Free Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto Page B

Tobey. Almost twenty years younger than Emily, he had travelled widely, and was considered a progressive and modern painter who also had an interest in the mystical aspect of art. He made her acquaintance on visits to Victoria, and communicated some of his ideas about the formal directions painting should take. However, writing about him in her journal, Emily said, “He is clever but his work has no soul.It’s clever and beautiful. He knows perhaps more than Lawren, but how different.”
    Harris was not the only artist to appreciate and promote Emily’s work—younger artists, like Max Maynard and Jack Shadbolt, were constantly trying to arrange exhibitions for her as far afield as New York—but Harris remained her most forceful champion. One of Emily’s best-loved paintings, The Indian Church from 1929, was purchased from an exhibition in Toronto by Harris, and hung in his dining room. When Emily dropped Native motifs from her subject matter and began to paint only the forest, it was at the suggestion of Harris. In a letter, he advised her to “Put aside the Indian motifs, strike out for yourself, Emily, inventing, creating, clothing ideas born of this West, ideas that you feel deep rooted in your heart.”
    When Emily was despondent or depressed, she often expressed herself in letters to Harris, who would write back with calm, fatherly advice. “For goodness sake, don’t let temporary depression, isolation, or any other feeling interfere with your work.... When we enter the stream of creative life, then we are on our own and have to find self-reliance.” Their correspondence flourished and their friendship continued over the years, with Emily visiting Harris and his wife in Toronto and receiving visits fromthem in Victoria. Through Lawren and Bess, she was also introduced to a wider circle of artists and intellectuals.
    After Emily passed away, Harris was one of the pallbearers at her funeral and one of the trustees of her paintings and sketches. Growing Pains, Emily’s autobiography, is dedicated to Lawren Harris.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Some Ladies Prefer Indians
    Around the time of the 1927 exhibition, an article on Emily Carr appeared in the Toronto Star Weekly with the title “Some Ladies Prefer Indians.” While the article in some ways misrepresented both Carr and the Native people she had visited, it was indicative of the degree to which Emily’s name was being associated with images of Native art.
    But who were these Indians?
    â€œIndian” was a word used generically to describe the original inhabitants of Canada before the European arrival. The word has been replaced in common usage by other terms: Aboriginal, Native, First Nations. The peoples that Emily Carr encountered on her travels comprised the Salishan, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Nisga’a, Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit. All of these tribes were linked, either through trade and shared customs or through language.
    From the first encounter between European and Native, the relationship was contentious and fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings. As European settlers spread throughout British Columbia, the Native communities suffered disruptions and stresses that altered their way of life. Traditional trade and hunting and fishing practices were curtailed or superseded by the cash economy in the form of logging enterprises and the many canning factories that employed Natives. Native land was appropriated, and legislation was enacted to hinder Native land claims. At the same time, various government bodies banned certain ceremonies, like the potlatch, all with the intent of assimilating Natives into the wider economy and community. Many of the villages that Carr visited were abandoned, either because they were inhabited seasonally, or because the population had been decimated by diseases such as smallpox and measles. Sometimes entire communities were relocated by the government when