PRODUCING BC IN WORDS AND IMAGES Sharon's Web Journal for English 470D

Thursday | September 12, 2002
Tanoo: 1941 Versus 1951

Our assignment for next class is to first read the Irwin edition of Emily Carr's "Tanoo," mull it over (preferably during a long walk), then proceed to read the original, 1941 version. This process, assures Dr. Martineau, will yield an interesting result.

Before sharing my insight, I'd like to make a comment about Carr's stories. As I had already read past "Tanoo" for today's class, I would need to re-read it once again. To peak my curiosity and hopefully uncover some life facts about Carr, I read Ira Dilworth's foreword. Dilworth writes about Carr's "peeling" of sentences to strip "all ambiguous and unnecessary worlds, replacing a vague word by a sharper, clearer one until the sentence emerged clean and precise in its meaning and strong in its impact on the reader." With this armed knowledge, I found myself reading radically slower than usual, sometimes rereading a sentence two, three, something even four times trying to absorb, and reabsorb any uncaptured meanings like words of gold. By reading this way, I caught passages I had previously missed. In fact, it altered my first perception of the story. And after reading the 1941 edition, my perception of the Irwin edition once again altered, even more dramatically, this time.

The mentioning of the missionary's daughter accompanying Carr on her excursion to Tanoo with Jimmie and Louisa, I thought, was Carr's way of retelling in detail, every aspect of the trip. In fact, I found both "Ucluelet," the first story in the book, set in a tone where missionaries were sympathetic and cordial with aboriginal peoples, such as their interaction with the Chief (In "Sophie") and with Mrs. Wynook. The notorious treatment of aboriginal families by European missionaries is well-known. Missionaries, recalls Carr, laughed at the tradition of totem poles, calling them heathenish. The missionary's daughter, whom upholds a "superior" European culture, found Jimmie and Louisa's habits savage-like, as shown in her refusal to try devilfish and exclaiming Tanoo, a place of spiritual value, as a "Horrid place!"

I wonder why the later edition of "Tanoo" deletes certain passages, notably those in which Europeans are sneering at the aboriginal way of life. We know Carr is unbiased; she commit herself to understanding Native culture. She does not directly judge the missionary's daughter, introducing her as the missionary's "pretty daughter." During the story, Carr only goes as far as calling her "Miss Missionary," perhaps a sarcastic way of direct us to the pushiness of the girl. My belief is that Carr's European audience met her work(s) with harsh criticism. As a result, for profitability's sake, it is necessary to blot out racial statements for Europeans' who look to Carr's books to acquire knowledge about First Nations people.

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