In the nineteenth century Paul Kane’s dignified and captivatingly detailed paintings of Native American life, along with the artist’s published travelogue from his sojourn across the continent, did much to form Western notions about North America’s original inhabitants. But a four-volume examination by Canadian academic Ian MacLaren digs into the slipshod observational habits and artistic license that mark Kane’s work and limit the reliability of his record.
Indian Woman by Paul Kane (1810–1871), 1845. Oil over graphite on paper, 12 ¹/₈ by 9 7/8 inches. Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas. All photographs courtesy of McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal.
A dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked, pensive young Menominee woman in European-influenced attire and colored necklace beads and bright red shawl. Somber I-a-ca-way (The Loud Speaker), identified as chief of a Saulteaux tribe, at Fort Frances, Ontario. A swaddled Cree child on a traditional head-flattening straight cradleboard. Cowlitz burial canoes, some accessorized with blankets and cook pots, elevated on wooden legs in above-ground resting places. The interior of an entire wooden Chinook ceremonial lodge on the Columbia River, seen from its gabled roof to the central fire pit set into the floor. These are among the hundreds of images that represent Canadian artist Paul Kane’s attainment of his goal “to sketch pictures of the principal chiefs, and their original costumes, to illustrate their manners and customs, and to represent the scenery of an almost unknown country,” says Ian MacLaren, whose comprehensive new opus, Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times, has just been published by McGill-Queens University Press.
Kane in an undated photograph. Collection of Harriet Chapman.
Kane, long called the founding father of Canadian art, set out to document this indigenous culture before it vanished. Between May and November of 1845 he traveled from Toronto through parts of the Great Lakes region, meeting and sketching tribal people; and then persuaded Sir George Simpson, superintendent of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to grant him paid passage with fur traders on a journey, from June 1846 to October 1848, through territories that now form Canada’s western provinces, lands straddling the newly established US-Canada border (1846), and into what would later be the states of Oregon and Washington. He became the first Western artist to reach North America’s Pacific coast and the first nonindigenous Canadian to describe Native people and their lives, all the while keeping phonetically written field notebooks as he traveled and sketched. He later used his sketches, some colored in watercolors or oils, as the basis for oil-on-canvas paintings executed in his Toronto studio. He edited his notebooks into a travel journal, Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, published in London in 1859, in which he writes: “[This book is] notes of my daily journey. . . . I trust they will possess . . . an intrinsic value to the historian.”
Kettle Falls by Kane, 1847. Oil on paper, 8 1/8 by 13 3/8 inches. Stark Museum of Art, bequest of H. J. Lutcher Stark.
Alas, the idea that Kane’s work, particularly his depictions of tribal chiefs and scenes of buffalo hunts and other activities, told unadorned stories had already started to fall out of favor in the twentieth century. Ethnographers, especially, rejected the long-held notion that the works on canvas were who and what and where the artist asserted. MacLaren, a University of Alberta professor emeritus (with a joint appointment in the departments of History and Classics and English and Film Studies, for three-plus decades), says that at the outset of his own work, before poring over, piece by piece, every aspect of Kane’s life, output, methodology, and more, “I did have curiosity about the narrative.” And, knowing that the artist had also published that travel book, well-received in its time, and had sold his paintings as authentic records of Indian life, he wondered about “how the two disciplines [art and travel writing] came together.”
Six Black Feet Chiefs, Blackfoot by Kane 1849–1855. Oil on canvas, 25 ¾ by 30 7/8 inches. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
MacLaren’s earliest encounter with Kane was on a school field trip to the Royal Ontario Museum, which holds the largest collection of Kane’s canvases in the world, the bulk received in the early twentieth century by donation or purchase from politician George William Allan, the artist’s primary patron, or his estate. “Like many Toronto school kids,” he says, “I gained an understanding of Native Americans from touring Kane’s canvases.”
The polymath author tackled Kane’s sketches and paintings, of course, as well as the field notebooks in his hand and the manuscript draft of his book in the hands of two still-unidentified scribes in the Stark Museum of Art in Texas, which he examined, compared, reexamined, and cross-examined. “First and foremost,” he writes in the introduction to his four-volume masterwork, “Paul Kane was a chronicler,” adding, but “not a particularly disciplined, consistent, or thorough one.” That realization set the guardrails and pace for MacLaren’s own meticulous work.
A Child in the Process of Having Its Head Flattened by Kane, 1847. Inscribed “Chinook child undergoing process/ of flattening the head.” at lower right. Watercolor over graphite on paper, 5 by 7 inches. Stark Museum of Art.
Kane had arrived as a child in Toronto (then called York) from Ireland with his immigrant family. Art and becoming an artist drove him from an early age, but that desire left his father disinclined to help provide him much formal education. The young Kane took himself and his developing talent on the road, supporting himself as an itinerant portrait painter in the US during the 1830s, traveling as far as New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, where he opened a studio. In 1841 he purchased passage to Europe to study, mostly by copying Old Masters. “He was an autodidact,” MacLaren says, “even in Europe, teaching himself ”—which didn’t always advance his raw talent. This shaky foundation showed up in his later work. “He had trouble with buffaloes, horses—they might as well be [carvings] on a merry-go-round. He doesn’t handle figures in a landscape well. He didn’t take basic anatomical training anywhere, though with bust portraits he became very competent.”
MacLaren believes numerous sketches, some colored, of Cowlitz, Chinook, Nahwitti, and other peoples and objects are accurate representations. Plus, he says, “Kane was very fortunate to see [a multi-tribal fishery on the Columbia River] in full operation. His pictorial record of it [made in oil-on-paper and watercolor] is both extensive and unrivaled.” His studio-generated art, however, was in many cases “concocted,” MacLaren says. While Kane’s portrait skill can be seen in ‘Kee-akee-ka-saa-ka-wow’ (The man that gives the war whoop, Head Chief of the Crees), Plains Cree, showing the sitter colorfully attired and with feather-bedecked accoutrements, the canvas is highly stylized. MacLaren notes, however, that when comparing it to a watercolor-over-graphite sketch of the same man, “the canvas accedes to oil portraiture’s demand [for] ideal proportions . . . [the artist] elongates both the neck and face, [effectively rendering] the subject tall and, thus, noble.” Victorian audiences and collectors of art sought these strong noble-savage images, never mind any cultural inaccuracies.
Chinook Grave on the Cowlitz River by Kane, 1847. Inscribed “Burial Canoes” at lower right. Watercolor over graphite on paper, 5 3/8 by 9 inches. Stark Museum of Art.
“In many cases what Kane concocted in the studio came out of thin air—that is, the oil-on-canvas painting has no [or almost no] preceding sketch,” MacLaren says. The artistic result often mixed and mismatched cultures. ‘Medicine Mask Dance,’ Northwest Coast Peoples shows a group of masked men dancing; but, MacLaren says, “Kane saw no dance being danced. The scene is intended to feature masks; it claims to represent S’Klallam men,” but “one of them is wearing a Chilkat blanket, and the featured masks are clearly of a distinctly different Northwest Coast people . . . the Kwagguilth.” What’s more, “the figures are embarrassingly stilted (repercussions of Kane’s not studying anatomy).” Likewise, there is no prefatory sketch for ‘Six Black Feet Chiefs’, Blackfoot, which MacLaren calls “the most glaring example” of Kane’s “concocted” art. “They might as well be Roman senators,” he observes.
In his published travelogue Kane may have endeavored to identify real individuals and report unvarnished stories, MacLaren says, but, “you can’t read [any] published travel narrative as an accurate account, [that] ‘what’s in this book is what the writer saw.’ And it’s always been bewitching and bedeviling.” An example of unreliable narration occurs in Kane’s very first chapter, which tells the story of a love triangle, and a murder purportedly committed by Chief Shawanosowe, a member of the Whitefish River First Nation (Ontario). “Only gradually [did I make] contact with indigenous people” whose tribal linguistic and cultural knowledge helped him decipher Kane’s phonetic writing and to fact check, MacLaren says. “I was able to find people who knew the real story.” Members of Whitefish River First Nation knew of no Ojibwe man who is remembered for having committed passion-fueled murder.
Medicine Mask Dance, Northwest Coast Peoples by Kane, 1849–1856. Oil on canvas, 17 7/8 by 29 1/8 inches. Royal Ontario Museum.
Through the four volumes of Paul Kane’s Travels, MacLaren painstakingly examines each of the twenty-five chapters of Kane’s original narrative and looks at how their contents bear on art history, book history, ethnohistory, and fur-trade history. In fact, despite (or, more accurately, because of) his own exhaustive life’s work, MacLaren says, his volumes, which include six fold-out, reconstructed maps, “lay the groundwork for lots more that can be done. I think of it as a portable museum and a reference work for a lot of professions and people.” The author’s research for his book has already figured in some Indigenous land-rights cases; for example, lawyers representing Songhees and Esquimalt peoples relied partly on it to win a $31.5M settlement for their clients.
Kee-akee-ka-saa-ka-wow “The man that Gives the War Whoop,” Cree Indian, Fort Pitt by Kane, 1846. Inscribed “Kee-akee-ka-saa-ka-wow/ Head Chief of the Crees” at lower left. Watercolor over graphite on paper, 4 1/2 by 5 ¼ inches. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa.
Ian MacLaren has enjoyed canoeing and Canadian wilderness trips himself. Would he like to have traveled with Paul Kane, whom he now knows so well. “No,” came a cryptic answer. “I wouldn’t have wanted to go traveling with Paul Kane.” He thought back to a letter he had discovered in his research, from Donald Ross, a fur-trade factor, who recalled the artist’s “leisurely habits . . . such as reading and smoking and talking” to anyone who would listen, abandoning his notebook, and missing delivery deadlines for sketches. “I would need someone more companionable.”
Kee-akee-ka-saa-ka-wow (“The man that gives the war whoop, Head Chief of the Crees”), Plains Cree by Kane c. 1849–1856. Oil on canvas, 29 7/8 by 25 inches. Royal Ontario Museum.
MARGARET SHAKESPEARE’s writing, with reporting from Svalbard to Lesotho to Tasmania, has appeared in many national publications.
