Emily Carr and Canadian Identity

A new exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery revisits the landscape painting of Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr (1871–1945), prompting questions of Carr’s relationship to the natural environment and her representation of Indigenous subjects. Carr was born into an affluent family in Victoria, British Columbia, whose plentiful resources allowed her to pursue her joint vocations of painting and travel. Although she studied abroad in San Francisco, London, and Paris, it can be argued that her most extensive education came from her travels along the west coast of the province of British Columbia.

Trekking across the lush landscape when the weather was amiable enough, Carr became closely acquainted with the Indigenous peoples of the region, immortalizing her journey in works such as her 1921 painting Church in Yuquot Village, inspired by her trip to Nootka Island, and her 1941 memoir, Klee Wyck.

Klee Wyck is a documentation of the time Carr spent immersing herself in the culture, history, and languages of First Nations’ communities. By nineteenth-century standards, she was a progressive thinker when it came to British Columbia’s Indigenous peoples. However, many present-day critics classify her adventures and recordings as cultural appropriation. For example, on June 24, 1937, Carr made a journal entry (which would later be included in Klee Wyck) that uses now outdated and offensive language to hint that, at times, she even identified as an Indigenous person, despite being from a white settler background.

“I tried to be plain, straight, simple and Indian,” Carr wrote. “I wanted to be true to the places as well as to the people. I put my whole soul into them and tried to avoid sentimentality. I went down deep in myself and dug up.”

Carr’s self-identification with and representations of Indigenous peoples in her writing and art is being productively reexamined today. Scholar of modernist literature Janice Stewart wonders how we should read “the stories of a middle-aged, middle-class, white woman who imagined herself as a member of First Nations in the 1930s.” What does it mean for Carr to “be Indian,” and “what issues of race and gender, for us and for Carr, are brought to bear on an understanding of that particular aspect of Carr’s imaginary space?”

Carr was painting and exploring her own province at a time where Canadian and US border relations were sometimes strained, sometimes settled. British Columbia was and still is considered part of the Cascadia bioregion, which is measured by the watersheds Columbia, Fraser, and Snake Rivers. Cascadia binds British Columbia to the Yukon in the Northwest Territories but also to Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska. According to Canadian Studies scholar Robert Thacker, Carr was always sensitive to her surroundings and their place in the North American sphere. He concludes that she took special care to capture in her work everything that was distinctively Canadian.

“Her ‘fresh seeing’—her phrase—was ever focused on that land, its imaginative effects, and the legacy of [N]ative presences found there,” he writes. It wasn’t that

Canadian nationalism ha[d] no bearing on Carr and her work. Rather, given Cascadian ecology—the primary focus of Carr’s images—understandings of her imaginative creations might also be constructed irrespective of nation: an artist seen primarily in relation to her place, itself her subject.

Carr’s life as a whole can be viewed as one long journey to discover what it really means to be an individual living in the country of Canada. She translated her lessons into art and literature, and what she learned (and maybe what she didn’t learn) are left open to interpretation.

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