Emily Carr (7 page)

In 1907, after her years of art classes in England, Emily and Alice took a cruise up the coast to Alaska. On a stop of a few hours in the Kwakiutl village of Alert Bay, Emily saw totem poles for the first time. The sisters' destination was the town of Sitka, already something of a tourist spot, and there, in a wooded area known as Totem Walk, where totem poles of the Haida and Tlingit people had been re-erected for the tourists, Emily had a chance to make her first painting of totem poles in the forest.

The painting is a muted watercolour of a tree-lined path, mostly in browns and greens, and yet to one side is a brilliant splash of colour, red and blue and white with black lines—a totem pole, bright as a beacon in the shadows. She will come back to this motif again and again. In this small watercolour is the beginning of the great artist she will become.

At about this time, Emily also met an American artist, T.E. Richardson, who had spent numerous summers travelling to Native villages in Alaska to paint, and then selling the pictures in New York for handsome prices.

Anyone who has seen a totem pole, either in a museum or in a natural environment, can attest to its tremendous effect and presence. When Emily Carr saw them for the first time, their colours and shapes so vivid against the backdrop of the forest, she must have found them stunning. She had visited
the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London, but had never encountered anything quite like this. She saw it as art, yes, but also as an expression of the place and the people who were of that place. What she saw was art with a purpose and an art of great originality. The common misperception among most non-Native people at this time was that the Aboriginal culture of the West Coast was declining, and that the totem poles were already disappearing. Emily probably had some inkling of the enormous transformations Native culture was being subjected to by white society, and this may have been why she undertook what she saw as a socially useful project: to make a visual record of the poles. Whatever her intention as a sort of amateur anthropologist, it was as an artist that she approached the project.

Emily embarked on her mission in the summer of 1908. In the years that followed she would return again and again to the forest, each time finding new subjects, new places, new techniques. When she came back from France, with a new, colourful palette and a different way of applying the paint, she would paint the poles and houses. Later, after her success at the National Gallery in 1927 and inspired by Lawren Harris and the Group of Seven, she would throw herself back into her sketching trips with a renewed passion, producing some of her finest paintings.

When her work entered a new stage, she abandoned Native motifs for a time and turned to pure landscape painting, but even then, at the very end of her career, she occasionally picked up one of her early sketches and worked it up into a finished painting. The chronology of her painting trips is the chronology of a journey, not only physical but also artistic, and it is the trajectory of a quest both to find and make meaning from what she found in the primeval forest.

But what are these totem poles, these carved and decorated tree trunks that became so important to her? What was their function? Who made them? What do they represent?

The totem poles of the West Coast Native peoples are unique. The geographical area where they are created is limited to the coastland from southern Alaska down to mid-British Columbia and does not extend much inland. As generally used in Native culture, a totem is an object or animal that is adopted as the emblem of an individual, family, or larger social group. It serves as an identifier and as a symbol of unity within the clan.

The European equivalent might be a heraldic crest or flag. Some scholars say that the term “crest poles” is more accurate. The crests belong to specific individuals and groups, and in that sense they are owned only by them. They are not works of art in the Western meaning of the term,
although there is a creative and aesthetic aspect to their design. The images on the poles are drawn from the environment in which they are created and most often consist of animal motifs—raven, bear, salmon, eagle, frog—as well as human faces and mythological creatures.

Totem poles can be part of a ceremony. They can illustrate stories or personify elements in the mythology of the group. They can also mark territory or a burial place. Because the coastal peoples did not use a written language or make pictures, the poles are carriers of meaning and history.

Europeans began to collect and remove the totem poles and carved masks almost as soon as they encountered them. They took them as exotic curios, as souvenirs, as oddities, as objects for museums, and as items that could be sold. The Christian missionaries, who brought their own iconography in the symbol of the crucifix and in the tales collected in the Bible, saw the Native poles as a competing system of “heathen” beliefs. They made a concerted effort to shame the Natives into seeing their masks and totems as uncivilized and primitive. Totem poles were destroyed, abandoned, removed, and the art of carving was actively discouraged.

In 1894, under the Indian Act, the potlatch ceremony, in which masks and poles played a part, was banned by the government. The potlatch was a gathering of Native peoples that
served many social purposes and functions. Economic and governance matters might be dealt with. Rites of passage, such as births and weddings, might be celebrated. Historical and spiritual rituals would be enacted. It was also an occasion of feasting and celebration. The potlatch strengthened relations between different tribes and confirmed Native identity as separate from that of the Europeans. Suppression of the potlatch also had the effect of making totem poles irrelevant to the lives of the Native peoples.

Because they are carved from trees, totem poles naturally decay and must be replaced by fresh ones. But the poles were losing their original function, and were reduced, through European intervention, to the archeological remnants of a dying culture. Many of the villages that Emily Carr visited had been abandoned for other reasons: either the inhabitants had been relocated under pressure to assimilate, or their traditional hunting and fishing practices had been disrupted, or the populations had died from the newly introduced diseases like smallpox and measles. The irony that some of the newcomers were trying to preserve the poles while others worked actively to destroy the culture that created them was lost on many people.

Emily might not have been aware of the political and cultural complexity of the situation, but she did see the
changes taking place. As an artist, she was deeply affected by the power of the poles, and if only for that reason she felt compelled to make others aware of them, too. It was also through the totem poles that Emily found her identity as an artist, and through them she would find purpose and meaning in her life.

The argillite sculpture I have on my desk, although removed from its true meaning and context, still resonates not only with personal memories but also with deeper meanings that stretch back through time and connect me to Emily Carr, and then further back to the First Peoples who created the original totem poles, and through them even further into the great mystery that is life.

There are fallow periods in every creative person's life, when they lose faith in their endeavours and it seems as if all their efforts have come to nothing. The composer Richard Wagner went into exile for years and then emerged with the stunning Ring Cycle operas. After a lost election Winston Churchill retreated into political silence, a period he called “the wilderness years,” before coming back to lead his country through the Second World War. Even the tremendously prolific Picasso was inactive for a couple of years, turning away from painting to take up poetry and playwriting instead. Adversity can silence the creative impulse, but the flame is never extinguished.

After 1913, Emily's grand project to record the Native totem poles for posterity had been abandoned. The exhibition of her French works had met with indifference and hostility and she was unable to resume her teaching positions in Vancouver. She retreated to Victoria, discouraged and depressed.

Meanwhile, there was a growing threat of war in Europe while, at home, an economic depression resulted in higher property taxes, unemployment, and inflation. The Carr family funds had shrunk over the years and the sisters were forced to sell off some of their land. The family home was rented out and the sisters built other accommodation for themselves. Emily had a house constructed next to Beacon Hill Park, with the idea of renting out part of it while setting aside a studio and apartment for herself. But long-term tenants were hard to come by in those unsettled years, so she took in boarders instead. The studio became a sitting-dining room for tenants and Emily made do with rooms in the attic for herself.

Two myths have arisen about this period in Emily's life: first, that she lived in dire poverty, and second, that she gave up painting entirely. Both are only partly true.

Although Emily owned land and the house, she had no regular income other than the rent she collected. Consequently, she took on the management of the boarding house herself. She did the repairs and maintenance, the finances, the cooking, and the washing. She even stoked the furnace with coal and shovelled snow in winter. She planted a vegetable and fruit garden and raised rabbits and chickens, both for the pot and for sale.

During this period, she also spent some months in San Francisco painting decorations for a ballroom. She raised
sheepdogs for sale. She made pottery and rugs to sell, and when times became very lean, sold off part of the lot on which the house stood.

Elsewhere in the world, the war in Europe ground on for four long years; a revolution in Russia overthrew the czar; women in Canada were given the vote, grudgingly, province by province; the CBC commenced national radio broadcasts; and the first exhibition by the Group of Seven took place in Toronto. But for Emily, consumed as she was by the requirements of each day, the world had shrunk. In 1919 her sisters Edith and Clara both died. Gone were the days of travel and exploration. She painted, but her output was severely curtailed and her outings to sketch were limited to the immediate neighbourhood. She had sporadic contact with other artists who passed through Victoria, and here and there she occasionally exhibited a picture or two. But the necessity of earning money left her tired and without the spark that is essential for creativity. The artist in her did not die, but lay dormant.

Many years later she would write about her years as a landlady, dramatizing them in one of her most popular and best-loved books,
The House of All Sorts,
but for fourteen years, until 1927, Emily Carr became, as she said herself, a little old lady on the edge of nowhere.

In 1927, at the age of fifty-six, Emily Carr despaired of ever realizing the vision she carried within herself. She assumed that her career as an artist was over. There had been no major works or exhibitions in over a decade. But sometimes in life it can seem as if fate is at work. Call it a conjunction of disparate events, call it serendipity or just coincidence. Nineteen twenty-seven was Emily's annus mirabilis—a miracle year. Seemingly overnight she was plucked from obscurity and placed in a national spotlight, beginning the incredible flowering that would be her greatest achievement.

This is what happened. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa was planning a major exhibition entitled Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern. Emily's work came to the attention of the gallery's director, Eric Brown, and he visited her studio, selecting paintings, rugs, and pottery for inclusion in the exhibition.

In November, Emily travelled to Ottawa for the opening. The works on display consisted of Native art and artifacts,
mixed with the paintings and sculpture of such contemporary Canadian artists as A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, and Edwin Holgate. A number of women artists were also included, among them Pegi Nicol, Anne Savage, and Florence Wyle. Emily had the greatest number of works, twenty-six paintings, as well as rugs and pottery. She was also asked to design the cover of the exhibition brochure, which she did, using borrowed Native motifs, and which she signed “Klee Wyck.”

Her visit to Ottawa, as well as Toronto and Montreal, was a revelation. She saw for the first time the works of the Group of Seven painters, and met some of them, as well as a number of other artists. She was praised for her work, and for the first time, she found herself in the company of artists who shared her interests and, more importantly, accepted Emily as one of them.

When she looked at the paintings by Harris and others in the group, Emily saw, as she noted in her journal,

a world shorn of fretting details, purged, purified; a naked soul, pure and unashamed; lovely spaces filled with wonderful serenity.... I think perhaps I shall find God here, the God I've longed and hunted for and failed to find. Always he's seemed nearer out in the big spaces, sometimes almost within reach but never quite. Perhaps in this newer,
wider, space-filled vision I shall find him . . . above the swirl into holy places.

The transformation of Emily's fortunes might have seemed like a sudden apotheosis but, with hindsight, we can see that many strands in her life were slowly coming together, and the point where they all met was where Emily happened to be waiting. And when the strands separated again, she was one of them, a major tributary.

Early twentieth-century Canada was a tentative enterprise, a nation in transition from colony to independence. Many political thinkers believed in a vision of Canada as a country united from sea to sea, incorporating not only English Canada but also the French and the Native populations, and distinct from both Britain and the United States.

In politics, in commerce, and in culture, people looked within their borders for national autonomy and identity. The provinces had been gathered together under a federal system, and a national railway helped bind them together. But Canada's past, and its identity, were closely entwined with those of Britain and France. Most people traced their origin to Europe. The new Canada needed its own myths and images, drawn from its own landscape.