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

Abstract

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.