British Columbian
artist Emily Carr was, in addition to being a
renowned painter whose art was heavily influenced by the material culture of the First Nations of Canada's Pacific coast and by the landscape, but was a
notable author as well.
Project Gutenberg of Australia has plain-text versions of the
1941 edition of Klee Wyck, 1942's
The Book of Small, and 1944's
The House of All Sorts, but here I'll be concerned with
Klee Wyck.
Canada's really a patchwork of separate regions, but British Columbia is more distinct than most. The young Dominion of Canada formed around the connected waterways of the Great Lakes, and both St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. At a stretch, Canada
might be extended across the Canadian Shield
northwards into the Arctic and westwards into the Prairies. But British Columbia? Concentrated away from the North American interior towards the coast, if not for problems of debt and MacDonald's promise of a rail link to the rest of Canada,
British Columbia might not have joined in 1871.
But it did, and British Columbia became another outlying region of another late-settled land of European settlement. Modern British Columbia's population is overwhelmingly urban now, half of its population lives within the confines of greater Vancouver alone and a similarly large share in other regional centres. Instead of being a country with a large populations of skilled and underemployed agricultural labourers, Britain was now an overwhelmingly urbanized population increasingly. Many of the resources desired by the colonizers--lumber, for instance, and mineral ores--required large investments of capital, this capital leading to a concentration of, well, everything.vAnd outside? When Carr was born, the native population of British Columbia was still fairly prominent, continuing to predominate outside of the lower mainland (around Vancouver) and the southern tip of Vancouver Island (around the provincial capital of Victoria). Over at least the previous half-century, and possibly as early as
Captain Vancouver’s explorations, British Columbian native societies were devastated by recurrent waves of first-contact epidemics, eventually becoming minoritized and shattered. Some survived, but shattered irrecoverably: the population of the
Queen Charlotte Islands plunged from a peak of tens of thousands one century to as few as hundreds in the next. Even as Carr grew up, an entire civilization around her was dying.
What does this mean for
Klee Wyck? The book is formed by the interaction between Carr's own standoffish, critical, innovative position as reader and the devastation that she could read in the native civilization of her land. Even as a child, this was apparent to her, visiting with her mother one former maid dying of tuberculosis. As an adult interested in the art of the area's First Nations, it was still more evident. Calling her a critical reader makes some sense of the below anecdote, recounting the origin of the phrase "Klee Wyck."
"What does Klee Wyck mean, Mrs. Wynook?" asked the Missionary.
Mrs. Wynook put her thumbs into the corners of her mouth and stretched them upwards. She pointed at me; there was a long, guttural jabber in Chinook between her and the Missionary. Finally the Missionary said, "Klee Wyck is the Indians' name for you. It means 'Laughing One'."
You have to know something well to make a joke about it, right? She certainly
grapsed the possible connections between First Nations and Western art forms, even spiritualities.
Carr was attracted to the mixture of human figures with animals for the multiplicity of subtle interactions depicted. To a Gitksan's man's question of why she wanted to paint totem poles, I have the fictional Emily respond, "Because I love even what I don't understand. Because they show a connection. Trees and animals and people. I want white people and your grandchildren's children to see this greatness."
On a more spiritual level, Carr wrote in her journal, "Our BC Indians lived in their totems and not in themselves, becoming the creature that was their ideal and guiding spirit. They loved it and were in awe of it and they experienced something."
Carr's anecdotes frequently position her as witness to a civilization's ruin, with that civilization's survivors at best alongside her as mute spectators. The below anecdote is pretty representative.
At one side of the Tanoo beach rose a big bluff, black now that the sun was behind it. It is said that the bluff is haunted. At its foot was the skeleton of a house; all that was left of it was the great beams and the corner posts and two carved poles one at each end of it. Inside, where the people used to live, was stuffed with elderberry bushes, scrub trees and fireweed. In that part of the village no other houses were left, but there were lots of totem poles sticking up. A tall slender one belonged to Louisa's grandmother. It had a story carved on it; Louisa told it to us in a loose sort of way as if she had half forgotten it. On the base of this pole was the figure of a man; he had on a tall, tall hat, which was made up of sections, and was a hat of great honour. On the top of the hat perched a raven. Little figures of men were clinging to every ring of honour all the way up the hat. The story told that the man had adopted a raven as his son. The raven turned out to be a wicked trickster and brought a flood upon his foster parents. When the waters rose the man's nephews and relations climbed up the rings of his hat of honour and were thus saved from being drowned. It was a fine pole, bleached of all colour and then bloomed over again with greeny-yellow mould.
The feelings Jimmie and Louisa had in this old village of their own people must have been quite different from ours. They must have made my curiosity seem small. Often Jimmie and Louisa went off hand in hand by themselves for a little, talking in Indian as they went.
Might Carr have feared that the cultures she studied and the people who affiliated themselves with these were dying? Disease and collapse aside, she certainly didn't think that they would be treated with any dignity or respect, as equals.The story below, chapter 17, presages the slow-motion catastrophe that hints at the future catastrophe of
Canadian Indian residential school systemMartha was sitting on the floor. Her hair was sticking out wildly, and her face was all swollen with crying. Things were thrown about the floor as if she did not care about anything any more. She could only sit swaying back and forth crying out, "Joey--my Joey--my Joey--"
Mother put some nice things on the floor beside her, but she did not look at them. She just went on crying and moaning.
Mother bent over Martha and stroked her shoulder; but it was no good saying anything, she was sobbing too hard to hear. I don't think she even knew we were there. The cat came and cried and begged for food. The house was cold.
Mother was crying a little when we came away.
"Is Joey dead, Mother?"
"No, the priests have taken him from Martha and sent him away to school."
"Why couldn't he stay with Martha and go to school like other Indian boys?"
"Joey is not an Indian; he is a white boy. Martha is not his mother."
"But Joey's mother did not want him; she gave him away to Martha and that made him her boy. He's hers. It's beastly of the priest to steal him from Martha."
Martha cried till she had no more tears and then she died.
This chapter was dropped from the educational edition.
Throughout
Klee Wyck, still, Carr was able to convey not only the basic fact that First Nations people are actual individuals, but the complexity of their civilization and that civilization's continued power, even over foreigners, even in ruin. Take the story of her encounter with the wealth-bringing cannibal ogress
Dzunukwa.
Her head and trunk were carved out of, or rather into, the bole of a great red cedar. She seemed to be part of the tree itself, as if she had grown there at its heart, and the carver had only chipped away the outer wood so that you could see her. Her arms were spliced and socketed to the trunk, and were flung wide in a circling, compelling movement. Her breasts were two eagle-heads, fiercely carved. That much, and the column of her great neck, and her strong chin, I had seen when I slithered to the ground beneath her. Now I saw her face.
The eyes were two rounds of black, set in wider rounds of white, and placed in deep sockets under wide, black eyebrows. Their fixed stare bored into me as if the very life of the old cedar looked out, and it seemed that the voice of the tree itself might have burst from that great round cavity, with projecting lips, that was her mouth: Her ears were round, and stuck out to catch all sounds. The salt air had not dimmed the heavy red of her trunk and arms and thighs. Her hands were black, with blunt finger-tips painted a dazzling white. I stood looking at her for a long, long time.
The rain stopped, and white mist came up from the sea, gradually paling her back into the forest. It was as if she belonged there, and the mist were carrying her home. Presently the mist took the forest too, and, wrapping them both together, hid them away.
"Who is that image?" I asked the little Indian girl, when I got back to the house.
She knew which one I meant, but to gain time, she said, "What image?"
"The terrible one, out there on the bluff."
"I dunno," she lied.
I never went to that village again, but the fierce wooden image often came to me, both in my waking and in my sleeping.
Have I mentioned that she could write, too?
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