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A Landscape in Flux: Emily Carr’s Zunoqua of the Cat 
Village and the Moment of Colonization

by Constance Roberts

The Need for a Canadian Art
When Emily Carr ventured into the woods of 

British Columbia in 1932, she was a side note, a 
Canadian artist living in the boonies. The epicenter 
of artistic production, where the latest innovations 
occurred, was on the opposite side of the country. In 
Toronto, Ottawa, and the surrounding parklands, the 
artist coalition called the Group of Seven—including 
the noted painters Franklin Carmichael, Lawren 
Harris, and Arthur Lismer—strove to establish a new 
art. A Canadian art. 

While her artistic contemporaries in the east 
explored established parkland, Carr chose to explore 
the woods and greenery of British Columbia, which 
were as entangling as the political forces at work. 
Carr emerged from the woods of Quatsino Sound 
with a sketch and a lasting impression of an imposing 
statue in a First Nations village. She combined the 
two on canvas to create Zunoqua of the Cat Village, 
a painting that distinguishes Carr from her eastern 
contemporaries with its vibrant representation of 
the elimination of First Nations people in British 
Columbia. Carr’s painting does more than record 
an individual experience. It preserves the moment 
of destruction of First Nations culture as a result of 
white colonization in British Columbia. 

Emily Carr memorialized this sketching trip 
to the “cat village” in Zunoqua of the Cat Village 
(see Fig. 1). In the painting, undulating waves of 
grass emerge from the verdant, shadowed forest, 
chaotically crashing against any surfaces opposing 
its movement. It aggressively rushes towards the 
front of the canvas. Impeded by the front edge, it 
swirls back and angrily flares up as it hits the walls 
of the two buildings. In its momentum, the animated 
force issuing from the mysterious depths of the 
forest drags lurking cats out of their hiding spots in 
the shadows of the tree trunks. The eerie ochre eyes 
of the cats, prominent against the charcoal and inky 
hues of their fur, stare out ominously from amid the 
crashing waves of grass. Before the emerging waves, 
a lone figure turns away from the impending danger 
and totters, tilting ever so slightly backwards. The 

canvas edge crops his legs from the scene, but his 
arm presses a weighty block against his side. The 
arm pulls his body forward, frozen as it swings so 
that his fingers continue beyond the edge of the 
frame. His empty, black eye sockets face the same 
direction, refusing to acknowledge or surrender to 
the undulating waves.  His mouth gapes open, mid-
gasp or mid-sentence, with purple lips framing a 
black void. The figure itself is entirely unanimated; 
only the eye of his serpent headdress, the head of 
which dangles above his shoulder, glints animatedly. 
Set against starkly and unnaturally lit mahogany 
wood, the black pupil stares directly at the viewer, 
posing a challenge.

Fig. 1. Emily Carr, Zunoqua of the Cat Village, 1931, oil on 
canvas, 112.2 cm x 70.1 cm, Wikiart,   https://www.wikiart.
org/en/emily-carr/zunoqua-of-the-cat-village-1931.



A Landscape in Flux: Emily Carr’s Zunoqua of the Cat Village and the Moment of Colonization

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201820

The Railway and Traveling Artists
Carr was not the only white artist depicting 

First Nations culture. However, she resisted the 
purely stylistic appreciation of the itinerant artists 
traveling west, who hoped to capture unfamiliar 
and idealized scenes for those back east. In 1886, the 
Canadian Pacific Railway completed a line of track 
that “provided a direct link with eastern Canada.”1 In 
addition to white settlers, artists could escape west in 
search of new inspiration. Their depictions of First 
Nations culture were not a result of intensive research 
or lengthy interactions but of brief sojourns into 
the wilderness. The ethnographer Marius Barbeau 
condones and explains their cultural appropriation 
in his 1932 essay, “The Canadian Northwest: Theme 
for Modern Painters.” He describes the villages of 
indigenous people, both those inhabited and those 
depopulated, as part of the scenery of western 
Canada and therefore available without constraints 
for artistic interpretation. In particular, he describes 
the “definite impressions of the picturesque Rockies, 
of the fine wood carvings of the Northwest Coast 
tribes and their totem poles, which constitute a 
striking feature of this continent.”2 He conflates the 
natural features and the culture of the First Nations 
people into one entity, a unique Canadian landscape. 

He writes as though the decaying and vanishing 
landscapes of the West Coast people were a 
vanishing Canadian aesthetic that eastern artists had 
a duty to preserve for the posterity of Canadian art. 
Barbeau urges artists to leave behind the parkland 
of eastern Canada in favor of the undiscovered west, 
a source of artistic material in First Nations villages 
and totem poles. Barbeau presses his point and 
cautions against delay: “(the) present-day Indians 
are no longer as their ancestors used to be: they have 
changed as radically as have their surroundings”3 but 
nevertheless notes that “artists gifted with insight 
and imagination can penetrate the surface.”4

1 Gerta Moray, “Emily Carr and the Traffic in Native 
Images,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: 
Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda Jessup 
(University of Toronto Press, 2001), 76. 
2 Marius Barbeau, “The Canadian Northwest: Theme for 
Modern Painters,” The American Magazine of Art 24, no. 
5, (1932): 331. 
3 Barbeau, “The Canadian Northwest: Theme for Modern 
Painters,” 337. 
4 Barbeau, 337. 

When necessary, Barbeau incentivized eastern 
Canadian artists to travel west. He not only posed 
friendly challenges but also petitioned for funding 
on the artists’ behalf. For Jackson and Holgate, two 
members of the rising Group of Seven, he “arranged 
for [them] to visit the Skeena on passes provided 
by the C.N.R. in the summer of 1926.”5 Working 
together, corporations and individuals used the 
new railway to lay claim to every aspect of British 
Columbia—natural resources, cultural property, and 
anything else within the province’s boundaries. The 
joint effort led to the aestheticizing of First Nations 
culture.

The exemplar Barbeau hopes other artists will 
note is Langdon Kihn, a New Yorker whose paintings 
disconnect First Nations culture from its living 
history and land, presenting it as items without 
lineage or legacy. Barbeau accompanied Kihn west 
on one of his sketching trip in 1922. This trip clearly 
left a lasting and pleasant impression on Barbeau, 
as he mentions the people he and Kihn met in the 
beginning of his essay. He reminiscences: “(when) 
Langdon Kihn ten years ago sought pictorial themes 
among the Indian fisherfolk of the Northwest 
Coast and the prairie hunters of Western Alberta, 
it was his good fortune to invade a colorful field.”6 
The personal pleasantry aside, Barbeau considered 
the novelty that First Nations culture offered to 
eastern viewers as exotic and intriguing.  Kihn’s 
works, including  “Indian portraits and totem-pole 
landscapes…attracted much attention …when they 
were exhibited in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal.”7 
Surely, other artists wanted their work to receive the 
same acclaim and attention.  However, the desire to 
capitalize on the less familiar First Nations culture 
led artists and curators to categorize it as a stylistic 
innovation from the past. Viewers in the east did not 
need to concern themselves with the daily affairs of 
those shown in the works of art; they needed only 
to appreciate the aesthetic worth of the art while 
visiting an art gallery.

One work of Kihn’s that epitomizes the 
decontextualization of First Nations culture and 
5 Charles C. Hill, The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation 
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 190.  
6 Barbeau, “The Canadian Northwest: Theme for Modern 
Painters,” 331. 
7 Barbeau, 331. 



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201821

dress is his portrait, Juliette Gaultier de la Verendrye 
(see Fig. 2). Juliette sits on a fur-covered throne 
in the center of the canvas wearing the traditional 
dress of First Nations people. She gazes outward, 
and her hands lay gently on her lap, one holding a 
drum-like instrument while the other grasps a piece 
of wood detailed on its end. The tactility and reality 
of Juliette’s depiction prevents her from becoming a 
doll. Kihn renders her in a fleshy, three-dimensional 
manner. Her face and hands are emphasized because 
of carefully placed highlights, such as those along 
the fingers. She lives and breathes. In contrast, Kihn 
flattens the clothing and focuses on its design. The 
designs on the chest are neatly rendered: a buckskin- 
colored square with the shape of a man cut out; two 
large handprints placed over the chest; medallions 
with five pointed designs cut out. However, the 
fabric does not drape over the three-dimensional 
form of Juliette. Rather, the clothing is a costume; it 
is flattened just as a paper cutout to clothe a paper 
doll. The lack of a setting underscores the artificiality 
of the scene. The background is cold, marbled gray; it 
is not a real location or environment. Kihn’s portrait 
not only subjugates First Nations dress to the whims 
of a white woman but also confines First Nations 
dress to seldom-worn costume. The scene presents 
a masquerade.

First Nations Culture as a Frame
The idea that First Nations culture offered 

artistic material to be used as a white artist saw fit 
did not occur solely in works of art but extended 
to the display and dissemination of works through 
public exhibitions. The idea manifested itself most 
apparently in the 1927 exhibition Canadian West 
Coast Art: Native and Modern. Marius Barbeau 
conceptualized the exhibit as “a stimulus towards 
the discovery of one of the most valuable artistic 
fields we have in Canada.”8  Despite advertising the 
exhibit as two-fold, equally emphasizing “native” 
and “modern” works, the curatorial staff did not 
invite First Nations people to attend the exhibition or 
participate in its development. All the “(house) poles, 
masks and ceremonial objects, as well as apparel and 
carved chests and argillite, were borrowed from the 
newly renamed National Museum, the Royal Ontario 

8 Hill, The Group of Seven, 191. 

Museum and McGill University.”9  The exhibit was 
designed by and for white audience.
      Both Landgon Kihn’s portrait and the Exhibition 
of 1927 presented First Nations works as objets d’art 
and not cultural artifacts. Sally Price argues this 
approach falsely credits the eye of the connoisseur 
for discovering the artistic merit of an item and 
undermines the intent of the original creator. Price 
distinguishes between the reception of objet d’art 
and the reception of cultural artifact: “For displays 
presenting objects as art, the implied definition of 
what should ‘happen’ between object and viewer 
is relatively constant; the museum visitor’s task-
pleasure… is conceptualized first and foremost as a 
perceptual-emotional experience, not a cognitive-
educational one.”10 Viewing an objet d’art does 
not require cultural edification. Instead, a visitor 
approaches a totem pole or an oil painting assuming 
she can understand both equally well.
      Displaying First Nations culture as a new artistic 
discovery not only wrongly credits connoisseurs but 
also alters the worth of the objects themselves. Price 
argues that the value of an object from so-called 

9 Hill, 191. 
10 Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 83. 

Fig. 2. Langdon Kihn. Juliette Gaultier de la Verendrye, 
1927, color pencil with silver leaf, Canadian Museum of 
History. https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/the-com-
plicated-case-of-juliette-gaultier-de-la-verendrye/



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201822

primitive cultures changes based on its categorization 
as either an objet d’art or an ethnographic artifact. 
The former is valued for its appearance, the latter for 
presenting a culture foreign to the viewer: “Through a 
‘rather than’ construction, aesthetic experiences and 
beauty are not joined with ethnographic evidence and 
social curiosity, but opposed to them.”11 An object is 
either a cultural artifact, which warrants historical 
context not provided in either Kihn’s painting or the 
Exhibition of 1927, or a hidden treasure discovered 
by eastern Canadian artists.

The exhibition presented objects removed from 
context, preventing the average Torontonian from 
differentiating the aesthetics and cultures of the First 
Nations people from that of the white colonizers. 
Modern painters shaped the exhibit and were the 
main attraction. They loaned their works to the 
gallery, and even Carr exhibited her work. In addition, 
she designed the catalogue cover, decorating it with 
a rendering of a totem pole.12,13 The organizers did 
not want to edify the public. Eric Brown clarified 
the exhibition’s aims in the preface to the catalogue, 
writing that the objects were “an invaluable mine of 
decorative design which is available to the student 
for a host of different purposes.”14 The exhibition 
wanted to preserve the objects and their designs so 
that modern artists could create a Canadian art.

The arrangement of the 1927 exhibition explicated 
the appropriation of First Nations culture as material 
for a new Canadian art by framing modern paintings 
with First Nations objects. Throughout the exhibit, 
sculptures and textiles were placed in the center of a 
wall, dividing the wall in two display areas.15,16 In one 
instance, a sculpture of a bird was centered on a wall; 
its wings arched over the adjacent spaces, implying 
a horizontal frame in addition to the central vertical 

11 Price, Primitive Art, 87. 
12 Hill, The Group of Seven, 191.
13 EX0085 12/12, November 11- December 31, 1927, Ex-
hibition of Canadian West Coast Art, National Gallery of 
Canada. http://bibcat.gallery.ca/screens/ex85.html 
14 Hill, 191. 
15 EX0085 9/12, November 11- December 31, 1927, Exhi-
bition of Canadian West Coast Art, National Gallery of 
Canada. http://bibcat.gallery.ca/screens/ex85.html
16 EX0085 8/12, November 11- December 31, 1927, Exhi-
bition of Canadian West Coast Art, National Gallery of 
Canada. http://bibcat.gallery.ca/screens/ex85.html 

frame.17 At the far edges of each wall hung either a 
pair of single oars or two pairs, framing the display 
area.18,19 Within the enclosed space hung either 
individual paintings or small groups of paintings. 
The First Nations art became an ornate yet functional 
interior frame. As a frame, the objects’ placement 
subjugated their importance to the importance of 
the modern paintings, which adopted the objects as 
subject matter and design motif. Such use was not 
unique to this exhibition. Barbeau notes at the end 
of his essay that the Château Laurier was designing 
a new wing to feature “an inner room a hundred feet 
long, and wide in proportion, with eighteen large 
supporting pillars and a vaulted ceiling, to be done 
in the Indian style.”20  Curious visitors could now 
experience the designs of the First Nations people—
appropriated, culturally artificial, but stylistically 
similar—without the hassle of traveling.

Carr challenged the established dichotomy of 
either objet d’art or ethnographic work by embedding 
cultural context within Zunoqua of the Cat Village. It is 
a painting by a white artist, showing colonizing forces 
destroying the imagery of the First Nations people. 
It ascribes to the multivalent method of viewing 
Price advocates. Price argues that understanding 
a non-western work of art requires acknowledging 
both “the ‘eye’ of even the most naturally gifted 
connoisseur …[that] views art through the lense 
(sic) of a Western cultural education” as well as the 
“discriminating ‘eye’ [of the creator]—similarly fitted 
with an optical device that reflects their own cultural 
education.”21 The brushwork and color choices result 
from Carr’s European training; the rendering of 
sculpture reflects the “discriminating ‘eye’”22 of the 
First Nations’ carver. Her painting intertwines the 
objet d’art with the ethnographic object, ensuring 
that her position as a white artist seeing a First 
Nations carving is clear in the painting. 

17 EX0085 9/12, November 11- December 31, 1927, Exhi-
bition of Canadian West Coast Art, National Gallery of 
Canada. Accessed October 30, 2017. http://bibcat.gallery.
ca/screens/ex85.html 
18 Ibid. 
19 EX0085 8/12, November 11- December 31, 1927. 
20 Barbeau, “The Canadian Northwest: Theme for Modern 
Painters,” 338. 
21 Price, Primitive Art, 93. 
22 Price, 93.



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201823

Emily Carr and the Group of Seven
The 1927 Exhibition placed Carr as a side 

note to the dominant Group of Seven. Their work 
overshadowed hers, as they established a national 
style from their regional eastern work. Although 
history lionized the Group of Seven for founding a 
national Canadian art, Lynda Jessup argues that the 
artists actually created a regional style propagated 
by the National Gallery of Canada as a national 
style. The artists in the Group of Seven advocated an 
anti-modernist style, believing it could “combat the 
decline in taste that caused the public to abandon 
older models of beauty and utility.”23 The artists 
disparaged contemporary society. Nevertheless, they 
participated in it fully. Both the artists and Canadian 
nationalists went on sketching trips into the parks 
and wildlife refuges around eastern Ontario.  Both 
groups appreciated the scenic wildlife as a unique 
Canadian experience. The artists, who associated 
“the idea of Canada as a northern wilderness and 
the health of the so-called Canadian race”24 returned 
laden with sketches and paintings that imbued the 
landscape with the artist’s emotional response. The 
artists hoped the mementos would edify the general 
public and heighten their ability to discern beauty 
from vulgarity. 

The Group partnered with the National Gallery 
to create a series of exhibitions that solidified their 
regional style into a national style. The Groups’ 
paintings were successful because they were accepted 
within the context of British imperialism. The 
success of developing trends in art depended on the 
arts’ “evaluation in an imperial context.”25 The Group 
of Seven avoided representing the negative effects 
of colonization, an essential aspect of Emily Carr’s 
work. As a result, their work appeared in exhibitions 
such as “the 1924-5 ‘British Empire Exhibition’.”26 
Frequent showings, such as “the 1926 Group of 
Seven exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto… 
followed in 1927 by the ‘Exhibition of Canadian 

23 Lynda Jessup, “Bushwhackers in the Gallery: Antimod-
ernism and the Group of Seven” in Antimodernism and 
Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Moderni-
ty, ed. Lynda Jessup (University of Toronto Press, 2001), 
132. 
24 Jessup, “Bushwhackers in the Gallery,” 133. 
25 Jessup, “Bushwhackers in the Gallery,” 136.
26 Jessup, 136. 

West Coast Art, Native and Modern’,”27  solidified 
the Group of Seven’s position in Canadian art. The 
mutually beneficial relationship between the Group 
of Seven and the National Gallery excluded artists of 
other themes and regions and established the Group 
of Seven as the proponent of a national style.

Because Emily Carr’s work questioned the 
colonalist values that the Group of Seven upheld, her 
art was largely excluded from national recognition. 
While Emily Carr employed similar practices, her 
excursions were not to scenic parkland but First 
Nations villages. While the Group of Seven depicted 
the landscape as a sight of emotional experience, 
Emily Carr prominently displayed the culture that 
the white population of British Columbia hoped to 
forcibly remove.

By showing her work in the 1927 Exhibition 
alongside the Group of Seven, Carr unwittingly 
trafficked First Nations imagery and subjugated her 
work to the Group of Seven’s. Carr’s works contain the 
inherent tension resulting from a white artist painting 
to preserve First Nations culture. Gerta Moray argues 
that interpreting Carr’s paintings requires a multifold 
approach to account for the contesting political and 
cultural forces and historical context. Carr was a 
born and raised British Columbian. When Carr was 
fifteen, she noticed the changes resulting from the 
newly finished Canadian Pacific Railway, including 
“the forcible assimilation of Native peoples…the 
eradication of their languages, beliefs and traditions 
through compulsory residential schooling, and the 
suppression of Frist Nations’ political protest.”28  
As the government enacted these policies, Carr 
developed a curiosity in her surroundings. She drew 
a series of documentary sketches of totem poles with 
“standards of accuracy that would satisfy current 
anthropological criteria.”29 Carr wanted to create 
a record: “In 1913 she mounted a large exhibition 
of nearly two hundred documentary paintings in a 
public hall she rented in Vancouver, and she wrote a 
lengthy lecture that she delivered to the public at this 
show on two occasions in an attempt to explain the 
content of her images.”30 Carr’s subject matter and 
27 Jessup, 136. 
28 Moray, “Emily Carr and the Traffic in Native Images,” 
71. 
29 Moray, 75. 
30 Moray, 78.



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201824

manner of working resulted from her proclivity for 
art and her awareness of contemporary politics.

However, Carr’s success as an artist depended 
on her participation in the white society and politics 
that undermined the culture of the First Nations 
people. She travelled to Europe for artistic training, 
as nothing comparable existed in British Columbia. 
Carr went “to France in 1910 and studied in Paris 
with a number of teachers associated with post-
impressionism and fauvism.”31 While there, Carr 
saw an opportunity to experiment, changing her 
rough sketches into paintings. Her natural interest 
in the totem poles around her home developed into 
“a conscious regard for the formal qualities of non-
European art.”32 Carr’s formal training provided her 
new skills and a new regard for her subject matter; 
these skills eventually propelled her work into the 
national arena. And by entering the national arena, 
centered in eastern Canada, Carr could earn merit as 
an artist. British Columbia lacked innovative artists 
and a thriving art scene. Carr contrasted this dull 
environment with the energy of the Group of Seven. 
As Carr notes, “These men are very interesting and 
big and inspiring…I know they are building an art 
worthy of our great country.”33 She expressed her wish 
to participate, writing, “I want to have my share, to 
put in a little spoke for the West, one woman holding 
up my end.”34 Displaying paintings in shows such 
as the Exhibition of 1927 offered Carr an audience, 
exposure, and recognition otherwise unattainable. 

Carr as Renegade
Although Carr wanted recognition for her work, 

she was also a highly opinionated artist. She often 
refused to subjugate her personal opinions to her 
work. Instead, she used her skills with pen and brush 
to unsettle the colonists entering British Columbia. 
While she sent her paintings east to appear in the 
Exhibition of 1927, she also opposed the etiquette of 
polite society and the denigration of First Nations 
culture that occurred in British Columbia. She 
traveled alone on her sketching trips. When the 

31 Moray, 74. 
32 Moray, “Emily Carr and the Traffic in Native Images,” 
74.
33 Quoted in Moray, “Emily Carr and the Traffic in Native 
Images,” 83. 
34 Ibid. 

white community worried about uprisings, Carr told 
a Vancouver audience, “I have spent long days and 
sometimes nights in lonely villages with no other 
protection than the worn teeth of my 13 year old 
dog. I never carry a revolver, being far more afraid of 
a gun than of an Indian.”35  Carr ignored the critics 
of her stories and, in 1941, published a memoir titled 
Klee Wyck. Although the book received the Governor 
General’s Award for English-language non-fiction, 
the government still took issue with Carr’s writing 
about her interactions with First Nations people, 
and “[a] number of passages have been expurgated 
from all editions of Klee Wyck printed since 1951.”36 
Carr wrote the text to her own standards and not 
those of the potential audience. Her creative works, 
whether paintings or writings, explicitly expressed 
her opinions and political stances. 

Moray’s multifaceted analysis of Carr’s work 
examines her oeuvre as a whole. Moray contrasts 
Carr’s trafficking of Native imagery—sending 
the paintings east without context—with the 
preservation of First Nations culture in her paintings. 
However, Moray’s analysis does not examine the 
specific messages of individual paintings. If Carr’s 
only interest was recording the First Nations villages 
for posterity, she would not take creative license 
with her depictions. Carr conveyed meaning beyond 
ethnographic facts through stylistic choices. 

In Zunoqua of the Cat Village, Carr selects 
saturated colors and bold framing.  The cats are black; 
the forest is emerald; the wood is rich mahogany. 
The scene is starkly framed. The statue occupies a 
little more than a third of the canvas horizontally 
and extends almost to the top edge; it frames the 
scene from within the painting. Behind the statue, 
the forest and undulating waves of grass overrun the 
remaining canvas. An ethnographic drawing would 
focus on the statue and the village, recording the 
details of the scene in natural lighting.

Instead, the painting animates the natural and 
inanimate objects, thereby anthropomorphizing 
the influence of white colonization on First Nation 
civilization into an elemental struggle. The sky is 
azure and the boughs of the evergreens musky green; 

35 Quoted in Moray, “Emily Carr and the Traffic in Native 
Images,” 76. 
36 Moray, 78. 



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  2018

it appears as though dusk is fading into night. The 
unruly waves of grass emerge surreptitiously from 
deeply shadowed woods. Despite the fading light 
in the back of the canvas, the waves of grass are 
disconcertingly spot lit. The harsh light condenses 
the foreground into the mid-ground through harsh 
shadows and transforms the lush, mossy green of the 
trees into a putrid, yellow mass in the foreground. 
As the mass of grass undulates forward, nature itself 
sickens. As the health of nature deteriorates, the 
lurking cats emerge in ever increasing numbers. 
Within the verdant woods, two cats peer around 
sturdy tree trunks; their eyes scarcely stand out 
against their black fur. As the grass pulls the cats 
forward, more of their faces emerge; by the middle  
ground, the eerie, ochre eyes of the cat gaze out 
menacingly. The cats are a hidden menace that lurk 
behind the façade of impenetrable woods. Just as the 
railroad brought new waves of colonizers into British 
Columbia, the waves of grass in the center of the 
canvas emanate from deep within the woods.

The aggressive momentum of the vigorous waves 
of grass and animated cats threatens the lifeless and 
immobile male statue. The bright light that turns the 
grass putrid also strikes the smooth, carved surfaces 
of his body. Where his arm blocks the light, the wood 
of his lower legs is luscious mahogany; luminescent 
red highlights on the brown wood convey a bodily 
warmth and vitality lacking in the cold stare of 
the cats. However, the harsh light drives away the 
warmth, relegating it to the bottom of the canvas, 
and transforms his forehead into an icy, purple-
tinged swath of white. The white highlights every 
protruding surface of his face and draws attention to 
the desolation of his facial features. His purple lips 
freeze partially open, revealing a black void; his eyes 
are a black void, unaffected by the light that draws 
notice to every feature of his face. Only the white 
pupil of the eye of his serpent headdress remains 
animated, a mediator between the humanity of the 
statue and the animalistic power of the cats. The white 
spreads over his body, the lack of color revealing 
putrid yellow highlights that measure the progress 
of disease and decay. Against the background of a 
pestilence spreading across the canvas, the statue 
totters precariously and inconclusively. Firmly 
pressing his arm against a block of wood held to his 
side, he turns his back on the buildings of his village. 

The canvas crops his legs from the scene, as well as his 
dangling fingers. Is he about to fall on his back and 
succumb? Or is he departing the scene of his own 
accord, ceding the space to the vigorous and vital 
new force? The reading depends on the audience.

Despite sincere intentions, Carr could not 
preclude her privileged position in Canadian society 
from her representation of First Nations culture.  She 
strove to preserve the culture of First Nations people, 
and she partially achieved her goal in Zunoqua of 
the Cat Village. The scene does not focus on the 
aesthetic qualities of the statue; it focuses on the 
impacts of the colonizing forces on the statue and 
the environment. Nevertheless, Carr positions the 
statue and the buildings so that they frame the action 
in the center; the colonizing force is the main actor, 
and spot lit to boot. Using the First Nations artifact 
as a frame mimics the displays of the Exhibition of 
1927, which Carr participated in five years prior to 
this painting. Just as a central carving and hanging 
paddles framed modern paintings in the Exhibition 
of 1927, the statue together with the two buildings 
divide the canvas into two cells: one cell contains the 
woods, the nexus of the destructive waves, and one 
contains the destructive waves themselves. First the 
waves engulf the buildings. Next, they will engulf the 
statute. If it were not for the boundaries of the canvas, 
the waves would threaten Carr and the audience as 
well. However, the prospective audience and Carr 
remain safe, and Carr remains able to record the 
moment, because they are all protected members of 
white society. 
      
      
      
      

25



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  2018

Bibliography     
Barbeau, Marius. “The Canadian Northwest: Theme

for Modern Painters.” The American  Magazine 
of Art 24, no. 5 (1932): 331–338. JSTOR, www.
jstor.org/stable/23935179.

Carr, Emily. Beloved World: The World of Emily
Carr. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1996.

Carr, Emily. Zunoqua of the Cat Village. 1931,
oil on canvas, 112.2 cm x 70.1 cm. Wikiart, 
Wikimedia Commons, 2016. https://www.
wikiart.org/en/emily-carr/zunoqua-of-the-cat-
village-1931. 

EX0085 8/12. November 11-December 31,
1927.  Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, 
National Gallery of Canada. Accessed October 
30, 2017. http://bibcat.gallery.ca/screens/ex85.
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