How Art and Literature made 'Indian':1800-1860 - ASA Calgary

Join us for our April talk, How Art and Literature made indians, 1800–1860, as part of the ASA Calgary Lecture Series, partnered with the Calgary Public Library! This in-person event will be held at the Central Library - Patricia A. Whelan Peformance Hall. Secure your spot now!

Presenter: Dr. I. S. MacLaren

Date: April 16, 2025

Time: Lecture start at 7:00p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Location: Central Library - Patricia A. Whelan Room

ABSTRACT:

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.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER:

Dr. I.S. MacLaren

I.S. MacLaren, professor emeritus, taught for three decades at the University of Alberta in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion, the Department of English and Film Studies, and the Canadian Studies Program. He was also an adjunct professor in the Canadian Circumpolar Institute. His scholarship, which takes arctic exploration, the history of the world’s national parks, exploration and travel writing, and the literature in English of early North America as its foci, has appeared as articles in a variety of journals and in several books. The latter include Arctic Artist: The Journal and Paintings of George Back, Midshipman with Franklin 1819–1822 (1994); The Ladies, the Gwich’in, and the Rat: Travels on the Athabasca, Mackenzie, Rat, Porcupine, and Yukon Rivers in 1926 (1998), Mapper of Mountains: M.P. Bridgland in the Canadian Rockies 1902–1930 (2005), and Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park: Studies in Two Centuries of Human History in the upper Athabasca River Valley (2007). In 2024, McGill-Queen’s University Press issued his Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times in four volumes.

With gratitude for the first, past and present caretakers of the land now also known as Calgary, including the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Îyârhe (Stoney) Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government and Métis nation, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.

Host or Publisher ASA Calgary Centre