Cultural Appropriations and Identificatory Practices in Emily Carr's "Indian Stories"

The fact that Carr incorporates aboriginal peoples into her conception of who she is is not contestable. . . . This process, as it occurs in Carr, deserves to be highlighted and examined.¹

In this paper, I aim to probe the complexities that underlie Emily Carr's narrative practices, particularly those evidenced in her "Indian Stories" of Klee Wyck.² I argue that these practices are markers of her identification with First Nations peoples, whose representations Carr both crafted and internalized by the practice of colonizing appropriation. How is one to read today the stories of a middle-aged, middle-class, white woman who imagined herself as a member of First Nations in the 1930s, and what issues of race and gender, for us and for Carr, are brought to bear on an understanding of that particular aspect of Carr's imaginary space? Academic research concerning Emily Carr and her relationship with First Nations has tended, unproductively, to produce accounts of her appropriative acts that function discursively to entrench an analytic binary, where Carr is either forgiven by contextualizing her actions in the cultural values³ of her era or demonized as a narcissistic white colonizer.⁴ It is my intent here to produce a critical (re)reading of Carr, one that examines the complexity of her identification with First Nations peoples and establishes itself as a space between redemption and condemnation. My aim is to produce a rereading that is productive as a result of this tension and that is useful in that it exceeds the totalizing tropes of salvage or accusation.

The central focus of this article concerns the intricacies of Carr's writing and her treatment of First Nations peoples of the northwest coast. These writings not only reveal a fictive portrait of the northwest coast and its aboriginal inhabitants but also serve as the textual traces of Carr's struggles both to understand her own creativity and to forge a place in the world as a female artist. Identification with First Nations peoples enabled Carr to generate an artistic identity through appropriative acts.

On June 24, 1937, in the midst of writing her Indian sketches stories, which would later be gathered in Klee Wyck, Carr recorded the following in her journal: "I tried to be plain, straight, simple and Indian. I wanted to be true to the places as well as to the people. I put my whole soul into them and tried to avoid sentimentality. I went down deep in myself and dug up."⁵ This journal entry, especially when considered in the context of Carr's numerous works of First Nations material and her youthful desire to have been born an "Indian," raises many important questions. What does it mean to Carr to be Indian, and how does this "Indianness" become engaged with Carr's creative process? What identificatory struggles enabled Carr to write her Indian stories and, in so doing, to forge a sense of self that enabled her to exceed the impoverished roles available to a female artist working toward recognition and against the grain of pervasive sexism?

Klee Wyck is the name that Carr finally chose to give the collection of short stories, depicting her frequent visits to west coast villages of First Nations peoples, visits undertaken decades earlier. Carr's first visit came about in the spring of 1899, when she was invited by E. May Armstrong to visit the Presbyterian Mission School at Ucluelet, where Miss Armstrong was the missionary teacher. A remote Nuu-Chah-Nulth village on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Ucluelet had been host to the Presbyterian presence for only five years, and its inhabitants still lived in community houses, preserved traditional kinship alliances, and depended on the resources of the sea for food. Despite the efforts of Reverend Melvyn Swartout and E. May Armstrong, Carr noted, not one Nuu-Chah-Nulth person of the two Ucluelet villages had been baptized into the Christian faith. Carr's memories of that journey are recorded as the first narrative of Klee Wyck, "Ucluelet."

In "Ucluelet," Carr recounts that "Klee Wyck" was a...