In his King Street East studio in the 1850s, Toronto artist Paul Kane painted 100 canvases depicting Indigenous individuals and their lifeways, some of them based on sketches he made during his travels from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean in the years 1845 to 1848. He did so to fulfill an unprecedented $20,000 commission from Senator George William Allan, a prominent Torontonian. After Allan died in 1901, Sir Edmund Boyd Osler purchased the canvases.
In April, 1912, the Government of Ontario passed its Royal Ontario Museum Act. Two years later, the building on Queen’s Park Crescent opened as the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology. Osler was a driving force behind the initiative. Chiefly a museum of science, it included the ROM of Geology, the ROM of Mineralogy, the ROM of Palaeontology and the ROM of Natural History (soon to become the ROM of Zoology). Until 1968, these were governed by respective science departments of the University of Toronto.
Osler had already decided that, when the ROM opened its doors, one of the museum’s collections would be Kane’s 100 canvases. Once they were installed there, the fate of Kane’s canvases as authoritative, empirical – scientific – was sealed. Romantic to the point of stereotype though his studio portraits and landscapes are, it was their apparent anthropological contribution that routinely garnered them esteem in subsequent decades. Generations of Ontario pupils were paraded past them on school trips to the museum. Because their subjects covered much of what is today Canada, the works’ scientific patina took on a national, if not nationalist, aura, and Kane became a “founding father of Canadian art.”
It is not a decolonial project to assess what Kane was perpetrating in his King Street East studio in the early 1850s; rather, it is a historical one. Kane concocted as much as he documented. Twelve of his canvas portraits have no – or no surviving – preparatory sketches. The individuals serve as clothes horses on which Kane draped items from the material-culture collection he amassed during his travels. In his studio, Kane answered the demands of mid-Victorian taste, which called for “noble savages,” not the individuals whom Kane encountered and who agreed to sit for him.
In November, 2022, the ROM announced that it would “pause” its First Nations Gallery briefly. Soon after, Kate Taylor wrote in this newspaper that the gallery’s reopening doomed Kane’s art: “Paintings by Paul Kane … known for romanticized depictions of First Nations people, were removed.” They have not been displayed since, and neither has there again been an exhibition of the more than 340 graphite sketches by Kane, most of them uncoloured, which the ROM was gifted in 1946.
The toxicity of identity politics has only increased in museal circles in the meantime. One public repository recently auctioned its only Kane canvas, in part to raise money to acquire Indigenous art, in part to distance itself from Kane.
Kane’s Shah-wah-nas-has-we, Southeastern Ojibwa.Royal Ontario Museum/Supplied
The vaulting and erasing of Kane might right a perceived wrong, but it is fundamentally a mistake and a disservice to Indigenous peoples. What the ROM ought to be doing instead is researching its Kanes and inviting interested First Nations whose ancestry the canvases depict or allegedly depict to co-curate exhibits that tell a different story than a particular canvas does. In many cases this could be done in conjunction with whatever there is about that subject in Kane’s field writings, in a draft manuscript for an extended narrative, which is not written in Kane’s hand, or in Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, the book that appeared under Kane’s name in 1859 but was actually the work of others.
This is not an unrealistic suggestion. In October, Whitefish River First Nation (WRFN) invited me to its land on the north shore of Lake Huron. In the afternoon at Shawanosowe School and in the evening at Seven Fires Youth and Elders’ Centre, I was joined by knowledge holder Esther Osche. After I introduced Kane and his travels and art in general terms, she and I compared the sketch portrait of Ojibwa leader Shawanosowe, which Kane drew at Manitowaning in summer 1845 and finished in oils that winter, on the one hand, with the canvas that he painted during the period of 1852 to 1856 on King Street East, on the other.
We also contrasted the Kane narrative with the WRFN’s oral history of Shawanosowe, who signed the Bond Head Treaty (a.k.a. Treaty 45; a.k.a. Manitoulin Island Treaty) at Manitowaning on Aug. 9, 1836. Although Kane’s field writings make no mention of Shawanosowe, he appears as the villain in a love triangle of stereotypical Victorian schlock that serves as the purple patch of Wanderings’ first chapter, rendering him a Five Vs “indian”: vain, vengeful, vicious, violent and vanishing. (Chippewa poet Gerald Vizenor coined the lower-case rendering of indian to emphasize the constructedness of most representations of Indigenous peoples in Euroamerican cultural expression.) But the story that Osche’s grandparents exhorted her to commit to memory makes no mention of this; rather, it recounts the dream vision that Shawanosowe experienced at Dreamer’s Rock, which directed his life and leadership of his people.
This collaboration with Osche and the WRFN community paid a rich dividend. Surely, with the resources they have at their disposal, ROM staff could do as much and more with nearly 30 other canvas portraits by Kane that have a preparatory sketch. But the museum’s vaulting and erasure of the artist precludes such an exercise in digging up truth and working toward an offer of reconciliation.
Will research on Kane by the ROM also cease? If so, the museum’s website will continue to retain the title Ojibbeway Chief that Kane gave to another canvas. This title prompted the ROM to add the designation “Southeastern Ojibwa” to the work’s label on its website and in its publications. This leaves viewers, including Ojibwa themselves, thinking that Ojibwa men shaved their heads and pierced their nasal septum. Kane initiated this error; a lack of research perpetuates it.
In fact, though, Kane plagiarized this work, which had been published in 1836 in Thomas McKenney and James Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America. That book’s first volume features Kish-Kallo-wa Shawnee Chief, a hand-coloured lithograph of Henry Inman’s copy of a portrait painted by Charles Bird King. This instance of Kane’s plagiarism was first brought to the ROM’s attention in 1960, but the work’s title remained unchanged. And it again remained unchanged after anthro-museologist Ted Brasser noted in 2005 what Kane had done.
Kane appropriated the shaved head and pierced septum of the Shawnee man named Kishkalwa in another studio canvas that lacks any preparatory sketch: Six Black Feet Chiefs, Blackfoot at the ROM, and Big Snake, Chief of the Blackfoot Indians, Recounting his War Exploits to Five Subordinate Chiefs, its copy, at the National Gallery of Canada. Nowhere in Kane’s field writings, only in Wanderings of an Artist, is the figure on the left given a name, Little Horn. It occurs on a page of text that faces Group of Six Indian Chiefs, a chromolithograph of this painting. The description identifies all of the depiction’s six figures as members of the Blackfoot (now Niitsitapi) Confederacy. Thus do a shaved head and pierced septum allegedly enter cultural practice on the Prairies. This is one of Kane’s best-known canvases.
These examples illustrate why, as current and future generations learn about this continent’s First Peoples and, thus, ask different questions than their predecessors of artworks depicting them, public repositories must continue with independent and collaborative research, and communicate their findings, not consign art to their vaults or divest themselves of it.
Ian S. MacLaren is professor emeritus, department of history and classics, and department of English and film studies, University of Alberta. In May, 2024, McGill-Queen’s University Press published his four-volume study, Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times.
