MONTREAL.- McGill-Queen’s University Press announces the release of the four-volume publication Paul Kane's Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times by I.S. MacLaren, the first comprehensive survey of Paul Kane’s (1810–1871) life and work in more than fifty years. Kane’s field sketches made between 1845 and 1848 constitute the first visual record of Indigenous life all the way from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean by a Non-Indigenous artist.

Beginning his research three and one-half decades ago, MacLaren, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, provides a singular opportunity to examine the impacts of Kane’s travels in Indigenous North America through his writings, art, life, times, and complex legacy. A meticulous, panoramic examination, 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 author contextualizes Kane’s travels and output by focusing on four areas of study: history of the fur trade, book publishing history, art history, and ethnohistory.

Kane, a portraitist based in Toronto, set out from the city in 1845 for Lake Huron and Wisconsin. From 1846 to 1848, he continued to the upper Great Lakes, the Prairies, across the Rockies, down the Columbia River, and through Oregon Territory to Puget Sound and Vancouver Island. MacLaren reconstructs the colonial processes that turned Kane’s unique descriptions and depictions of Indigenous peoples into benighted stereotypes, teaching contemporary readers valuable lessons about what we thought we knew about Kane and his art, how he let himself be turned into a detractor of Native Americans, and how society endowed him with authority that was not always warranted.

According to the author, the publication intentionally lays the groundwork for future discussions of the pertinence of Kane’s original documentary field work to contemporary Indigenous studies in North America. “Among its goals, Paul Kane’s Travels aims to prepare the ground not only to encourage Indigenous scholars to make more use of Kane’s own writings and sketches to enhance and revise their histories of and teachings about the mid-19th century but also to prompt Indigenous artists to interrogate and deconstruct the pervasive and persistent ‘truth effect’ of innate ‘Indian-ness’ that has become part of the underlying visual sediment upon which more extreme forms of racial stereotyping are built” (Vol. 1, p. 4).

Kane has been called the founding father of Canadian art, and his Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America (1859) is considered a classic of Canadian literature, albeit a controversial one if viewed from a contemporary perspective. More recently, he has been vilified as having misrepresented and exploited his subjects.

Kane’s studio canvases are stereotypically generic, depicting composites of Native North Americans and their activities. Whereas his field sketches tend to be more accurate, executed in the moment, the embellished studio work provides little of ethnohistorical significance. Published in London, Wanderings of an Artist contains passages and flourishes added by others portraying Indigenous peoples as either “noble” or violent and vicious. More fiction than fact, the tales were designed to appeal to Victorian-era readers. MacLaren’s tomes reposition Kane’s primary fieldwork and reveal the process by which his sketches and field writings developed by him and others into damaging stereotypes, in both popular and learned circles.

Paul Kane’s Travels features reproductions of nearly all Kane’s sketches—many published for the first time—and many of his studio paintings, as well as transcriptions of his field writings. The writings, which show the artist to have been a curious traveller fascinated by Indigenous lifeways, contain no pejorative references to Indigenous people. MacLaren’s work also features a transcription of manuscripts not in Kane’s handwriting (by unknown scribes), the text of the first edition of Wanderings of an Artist, an updated catalogue raisonné, and detailed maps of Kane’s routes. Through the author’s in-depth research, the publication offers scholarly and first-hand understandings of the lives and histories of the real people Kane described and depicted while providing an authoritative biographical portrait of the artist. Thanks to family descendants’ support, MacLaren has identified 26 Indigenous people depicted in the portraits.

Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America reveals some little-known facts about the artist and his work including:

· Kane’s field notes provided the basis for Wanderings of an Artist, but it was not written entirely by him. MacLaren did exhaustive research to try to determine who the ghost writers might have been but could not definitively identify the authors.

· Published in London, Wanderings of an Artist elevated inoffensive field notes and logs into a travelogue geared to a Victorian audience that craved tales of the exotic. Wanderings turns Indigenous people into repulsive figures that the “gentleman” Kane had to endure. Like many stories told by colonizers during this period, it did not matter if it was true because no one could disprove it.

· Having been invited to address the 1857 American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Montreal as a man of science, and having had Wanderings published eighteen months later, Kane let himself become known as a gentleman scholar – an inaccurate and undeserved accolade.

· Never formally educated, Kane wrote phonetically. Thus, his field notes include words he recorded from various languages he encountered in his travels as he heard them.

· Travelling primarily by canoe and boat with fur traders, Kane was the only artist of his generation to venture as far west as the Pacific. His artist contemporaries George Caitlin, Karl Bodmer, and Alfred Jacob Miller confined themselves to the Missouri River watershed, while John Mix Stanley crossed the mountains after Kane.

· Kane produced over 500 sketches during his travels.

· While Kane is considered to have possessed artistic talent, it is his subject matter that makes his work vital and unrivalled. His commissioned portraits of Indigenous people were well received at the time and now reside in a number of North American museums including the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. However, when painted on canvas in the studio, individuals sketched in the field occasionally take different names or are draped in garments and decorations that do not belong to their specific culture. By today’s standards, his studio paintings are regarded as ethnographically undependable. “But it is vital to understand that during his life the studio works, together with displays of his Native American material-culture collection, garnered the artist a living, some celebrity, and considerable authority as a unique ‘wanderer’ among indians,” MacLaren writes.