Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Gerta Moray is a professor of art history at the University of Guelph.
In her critical foreword, Marcia Crosby notes that Moray’s lengthy
study of Carr’s documentary work on Native Haida peoples reveals many
socio-political aspects of their culture.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Contexts for a
Colonial Artist,” introduces readers to Carr’s “startling”
desire to champion British Columbia’s Native peoples, and to defend
what Carr called “the honour of the Indian.”

Part 2, a pictorial record of Native villages and totem poles between
1899 and 1913, begins (like other chapters) with a long quotation from
Carr’s lectures. Moray notes the quiet dignity of the Natives, calling
them “keen observers and clever readers of character.” Coverage of
Carr’s 1913 Vancouver Exhibition and its aftermath is followed by a
wonderfully rich section of colour plates with full-page reproductions
of Carr’s paintings.

Part 3, “Homesick for Indian,” deals with Carr’s “Out of the
Wilderness and into the National Gallery” movement, and also with her
“lost years” (between 1914 and the mid-1920s) when she endured both
poverty and the neglect of her paintings and drawings. In her
autobiography, circa 1940, Carr bemoaned the commercialization of
traditional Native culture: “The Indians had sold most of their best
poles. Museums were gobbling them. The recent carvings were superficial,
meaningless; the Indian had lost faith in his totem. Now he is carving
to please the tourist and make money for himself, not to express the
glory of his tribe.”

Unsettling Encounters is a handsome, heavy, and beautifully illustrated
book that will doubtless be judged to be the most extensive study to
date of the maverick West Coast painter and writer.