Emily Carr painting gets a new name
AGO removes offensive term, vows to make similar revisions to the titles of other works
In the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Fudger rotunda, by-the-book examples of early Canadian Modernism — Lawren Harris, Kathleen Munn, Frederick Horsman Varley — surround a rough installation by Adrian Stimson of a light fixture, salvaged from the Old Sun residential school, dangling from on high above a buffalo skin criss-crossed with iron, throwing a shadow in the distinct form of a Union Jack. It’s a not-so-subtle symbol of the violent disconnect between colonial Canada’s poetic visions of an unspoiled wilderness, conveniently unpeopled by an Indigenous population who were corralled onto little reserves or trucked off to the schools for assimilation, and it does its work with an appropriately jarring confrontational way.
Less jarring but just as powerfully ofthe-theme here is a painting by Emily Carr, of a slim white church presiding over a small graveyard, its steeple and scant rows of pale crosses all but swallowed by the sensuous folds of a thick British Columbia rainforest enveloping it in a deep, verdant green. For all of its 89 years, the work went by the title Indi
an Church, a simple title in Carr’s time denoting its location in an Indigenous village. But times have changed, and radically; on the wall at the AGO, it now bears a new name: Church at Yuquot Village.
I asked the AGO if the title of the Carr had been changed to excise what now most would agree is an offending term in “Indian” (not just derogatory, it remains a badge of wilful ignorance, the product of Christopher Columbus’s navigational incompetence.) The museum confirmed that yes, it was; and that the titles of other works would similarly re- vised as they reinstall them, one by one.
Some might argue a violation of provenance or heritage, and that the title should be preserved as an artifact of its time. But given all we know of Carr, I feel certain she would agree with the change. There’s no argument to be made that she, of all people, would be comfortable with a term loaded with the freight we now know it to carry. It pays respect both to the artist and the people she so admired. And if anyone in this messy history of ours merits a pass as we forge new ways to reconsider terrible old ideas, it’s her.