A Rich Heritage Ignored

In the wake of the First World War, Canada began to shake off its colonial status and to define itself as an independent state with its own indigenous art forms. One of the enduring initiatives in this movement was the creation of the Group of Seven, officially formed in Toronto in 1920, and its legacy of defining Canada by painting the Canadian landscape, sea to sea to sea. Indeed, from this obsession we ended up with an image of Canada that emerged from Toronto studios and portrayed a suite of landscapes that few Canadians live in and most have never seen.

Pushed to one side in this process was the art of Canada’s truly indigenous peoples, the Indian tribes, with their totems, longhouses, masks, weapons, objects for rituals, beadwork, basketry and carving. Native art did not include landscape painting, and the Group of Seven did not carve masks or totems: joining these two to produce a unified image of Canada was not likely then or, perhaps, even possible. The chasm between the cultures would have been seen as too great to bridge. The thesis of Leslie Dawn’s National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s is that this treatment of Native art, basically shunting it onto a siding, was intentional, malicious and wrong and the result was an image of a Canada that was, and is, false.

The primary players in the Group of Seven’s messianic role were Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson, assisted by Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery of Canada, who carried the banner for the group; Marius Barbeau, influential anthropologist and writer at the National Museum of Man, who was convinced the Indians were doomed as a race; and the fervently nationalist poet Duncan Campbell Scott, who became deputy of the department responsible for Indian affairs from 1913 to 1932 (replacing a man who sold Indian lands and put the money in his own pocket). These men were encouraged and supported by a bevy of acolytes. Lawren Harris had a vision of Canada as a northern country, whose pure spirit and cold energy came out of the light of the pristine Arctic and the mountains, and brought moral and spiritual benefits to bear on our southern neighbour, and he encouraged Emily Carr to forget about painting images of totem poles and house posts and to concentrate on the landscape. A.Y. Jackson, in his travels throughout Canada, and particularly when depicting Native settlements in the Arctic or the west or the small villages in rural Quebec, believed that he was documenting something that was on its way to sure and early extinction. Eric Brown, fresh from England, used his institution to promote the Group of Seven at home and abroad and enthusiastically proposed their images as an identity for Canada; he, too, while admiring aspects of Indian cultural objects, thought of them as “other” and certainly not part of Canada’s new identity. Marius Barbeau, a Rhodes Scholar, not only believed the Indians were doomed to extinction (90 percent of some populations had already disappeared), but also treated those still living and their art as relics and historical curiosities. Duncan Campbell Scott had as his goal “to eliminate anything that could be defined as Indian … to fight unresolved land claims and to reduce the allocations of reserve lands.” Scott tightened the noose on such practices as the potlatch, Native dances (except for tourists) and any traditional activities, such as raising totem poles.

Leslie Dawn argues in this book that these men made sure, through subterfuge, prejudice and conspiracy, that the images and identity of Canada were created by them, and that the art of the Native peoples was not only excluded from, or poorly represented in, national and international exhibitions of Canadian art (they had been included, to a degree, up to 1924), but was also systematically disqualified or described as being something from the past and worthy only of ethnographic study or of value to the railways, western hotel chains and the tourist business. A welter of information and research is mustered to convince the reader that this was done purposefully.

The list of sources and the analysis of the evidence is massive, admirable and unrelenting. Much that is new and useful has been winkled out of recondite (and some more obvious) corners, and provides a fresh slant on the period and on some crucial issues that have not been part of the traditional interpretation of this part of our history. The author has assembled more information than has ever been easily available about how and when and by whom Native peoples and their homes were depicted and their works exhibited. We learn new details about the famous Wembley British Empire exhibitions of 1924 and 1925, which displayed the achievements of the Empire and all its colonies, about the surreptitious inclusion of Haida artifacts in the 1927 exhibition of Canadian art at the Jeu de Paume pavilion in Paris and, in the same year, about the West Coast Art Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. Who knew that in Wembley in 1924, the Canadian pavilion displayed a large sculpture in butter of the Prince of Wales as Morning Star, the absentee chief of the Stoney band? But whether the Paris show was, as the author claims, “a project to shore up [the Group of Seven’s] faltering foundational structures” is open to question. The book is replete with other intriguing discoveries and brash speculations.

The National Gallery made quite a lot out of the Wembley exhibitions back in Canada. The warm reception given to Canadian art there by the British press provided the gallery with the opportunity to publish the glowing reviews. Dawn points out that the rather tepid and sometimes critical reviews of the Canadian show in Paris in 1927, even in a very conservative venue, were not published and sees this as proof that Brown, Harris, Jackson, et al. only heard what they wanted to hear and repressed criticism. The truth may be that the French critics found the Group of Seven distinctly derrière garde (not difficult) and were enthusiastic about ethnographic art. (As an aside, fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism and much else was already long past; two decades earlier Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon made manifest the interest that artists in Paris had in Native art, in their case African; if the Group of Seven had been up to speed they might have found in the vitality of Canadian Native art something that could be usefully explored, borrowed from, and even traded in, as Emily Carr had begun to do.) Besides, English disdain for French opinion would be quite prevalent in an English colony at the time. The English were enthusiastic about the group’s work (although the Tate Gallery only bought one war painting, Jackson’s The Entrance to Halifax Harbour, and never acquired another by any other Canadian artist until the 1960s), but really because the work was a version or an extension of the English picturesque tradition, a point that Dawn makes with both shrewdness and accuracy. The opinions of the press, in any country, ought to be discounted or weighted, depending on the stature of the writer, but Dawn takes them all at face value.

A lot of Dawn’s case rests on the work and activity of the American artist W. Langdon Kihn, whose large, formal portraits of the Stoney and Gitxsan at least did not stereotype his subjects, and whose Canadian work was commissioned, shown and purchased. Brown did not like Kihn’s work much and acquired but one landscape for the National Gallery, although two works were in the Canadian show at Wembley. Barbeau was enthusiastic about him initially and then became less so, doubtless in part because he got to know A.Y. Jackson, who became, instead, Barbeau’s preferred artist for a book he was working on. Kihn’s work is rather bland and bloodless, and age has not made it better. However, this aspect of the story is not dealt with by Dawn, who appears to believe that these were masterpieces that were ignored and that the artist was intentionally sidelined because he was sympathetic to the Indians and that his portrayal of them proved that they were neither dead nor dying. Indeed, Dawn goes so far as to argue that Kihn’s works were purchased specifically to keep them from being shown in Paris. This argument is absurd, given Ottawa’s general disposition not to spend money on art, and there is no evidence to support the argument, apart from the fact that the work was not exhibited. Fashion, style, practical exigencies and taste have as much to do with such matters as the content of the works. When we are told that “[Kihn’s] exclusion in Paris was part of a larger pattern and of greater significance,” it is hard to believe. Rather than letting the story tell itself, and finding a clean narrative line to what is potentially an interesting tale, the author imposes a reading, and it is too often not a convincing one. He imputes knowledge, efficiency and a plan where there may have been none at all.

When Barbeau invited Jackson and Edwin Holgate to visit the Skeena River area in 1926, and deftly uninvited Kihn, Dawn argues that “the Canadian artists, as members of the Group of Seven, would have understood the necessity of representing the Indian as having long disappeared and, indeed, would have had a personal stake in doing so.” This argument, that the Indian culture was alive and well and should have been part of the new Canadian identity but was muscled aside by greedy artists backed by bureaucrats with a “state policy” of exclusion, is what gives the book as a whole an impression of improbability. It is not helpful to stir up unlikely antagonisms, since there are enough real ones already, and we have to deal with what is, not what should have been or might have been. What people believed or what motives they harboured can only be guessed at. Jackson was a red-necked artist with fixed and conservative views, who looked out for himself and his close friends; his beliefs about the disappearing Indians were what they were, whether he was right or wrong. With the huge surge of immigration in the years before the war and after, it must have seemed inevitable that the Native population would shortly be totally displaced.

Despite the apparent motives or the perceived intrigues, however, the fact remains that the various Native tribes (and they were all different in cultural expression, a distinction that few in Ottawa deemed worthy of noting) were not part of what came to define Canada in the minds of generations for well over a century. Was this a deliberate plan or was it simply the result of human shortsightedness, prejudice and white arrogance? Many countries have given short shrift to the poor, disenfranchised and racial minorities; Canada’s Natives, and their art, were not simply given a low priority: they were given no priority.

The great irony is that just as the end seemed nigh, as the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression, the Native population began to recover. Two or three generations later, in 1969, a spectacular Haida totem, carved by Robert Davidson, was raised in Haida Gwai—almost a century after the last. Techniques had to be learned anew—as also happened when Bill Reid made the first Haida war canoe a few years later.

Today, thankfully, talented artists of Native origin are no longer marginalized in the way their forebears once were. Without leaving their heritage behind, major artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Robert Houle, Carl Beam, Robert Boyer and others are now a forceful presence in the Canadian art mainstream. The work of others, such as Davidson, Reid, Jim Hart, Norval Morriseau, Daphne Odjig and Alex Janvier, while created within the forms and mythologies of their respective tribes, has a contemporary sensibility that largely avoids the ethnographic fences that were erected around the art of their predecessors. The context for this remarkable revival is dramatically receptive now, and a welcome move in the right direction at last.

The issues raised in this book are important and worthy of study. However, this particular telling of them is marred by a prose style that is wearying and often irritating to read. Apart from one’s having to digest the dubious main thesis, following the story itself is like wading through glue. Little errors the editor should have caught, such as “foothills west of Banff” or “peaks” out from, are only minor flaws, and such snide comments as the National Gallery of Canada being “state run,” as if that somehow defined it as a propaganda arm of devious politicians who actually had a state policy, is unworthy of an objective study. When I came across the word “problemitization,” I was reminded of being chided by a university English professor who, beside a nice long word I had invented, wrote: “I ask not does this word exist (it doesn’t), but rather, if it did, should it?” Other words here do exist, but I would question their use anyway: “subsidization” is what Fowler calls the “love of long word”; hierarchicized, hybridity, reifying, trope, binary; and there are sentences such as “but questioning conventional narrations of Canada’s nationhood has also meant departing from one of the norms of discourse theory and practice: the tendency to privilege the supra-personal while occluding individual agency.” One needs a rest after prose like that.

As a result, I was cheered to see that more than a hundred pages (nearly a third of the book) are devoted to footnotes and bibliography. The research and the documentation are thorough and much is new and original. While certainly deserving of whatever academic kudos the book may earn for this achievement, it tends to give academic pretension a bad name. As a reference source, it is reliable and will be consulted, but the story it tells—and it is one that has been waiting to be told—needs to be recounted with a better critical evaluation of the art that is discussed and with a gift for storytelling.