Opposite Contraries (20 page)

Page 167: Emily Carr’s studio at 218 St. Andrews St., ca. 1945. B.C. Archives E-01423

Emily Carr gave three public lectures in her life, two of which were published in 1972 in a booklet entitled
Fresh Seeing
. The title came from one of them, the talk she gave in March 1930 to the Women’s Canadian Club in Victoria. The second, titled “Something Plus in a Work of Art,” was given in Victoria in October 1935. The third, the “Lecture on Totems,” was also Carr’s first public talk. She delivered it twice in Vancouver in 1913, on the occasion of her landmark exhibition, which she organized and mounted herself. It is often referred to in the literature and is published here for the first time.

“Lecture on Totems” is the earliest piece of writing we have by Emily Carr on the subject of her art and the indigenous peoples living in British Columbia. Art historian Gerta Moray, who takes a particular interest in what Carr called her “Indian paintings,” has found that a good portion of the information presented in the talk on the meaning of the Native carvings and on Native culture was actually drawn from the writings of Charles Hill-Tout, an ethnographer who was president of the Vancouver Museum at the time. Moray also found that Carr used long quotes from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and a book called
Canadian Savage Folk,
written by John Maclean and published in 1896. These excerpts, which have been identified by Moray, are denoted by quotation marks.

The 1913 exhibition was a momentous event in Carr’s career as an artist. Not only was it the culmination of several years of hard work and of her first major trip up the coast of British Columbia to the Skeena River and Haida Gwaii but it was a bid to present herself under her own aegis to the art-buying public. Her hope was that the main collection of Native subjects would be purchased by the province and that funds for further travel to complete her project of recording monumental carvings by the region’s indigenous peoples (poles, house fronts and so on) would materialize. As Gerta Moray demonstrates in the manuscript for her forthcoming book,
Unsettling Encounters: The “Indian” Images of Emily Carr,
this was a bold move, and her failure was a catastrophe. It forced the decision (already being planned) to return to Victoria. There, Carr used her inheritance to construct a small apartment building, and she set out to make a living as a landlady while continuing to paint. The economics of Hill House did not pan out, however, and the return to Victoria became a retreat, not only from the art world but from painting. It was fourteen years before she took up painting again with vigour.

In 1927 came the breakthrough: the invitation to participate in an exhibition called
West Coast Art — Native and Modern,
being put together by ethnologist Marius Barbeau at the National Gallery of Canada. Carr travelled east on a rail pass, met the Group of Seven in Toronto and went on to Ottawa for the opening of the show. Before leaving Victoria, she sent Eric Brown, the director of the National Gallery, a short autobiography, no doubt at his request. It is dated November 1, 1927. This document, published here for the first time, is her first rendition of her life, and it contains most of the now familiar elements: her anathema for big cities, the negative response of
friends and critics to modernism, especially hers (“they hated and ridiculed my newer work”) and her dedication to it nonetheless. She notes that the paintings she did of Native villages were to please herself as much as history.

Late in 1932, Emily Carr, joined by a number of younger Victoria artists (Jack Shadbolt, Edythe Hembroff and Max Maynard), called a meeting at Hill House to discuss her idea for a public art gallery. She had emptied the lower floor of the building, put in a connecting door between apartments and installed an exhibition of paintings, including some of her own works, along with landscapes by Annie Bullen and watercolours by Lee Nan, both friends of hers. On December 14, about forty people came to hear her talk about the proposal for a permanent gallery to be called Beacon Hill Galleries. It would be a modest operation, intended for those who knew something about art as well as those who did not. And it would exhibit art of all kinds: “conservative, progressive, oriental, children’s.” It would be a “people’s gallery in a people’s park,” she told the meeting, a place that “touched all classes, all nationalities, all colours.” Moreover, she noted, it would benefit artists, especially “Oriental boys” (like Lee Nan, presumably) who were denied membership in Victoria’s art clubs. The purpose of the meeting was to gather support and participation as well as to raise funds. A committee was set up, but by the end of January it was clear the project would be stillborn. In
Hundreds and Thousands,
she writes, on January 27, 1933: “The People’s Gallery scheme is over for the present. It was a good idea and I am convinced put for some purpose into my mind. I went ahead as far as I could; then it came to a
cul de sac
: no money, no help, no nothing but to let her lie by and sleep and some day she may revive. I don’t know now.”

Klee Wyck
was the first of Emily Carr’s books, published in 1941 by Oxford University Press in Toronto and in print continuously for more than sixty years. Clarke, Irwin & Company reissued it in an educational edition in 1951 (and as a paperback in 1962), after removing an entire story, “Martha’s Joey” (restored in 1993 in the version of
Klee Wyck
in
The Complete Writings of Emily Carr
), deleting the ending of “Friends,” and cutting the ending with the details of Nuu-chah-nulth burial customs from “Ucluelet.” Also removed from “Ucluelet” were many comments that reflect negatively on missionaries, such as the statement of one when it finally comes out that Mrs. Wynook’s husband dislikes having his picture made for fear he will be trapped in the image:

“They have such silly notions,’ said the Missionary.”

A descriptive passage about the missionaries retiring to bed was also removed:

The Missionaries folded their clothes, paired their shoes, and put on stout nightgowns. Then, one on each side of the bed, they sank to their knees on the splintery floor and prayed some more, this time silent, private prayers. The buns now dangled in long plaits down their backs and each bowed head was silhouetted against a sputtering candle that sat on an upturned apple-box, one on either side of the bed, apple-boxes heaped with devotional books.

Just a paragraph later was another cut, part of the third sentence below about the missionaries changing their underwear on Sunday:

Every day might have been a Sunday in the Indian village. At Toxis only the seventh day was the Sabbath. Then the Missionaries changed their “undies” and put lace jabots across the fronts of their “ovies,” took an hour longer in bed in the morning, doubled their doses of coffee and prayers, and conducted service in the school house.
[…]

The cuts in these two stories were not restored in
The Complete Writings
but the major deletions and the whole of “Martha’s Joey” are republished here. Ostensibly, these excisions were made in consideration of the young readers of the educational edition. However, the political tone of a piece like “Martha’s Joey” is so obvious and the pathos of the story so profound that its deletion can only have been motivated by racism.

In the original “Tanoo” in
Klee Wyck
were several significant comments about missionaries, priests and the Catholic Church that subsequently were taken out. Carr was visiting the old village of T’anuu with her friends Louisa and Jimmie (Clara and William Russ in real life) and the daughter of the missionary. Standing beside a pole that belonged to her grandmother, Louisa recounts the story carved on it as if she had half forgotten it. Carr wrote in the original:

Perhaps she had forgotten some, but perhaps it was the missionary’s daughter being there that made her want to forget the rest. The missionaries laughed at the poles and said they were heathenish.

In the next paragraph, in which Carr comments, “The feelings Jimmie and Louisa had in this village of their own people
must have been quite different from ours,” the latter half of the next sentence was deleted:

They must have made my curiosity and the missionary girl’s sneer seem small.

When night comes, Jimmy and Louisa go to sleep in their canoe offshore to escape the bugs while Carr and the young girl are left to sleep in a tent on the beach. Carr wanted to leave the tent flaps open,

But Miss Missionary wanted them tied tight shut to keep everything out.

A little farther on, two entire paragraphs were chopped:

The Indians would not do a thing for Miss Missionary. They let her collect rushes for her own bed and carry things. The Mission house in their home village stood on the hill and looked down on the Indians. But here all of us were on the dead level, all of us had the same mosquito-tormented skins and everything in common, and were wholly dependent on the Indians’ knowledge and skill.

I often wondered what Louisa and the white girl talked about while I was away from them working. Because of the mosquitoes, they tied their heads up in towels and were frightfully hot. I offered Miss Missionary some of the mosquito stuff a miner had told me of — bacon fat (it must be rancid) and turpentine. She refused — she said I looked so horrible dripping with it. She was bumped all over with bites. If you drew your hand down your face it was red with the blood the brutes had stolen from you.

Later on, when Jimmie and Louisa catch a devilfish for supper, there is an excision about the reactions of “Miss Missionary,” who would not eat it:

Miss Missionary ate bread and jam.

“Father would not like me to eat devil,” she said.

She told me the hunt was a disgusting performance. The devilfish were in the puddles around the rocks at low tide. When they saw people come, they threw their tentacles around the rocks and stuck their heads into the rocky creases; the only way to make them let go was to beat their heads in when you got the chance.

And, finally, in the second-last section of “Tanoo,” Carr’s complaint about the missionary’s daughter, in which Louisa collaborates, was deleted:

When we boarded the boat the missionary girl put her clumsy foot through my light cedar drawing board. Nothing about her balanced — her silly little voice and her big foot; her pink and white face and big red hands. I was so mad about my board that I looked across the water for fear I’d hit her. Louisa’s voice in my ear said,

“Isn’t she clumsy and isn’t she stupid!”

In the first published version of “Sophie,” when Sophie answers Emily’s question about when the funeral will be for one of her children who died, she says:

“I dunno. Pliest go Vancouver. He not come two more day. S’pose I got lots money he come quick. No hully up, except fo’ money.”

The last two sentences were dropped in subsequent editions, as was the description of the little Catholic church on the North Vancouver reserve:

The smell of the church seemed fusty after the fresh sea air outside, the paper flowers artificial.

The rope of the bell dangled dead in the entrance. It was a new rope and smelt of tar. Paper flowers stood stiffly before the Virgin.

The reason for this last deletion is not clear but would seem to have to do with preserving a positive image of Christianity generally. However, the expurgated passage at the end of “Friends” and the story “Martha’s Joey” were obviously problematic for the white audience as they ran counter to prevailing prejudices and mentioned the unmentionable. Carr was stepping over a line when she declared that were she Louisa, she would refuse to send her sickly son to residential school. And Carr was probably breaking several taboos, social and political, when she pointed to the hypocritical attitudes of the authorities: while they considered it beneficial for Native people to associate with whites, they did not consider it good for their own children to mix with Native children. And it was a very long way beyond the pale for any Native woman to raise a white child as Martha was raising and loving Joey. These stories reveal a great deal about Carr’s ideas on race and her attitudes toward indigenous culture. It is there in the language (in words like “primitive” and “nigger”) and in passing comments such as Native people being “born campers.” It is there in the situations and characters she describes. Naturally, these reflect back on Carr’s own time and society, but the handling of these controversial passages reflects equally on the editors who came along afterward.

My object in making this collection of totem pole pictures has been to depict these wonderful relics of a passing people in their own original setting: the identical spots where they were carved and placed by the Indians in honour of their chiefs. These poles are fast becoming extinct. Each year sees some of their number fall, rotted with age; others bought and carried off to museums in various parts of the world; others, alas, burned down for firewood. In some instances the Indians are becoming ashamed of them, fearing that the white people whom they are anxious to resemble will regard them as paganish and will laugh at them, and they are threatening to burn them down

Now comes the question what
are
totems? Primitive peoples the world over have used the totem system, expressing them in a variety of different ways, carving them upon rocks, tattooing them upon their persons, making clay and earth images of them, painting them on houses, carving them on posts, but these high elaborately carved cedar columns, “totem sticks” as the Indians call them, are peculiar to the North West Coast of North America, to the adjacent islands and, following up the main rivers, they extend into Alaska and were formerly used near Vancouver. A Squamish Indian tells me that the old villages of Squamish had a great many lodge poles, but that many years ago there was a great log jam in the river which
caused it to overflow its banks and all the houses and poles were swept away. One reason for these high poles following this particular region is, probably, that it is the home of the American white cedar [yellow cedar], which along this coast grows to an enormous size, not uncommonly having a diameter of from 15–20 feet near the base. I shall here quote from Hill-Tout on the uses of the tree to the Indians.