Opposite Contraries (24 page)

And so I have gone about my work making this collection of Indian totems and I am not through yet. What I have done, I have done alone and single-handed. I have been backed by neither companies nor individuals. I have borne my own expenses and done my own work. My sole protector and companion has been the old faithful dog. I am a Canadian born and bred. I
glory in our wonderful West and I [would] like to leave behind me some of the relics of its first primitive greatness. These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Britons’ relics are to the English. Only a few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness, and I would gather my collection together before they are forever past.

[Written on page 51 verso of manuscript] There are many difficulties to be met and overcome in the work, but two things help and spur me on. The love I have for the simple gentle folk and the desire to leave in this, my own Province of British Columbia, a collection of the things that she need not be ashamed of when they have ceased to exist.

I was born in Victoria, B.C., in 1871. On leaving high school, I went to San Francisco as a student at the Mark Hopkins School of Art and spent three years there. I returned to Victoria and taught children’s classes and saved up for a trip to Europe.

I attended the Westminster School of Art in London. But after the free, wild life of the West, London wilted the very life out of me, so I went down to Cornwall and studied in the open, also to the Bushey studios. Returning again to Westminster School, I broke down completely, wrestled three years with desperate illness, then returned to Canada and started all over again, working and saving, this time with Paris in view. Teaching in Vancouver and very successful with children’s
classes, I was asked to teach in the art club and made a complete failure, their complaint being “that I could not realize that they were just amusing themselves and tried to make the ladies work in earnest.” So they dismissed me. I was glad.

In 1911 I went to Paris with a letter of introduction to a modern painter of Scotch birth, Harry Gibb. This man opened my eyes to the joyousness of the new school. At that time he was being bitterly criticized.

By his advice, I became a student at the Académie Colarossi, Paris. I could not stand the airlessness of the life rooms for long, the doctors stating, as they had done in London, that “there was something about these big cities that these Canadians from their big spaces couldn’t stand, it was like putting a pine tree in a pot.” So I left Paris and joined outdoor classes under Mr. Gibb, who was then in Brittany. When my money was spent I returned to Canada, but they hated and ridiculed my work. My first exhibition here they dishonoured my work, putting it behind things, under shelves or on the ceiling. My friends begged me to go back to my old way of painting, but I had tasted the joys of a bigger way. It would have been impossible had I wanted to, which I did not. Whenever I could afford it I went up North, among the Indians and the woods, and forgot all about everything in the joy of those lonely, wonderful places. I decided to try and make as good a representative collection of those old villages and wonderful totem poles as I could, for the love of the people and the love of the places and the love of the art; whether anybody liked them or not I did not care a bean.

I painted them to please myself in my own way, but I also stuck rigidly to the facts because I knew I was painting history. The war came (1914). I had a living to make. Of course, nobody
wanted to buy my pictures. I’d never tried to paint to please them anyway, so I did horrible things like taking boarders to make a living, and the very little time I had for painting I tried to paint in the despised, adorable joyous modern way. The last two years I have taken up … pottery, adapting and utilizing my Indian designs for it. A much pleasanter livelihood than catering to people’s appetites.

You have been invited here tonight to view this exhibition on the walls that a suggestion may be put before you for your consideration. Viz. the converting of these rooms into a small picture gallery for the use of the people of Victoria.

The Arts and Crafts, a society of long standing in Victoria, has rendered valuable service to Victoria by providing a yearly exhibition and also holding sketch classes. But there would seem now to be a furthering need. One that touches all classes, all nationalities, all colours.

The proposed art gallery would have a different objective and would in no way interfere or overlay the undertakings of the other society. It would be a place for those who do know something about art, but would also be a place for those who do not and maybe want to. A place for the spirit of art to grow in.

Situated on the very edge of Beacon Hill Park. Possibly linked to the park in name and called the Beacon Hill Galleries. (A people’s gallery in a people’s park.) A warm, quiet nook to
drop into on those dull winter days when no band plays. A place one could sit and rest and look at pictures in, which would be changed every few weeks. Pictures of all types: conservative, progressive, oriental, children’s. Let the gallery be opened on Saturday mornings specially for the children. On Sundays let it be free for all. On weekdays a small fee might be charged to help with running expenses.

In summer the visitors who so frequently ask, “Is there no picture gallery in Victoria?” could take it in, for the sightseeing buses pass the very door. These visitors would also help on the expense of upkeep.

It would be of benefit to the artists of Victoria by getting their work known. There are also young Orientals in our midst with their fine inborn sensitiveness to art, and no encouragement whatever to go ahead. Boys who have asked for membership to the existing club in Victoria and been refused.

You would be surprised, as I have been, at the art love popping out of odd corners. The other day a negro came to my house, delivering coal. I came to the door with my hands full of paintbrushes. As I signed his book, he said, “Gee! I envy you.” “Why?” I asked. “Because I own a monkey?” For I had heard him joking with the monkey below. “No,” he replied. “Because you can paint. Gee I’d love to go out to nature and paint.” Another day I came to my studio to find two men, hands shading their eyes and noses flattened against the big north window. I flew to the door, angry as a wildcat. “What do you what?” I asked. “Don’t you know it’s rude to peer into people’s windows?” The man, a baker, drew back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did not realize it was rude. I do admire those pictures and this other man likes pictures too.” So I said I’d show him some.

As for the old vegetable Chinaman, he never misses an opportunity to look in and show real interest. When he went home to China, I gave him a picture to take to his wife. He was much pleased; he had three to choose from and unerringly chose the best. So there you are. Could any of those there go to the annual Victoria exhibition and feel comfortable?

One of the loveliest things about the Louvre in Paris is Sunday, the “people’s day.” Then you see soldiers and peasants, workmen and butchers’ boys also, with their empty wooden trays and their blue blouses, doubtless pinching a few moments of their employers’ time to reverently peep in at the nation’s art treasures.

We may not have here Old Masters to study and enjoy, but who knows what future masters may be hidden away among the rising generation in our very midst, who might be helped and encouraged by this little gallery. We already have a splendid selection of art books in both our libraries, and short talks in the gallery would be very helpful too and start our young folk a long way on the road to thinking on these things.

Now, of course, there’s that pestiferous money business that butts into everything. This is no job for the city fathers and the overburdened taxpayer. At present the poor things have more than they can bear. But it is the time of all others that the
people
need a little happiness of art in their lives, to lead them for brief spells from the bread and butter problems.

It would not take very much money. To start simply and happily we don’t need a stone edifice and liveried attendants, rooms full of priceless pictures and the wrangle and worry of trying to be able to boast that we have the most magnificent gallery in all Canada. We want to grow and to learn to see the
real beauty in those things close about us, to learn to express them in paint or to see them so expressed and to understand.

It is to the many clubs and societies of Victoria that I would make my appeal for help, and particularly to the women’s clubs as well as to interested individuals. Not asking any of you to give a lot, but many of you to each give a little, and all of you, if the idea appeals to you, to give it moral support and mothering.

We have lots of material here to draw from, and I’ve a notion perhaps artists from other places might lend us a parcel of sketches sometimes. We’ll round up the artists we know and dig out unknown ones; we won’t worry about gold and silver frames in our shows but try to get down to understanding and expressing the real things right here all about us.

I have thought this idea over in a careful practical way for a considerable time, and it seems to me workable. Now I turn it over to you for your weighing, suggesting that it might be given a three-month trial. It would take Victoria quite that time to realize its existence, slow catchers-on we are.

[
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No one disturbed the Indian dead. Their place was a small, half-cleared spot, a little off from the village and at the edge of the forest. When an Indian died no time was lost in hurrying the body away. While death was approaching a box was got ready. Sometimes, if they owned one, a trunk was used. The body did not lie straight and stark in the box. It was folded up; often it
was placed in the box before it really was a corpse. When life had quite gone, the box was closed, some boards were broken from the side wall of the house, and it was taken away through the hole which was later mended so that the spirit should not remember how it got out and come bothering back.

The people never went to the dead’s place except to carry another dead body there and then they would hurry back to make dreadful mourning howls in the village.

One day I went to the place of the dead to sketch. It was creepy. At first I did not know whether I could bear it or not. Bones lay about — human bones — skulls, staring from their eye hollows, stuck out from under the bracken, ribs and thigh bones lay among the roots of the trees where coffin boxes had split. Many “dead-boxes” were bound to the high branches of the pines. The lower limbs of the trees were chopped away. Sometimes a Hudson’s Bay blanket would be bound around the box, and flapped in the wind as the tree rocked the box. Up there in the keen air the body disintegrated quickly. The sun and the rain rotted the ropes that bound the box to the tree. They broke and the bones were flung to earth where greenery soon hid them.

It was beautiful how the sea air and sun hurried to help the corpses through their horror. The poor, frail boxes could not keep the elements out; they were quick to make the bones clean and white.

Sometimes Indians used the hollow boles of ancient cedar trees as grave holes, though life was still racing through the cedar’s outer shell.

In one of these hollow trees the Indians had lately buried a young woman. They had put her in a trunk. There was a scarlet
blanket over the top. Scattered upon that were some beads and bracelets. There was a brass lamp and her clothes too. The sun streamed in through the split in the side of the tree and sparkled on her dear things. This young woman lay in the very heart of the living cedar tree. As I stood looking, suddenly twigs crackled and bracken shivered behind me. My throat went dry and my forehead wet — but it was only Indian dogs.

Up behind Toxis the forest climbed a steep hill and here in the woods was one lonely grave, that of “our only professed Christian Indian,” according to the Missionaries. The Missionaries had coffined him tight and carried him up the new-made trail with great difficulty. They put him into the earth among the roots of the trees, away from all his people, away from the rain and the sun and the wind which he had loved and which would have rushed to help his body melt quickly into the dust to make earth richer because this man had lived.

[…]
On Sunday, Louisa opened the chest in my room and dressed her family. Then we all went to church.

The Missionary and his sister shook hands with us and asked us to tea the next day. Louisa could not go, but I went.

The Missionary said, “It is good for the Indians to have a white person stay in their homes; we are at a very difficult stage with them — this passing from old ways into new. I tell you
savages were easier to handle than these half-civilized people . . . in fact it is impossible …I have sent my wife and children south….”

“Is the school here not good?”

“I can’t have my children mix with the Indians.”

A long pause, then, “I want to ask you to try to use your influence with Louisa and her husband to send their boys to the Industrial boarding-school for Indians. Will you do so?” asked the Parson.

“No.”

The Missionary’s eyes and his sister’s glared at me through their spectacles like fish eyes.

“Why will you not?”

“In Louisa’s house now there is an adopted child, a lazy, detestable boy, the product of an Indian Industrial School, ashamed of his Indian heritage. All Louisa’s large family of children are dead, all but these two boys, and they are not robust. Louisa knows how to look after them — there is a school in the village. She can send them there and own and mother them during their short lives. Why should she give up her boys?”

“But the advantages?”

“And the disadvantages!”

Louisa and I sat by the kitchen stove. Joe, her younger son, had thrown himself across her lap to lull a toothache; his cheeks were thin and too pink. Louisa said, “The Missionary wants us to send our boys away to school.”