have realised (or perhaps was unable to admit) the full extent of the existential threat to their way of life that the First Nations faced during that period of Canadian history, though she did at least intuit the dangers threatening their holistic worldview, as these were the same forces of oppression that Emily herself had struggled against her entire life. She writes later in her story ‘Greenville’:
Then the missionaries came and took the Indians away from their old villages and the totem poles and put them into new places where life was easier, where they bought things from a store instead of taking them from nature….
They took no totem poles with them to hamper their progress in new ways; the poles were left standing in the old places. But now there was no one to listen to their talk any more. By and by they would rot and topple to the earth, unless white men came and carried them away to museums. There they would be labelled as exhibits, dumb before the crowds who gaped and laughed and said, “This is the distorted foolishness of an uncivilized people.” And the poor poles could not talk back because the white man did not understand their language.
Many of these poles, many of the same poles, in fact, that Carr sketched in situ in 1912 at Alert Bay on Cormorant Island, or at Tanoo or Skidegate on the islands of Haida Gwaii, and in 1928 at Kitwancool in the BC interior, are indeed now in museums in Vancouver, Victoria and elsewhere, while some remain in place as haunting reminders of the people who made them, such as the poles at SGang Gwaay (Anthony Island), Haida Gwaii, since 1981 a UNESCO World Heritage site in recognition of their place among humanity’s great cultural treasures.
Hat, Haida (crest painting attributed to Charles Edenshaw), 19th century, Spruce root and paint, 35.6 × 35.6 × 19 cm, Murderme Collection DHC 6530 © Prudence Cuming Associates
Carr believed with a kind of historical fatalism common to most people in her society that the peoples and cultures of the region were ‘vanishing’, hence her determination to record them before that happened. And given the forces ranged against them, which even an observer as sympathetic as Carr failed to identify clearly, it is perhaps remarkable that such total cultural annihilation did not indeed come to pass. What began as a relationship of trade between Indigenous peoples and the European navigators who followed Captain Cook’s third great voyage (which saw his ships drop anchor in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island in March 1778) inevitably changed once the British decided to establish a colony around Fort Victoria in 1849. Peoples such as the Songhees in Victoria were obliged to move from their traditional lands as environments on Vancouver Island and on the mainland began to be transformed either for settlement or for profit through logging and mining (in the specific case of British Columbia largely without the dubious legal safeguard of the numerous formal treaties by which land use and ownership would be reapportioned elsewhere in Canada from the mid-19th century onwards). Then in 1862, the most devastating of several smallpox epidemics to afflict the region decimated Indigenous populations with no natural immunity, one of many such instances of European diseases severely weakening the already beleaguered communities of the Northwest Coast.
But the machinery of colonialism, the material task of acquisition and exploitation made even easier by such disasters, was in fact lubricated by an intellectual corpus of specious justifications, on the one hand through the supposedly civilising influence and superior moral teaching of the Church (assumptions that now seem laughable in their arrogance), and on the other through sincere polemics from some of the leading British thinkers of the Victorian era. Leaving aside now notorious figures like Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, two of the greatest minds this country has produced also set their imprimatur on the inevitable march of ‘progress’ which, given unimpeded aim, would have seen the world’s Indigenous peoples simply swept away: first Charles Dickens’s loathsome diatribe ‘The Noble Savage’, an article from 1853 in his own magazine, Household Words, at the very least puts a dent in his contemporary reputation as a great humanitarian, though at the time the piece seems not to have caused a stir; then Galton’s cousin and friend Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871), in what we might charitably describe as a foolish misreading of his own elegant theory of natural selection, offered the ignorant observation that, ‘When we see in many parts of the world enormous areas of the most fertile land peopled by a few wandering savages, but which are capable of supporting numerous happy homes, it might be argued that the struggle for existence had not been sufficiently severe to force man upwards to his highest standard.’ Misbegotten arguments like these coming from writers of such overwhelming influence throughout the English-speaking world and beyond served to justify European hegemony around the globe and by implication the means required to ensure it.
Carved Alderwood mask of a woman of high rank with labret (lip plug) and painted crest design, possibly Djiláquons, Haida, around AD 1830. Am1986,18.13, ©The Trustees of the British Museum
So given such a hostile intellectual climate, it is not in the least surprising that in 1876 the federal government of the newly emboldened dominion of Canada, preoccupied with guiding the fledgling nation along a single standard-gauge track, passed a law banning certain traditional Native customs, specifically the sun dance of the Plains Indians and the potlatch, a catch-all term for a wide range of different ceremonies held in common among the peoples of the Northwest Coast, involving feasting, dancing and the copious giving of gifts. It sounds and looks like a lot of fun, but to the administrative zealots of the new nation state it represented a threat to the approved cultural order. As Indian agent William Halliday put it bluntly in 1914, ‘“The law against the potlatch has been passed because it has been seen that where the potlatch exists there has been no progress”.’ Thus potlatches celebrating births or marriages or naming ceremonies now began to be held in secret or else incognito at Christmas, when they would seem to be part of the European festive pattern associated with that time of the year. Breaches were punishable by imprisonment and in one infamous case a potlatch held at Alert Bay in 1921resulted in the incarceration of several members of a community so well-known to Emily Carr and the confiscation of dozens of masks and other objects used in the potlatch ceremonies, a traumatic occurrence vividly recalled by Kwakwaka’wakw elder Agnes Alfred in her memoir Paddling to Where I Stand. ‘People would never know when or if they were actually going to be arrested, for sometimes a police officer would just come and watch and then leave. Little did we know that they were getting prepared to make arrests. They arrested Moses [Agnes’s husband] simply because he was getting apples out of the box and giving them to the guests. On that account, he was taken to prison. He was kept in prison for two months.’
Haida Dance Rattle (Long Billed Bird), Maple wood plant with animal ivory tooth, animal hide skin, stone, pigment, Iron metal and cockle shell, 1884.110.15 (Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford) Collected by Dr. Frederick Dally c. 1862-1870
In the case of the Kwakwaka’wakw, many of the confiscated treasures were finally returned after the lifting of the ban in 1951 (and are now housed at the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay), following the new emphasis on human rights engendered by the UN’s Universal Declaration of 1948. Indeed, from the 1950s onwards, the peoples of the Northwest Coast, so long suppressed not only by the potlatch ban but also through the Church-run residential schools which until the 1970s prohibited Native children from speaking their own languages or practising any spiritual or cultural tradition other than a cruelly administered Christianity, began once again to assert their cultural identity. Incredibly, the old traditions had been diligently continued throughout the worst decades, so that master carvers such as Mungo Martin (whose totem pole presented to Queen Elizabeth II in 1958 still stands in Windsor Great Park) were able to pass on their vast knowledge to a younger generation. Since then the First Nations of the Northwest Coast, likethose elsewhere in Canada, have enjoyed an extraordinary cultural renaissance leading in the case of the work of Haida sculptor, jeweller, carver and printmaker Bill Reid to some of the most beautiful and life-affirming art anywhere in the late 20th century.
Moreover, as Emily Carr realised, in the traditional worldview of the peoples of the Northwest Coast art and life are one, and even if this had not been the case the continuing challenges to their way of life as a result of the lingering effects and attitudes of the colonial period, now most often encountered in a business suit, have turned many Native artists into political activists. Among the most extraordinary of these men and women must be Kwakwaka’wakw master carver Beau Dick, a chief of the ‘Namgis First Nation at Yalis, Alert Bay, whose cutting of the copper in reproach to the government of British Columbia on the steps of the provincial parliament building in Victoria in February 2013 went far beyond the gesture of disrespect traditionally signified by such an act to become a visionary appeal for global justice in an increasingly unequal world.
What would Emily Carr have made of men like Beau Dick or groups like Idle No More campaigning for better treatment of Native peoples, protection of the natural environmentand a fair settlement of the litany of outstanding land claims against the Crown – that is, the British monarchy as embodied in the federal government of Canada? Does the question really need asking? With all that we know about Carr, the debt she herself acknowledged to the First Nations of her own province, as conveyed in both her paintings and her writings, I hardly think it does.
Julian’s Beecroft’s Carr blog is exclusively available to DOV readers. Please do not hesitate to leave your comment in the box below. Julian will try to answer any questions you leave him. His final entry will be available on 13 February 2015.
Book your tickets to see From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
You can read Julian’s first entry here: A Victorian Childhood and his second one here: A Woman of All Sorts
Related posts:
A Woman of All Sorts
A Victorian Childhood
A British First: Emily Carr at the Dulwich Picture Gallery