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Calgary

Speaker Series: How Art and Literature made Indians, 1800-1860

     
7:00 PM
Calgary Central Public Library

Speaker: Dr. I. S. MacLaren

Emeritus, Department of History, Classics, and Religion; and Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta

The publication in May 2024 of Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times occasions the opportunity to interrogate the means by which the nineteenth century began invoking a biological determination of “civilization” to displace the eighteenth-century’s understanding of it in terms of cultural and environmental factors; thereby, theories of race that included the debate between monogenists and polygenists, and the rise of such pseudo-sciences as phrenology and craniology erupted in search of biological “proofs” of differences among peoples, especially gradations of intelligence and, thus, of civility. Both exploration and travel literature and portraiture reflected this displacement. Artist-traveller Paul Kane’s pictorial oeuvre and the various stages of the Kane narrative that culminated in the publication of Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America (1859) offer rich materials for the study of how a biological foundation for “civilization” pervaded Euro-american thinking about and attitudes towards the Indigenous Peoples of North America in the decades leading up to the negotiation of treaties in the West, the establishment of reservations and reserves, the replacement of treaties with allotment legislation in the United States after 1871 and the Indian Act in Canada in 1876, and the establishment by the governments of both countries of residential schools.