The Stage of History and the Theater of Myth

The disenfranchisement, cultural impoverishment and decimation of Native peoples in the two countries (resulting from disease, ruthless wars, forced relocation onto reservations and, in Canada, large-scale, low-value purchases of Native territory) forever altered the relation of Aboriginal people with the land they had inhabited for 15,000 years. Ironically, this period coincided with a broader and increasing public interest in Aboriginal people, both expressed and popularized by news headlines surrounding such conflicts. The diminishing of the “frontier” wilderness, the emerging controversy over these events and policies and the near-extinction of the buffalo and bison (greatly accelerated by the construction of two transcontinental railroads) led to a desire to record and memorialize the Native communities and their lifestyles. Their images, as captured or interpreted by artists, contributed to the distinctive national characters of both countries.

Concomitant with these concerns were the efforts to present national and natural histories of the United States and Canada using their landscapes as backdrops to distinguish the “New World” from “Old Europe.” Many American painters – Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Worthington Whittredge, Ralph Albert Blakelock, Thomas Moran and Frederic Remington – and well-known photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan and Edward S. Curtis encouraged this view with frequently romanticised and sometimes polemic images. In Canada, painters such as Henry Sandham, William Brymner, Homer Watson and Emily Carr, and photographers such as Alexander Henderson, Charles Horetzky and William Notman captured their own land, its Aboriginal inhabitants and its rapidly changing landscape.