Photograph of Paul Kane in a similar hide shirt to the ‘Kee-akee-ka-saa-ka-wow’ portrait.Harriet Chapman Collection/Supplied
Historian Ian S. MacLaren has completed his life’s work: This spring, he published a four-volume, 2,424 page study of Paul Kane that can claim to be the largest book ever devoted to a Canadian artist.
Known for his romantic and sometimes inaccurate depictions of Indigenous people he met during travels through what are now Western Canada and the states of Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington in 1845 and 1846-1848, Kane is not a popular figure these days. His landscapes populated by fierce warriors or placid villagers were once a staple of school trips to the Royal Ontario Museum; today, the museum does not have any of his work on display. But MacLaren believes Kane’s field notebooks and sketches deserve careful study to separate the wheat of legitimate ethnographic information from the chaff of racist stereotypes.
“He offers a priceless entrée into the lives of Indigenous people before treaties and before subjugation and before residential schools and even reserves,” MacLaren said in an interview from his home in Montreal.
MacLaren, a professor emeritus of history and English at the University of Alberta, has been working on Kane since the 1980s, and has seen him slip from national icon to potential embarrassment.
“The big change has come, not because of anything Kane did, but as Canadians’ attitudes towards their relationships with Indigenous peoples have evolved,” he said. “Museums have cold feet about exhibiting Kane at this point. But it would be a mistake to regard him as an imperial agent. He didn’t work for anybody. It wasn’t anybody else’s idea that he make his travels and produce his ‘Indian Gallery’ as the genre was known.”
It was only after MacLaren retired in 2016 that he managed to complete Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America. The four volumes, published by McGill-Queen’s Press in May, feature heavily annotated transcripts of Kane’s field notebooks, where he jotted down a basic account of his travels as well as his artist’s log books recording the people and places he sketched. They also feature 822 photos including many of his sketches, some held at the ROM but others also housed at the Stark Museum of Art, a collection of Western art in Orange, Tex. Back in 1957, Kane’s heirs couldn’t find a Canadian institution prepared to buy them.
What Canadians valued in those days were Kane’s grand oil paintings of feather-bonneted chiefs or gentle maidens. The landscapes used a European palette and the regalia were assembled from Kane’s own collection. Meanwhile, critics point out that the self-taught Kane struggled to paint human anatomy and female faces.
Still, returning to the original sketches can yield useful information. For example, MacLaren compares the sketch of the Cree leader “Kee-akee-ka-saa-ka-wow” or Kakisheway with a finished oil supposedly of the same man. The sketch shows a figure with broad features and a bare chest covered only by a wolf’s skin. According to Kane’s portrait log, the man declined to dress for his portrait because he was mourning for relatives killed by the Blackfoot the previous year. The wolf skin was a symbol of his power. The “Kee-akee-ka-saa-ka-wow” portrait, in the ROM collection, has transformed him into a noble prince with softer features, wearing a feather bonnet and a hide shirt similar to one in which the artist himself had posed for photographs.
Paul Kane sketch of the Cree leader 'Kee-akee-ka-saa-ka-wow' shows a figure with broad features and a bare chest covered only by a wolf’s skin.Library Archives Canada/Supplied
Paul Kane's 'Kee-akee-ka-saa-ka-wow' portrait, in the ROM collection, has transformed the Cree leader into a noble prince with softer features, wearing a feather bonnet and a hide shirt.Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
“I call him a clothes horse,” MacLaren said of the Cree figure. “Kane is providing stereotype after stereotype for Victorian parlour walls.”
At least scholars can be fairly certain that Kakisheway’s clothing and pipe stem are Cree. In the familiar painting of the six chiefs of the Niitsitapi (or Blackfoot) Confederacy, one figure sports a shaved head common to the Shawnee, not the Blackfoot, a hairstyle which Kane borrowed from an illustration in another artist’s book.
MacLaren is not the first to point out these discrepancies; what is new about his work is the way he has painstakingly gone through every sketch, every painting, and every text to discover what is fabricated and what is useful. One key revelation is that Kane did not write Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, the travel book published under his name in 1859. Explorers’ memoirs in the 19th-century were often ghost-written and Kane’s field notes reveal his literary style was rudimentary. There are two scribes in the handwritten draft of the book; MacLaren has analyzed the handwriting of 25 of Kane’s associates, including his wife, but has not found who wrote them.
Paul Kane did not write Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, the travel book published under his name in 1859.Stark Museum of Art/Supplied
The book, therefore, should be viewed with skepticism. The 18th-century notion of the noble savage was being replaced by the 19th-century’s colonizing view of Indigenous people as suffering from what MacLaren identifies as the five Vs – “vicious, vain, violent, vengeful and vanishing.” The book is erratic in its attitudes, including fanciful stories such as the Ojibwa love triangle in which one suitor murders the other – MacLaren points out this is a universal folk tale that the ghost writer has larded in – as well as much disgust over the personal hygiene of the people Kane encountered. Kane didn’t write this stuff, which to judge from the field notes did not reflect his views, but MacLaren doesn’t let him off the hook.
“His name’s on the book and it helped grow his stature in his lifetime. I think he has to own that,” he said. “It’s part and parcel of who he is. It can be understood as a typical commercial product of his times.”
To both expose the fancies of Wanderings and reveal the potential information hidden in the field notes and logs, MacLaren compares the sources date by date. Using facsimiles of the pages of the book and his own transcripts of both its handwritten draft and the field notes, his annotations reveal where and how the published book departed from both the draft and the original source material.
This requires a lot of pages: Paul Kane’s Travels can claim to be the biggest book about a single Canadian artist published at one time, 80 per cent of it written by MacLaren himself. (At five volumes, the continuing project to publish a nine-volume catalogue raisonné of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s work is already getting longer.)
Given the problems with Kane’s work, you might wonder why study him at all. MacLaren points out that his subjects were real individuals who agreed to pose: Kakisheway was one of the signatories of Treaty 4, the 1874 treaty covering what is today southern Saskatchewan. Shawanosowe was not the murderous party in a love triangle, but an Ojibwa leader, remembered to this day by the Whitefish River First Nation in Ontario’s Manitoulin District.
“I think he’s a haphazard ethnographer, I wouldn’t say unreliable,” MacLaren said, adding that Kane’s portrait log was used as evidence in the Lekwungen Nation’s land claim on Vancouver Island in 2006. His book lists 35 historical figures about whom more is known through Kane’s work, cites a Cowichan knowledge keeper who respects Kane’s detailed descriptions of blanket-making and notes that his sketches of Northwest Coast burial canoes are important records of lost artifacts.
MacLaren thinks it is time for Indigenous scholars to take up Kane.
“I’m confident that I’ve unpacked it sufficiently, that I’ve provided avenues into Kane that don’t have to run the rough road first. They can disown him and still take an interest.”