Paul Kane's Travels in Indigenous North America

Nicole O’Byrne talks to Ian MacLaren about his four-volume set, Paul Kane's Travels in Indigenous North America.

An all-encompassing exploration of the nineteenth-century painter’s documentary record and controversial place in Indigenous studies in North America.

Paul Kane has been called the founding father of Canadian art, and Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America a classic of Canadian literature. Yet his studio canvases are stereotypically generic, and his book is infamous: in word and in image, it depicts vain, vengeful, vicious, violent, and vanishing Indigenous people, disregarding its subjects’ lived experiences and providing little of ethnohistorical significance. Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America rediscovers the primary fieldwork underlying Kane’s studio art and book and the process by which his sketches and field writings evolved into damaging stereotypes with significant authority in the nineteenth century, in both popular and learned circles.

A painstaking, panoramic exploration, Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America also studies the artist’s oeuvre in terms of his contemporaries, his technique, and the complicated history of the provenance of the works. The whole lays the groundwork for future discussions of the pertinence of Paul Kane’s documentary record to Indigenous studies in North America.

I.S. MacLaren is professor emeritus of history and English at the University of Alberta.

Image Credit: MQUP

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