Odds and Ends by Emily Carr (1939)
Emily Carr’s painting Odds and Ends is the epitome of an unconquerable environment. On a smudge blue sky, tree stumps dot the lush moss of the landscape while sickly thin birches growing through the logging stand weak and fragile. While post-clearing stumps of ancient trees occupy half the painting, pine-covered mountains saturate the other half. Loggers do not begin clearing such terrains to mow the entire landscape of trees, but they log to make a livable place for themselves. Similarly, many pieces of Canadian art depict the struggles of immigratory settlement into foreign societies and the challenges of finding or having to pioneer a culture of acceptance in new communities.
Odds and Ends relays through art the experiential distance that Susanna Moodie felt from her home in England when she arrived in Canada, as well as the separation that the Ukrainian mother or Chinese boy or Iranian lady endured from home. Perhaps they do not know the language, are alone or have little money. Absolutely, there will be frauds, thieves, and corruption at every wrong turn, yet all the same, there will be immigration services, familiar communities, and kind people to help new arrivals feel at home. Regardless of motives to immigrate, settlers are just as accompanied as they are alone.
In terms of Odds and Ends, every new settler is stepping into a forest. They may have never lived in such a wild environment as this, but just as people before them were able to inhabit the logging town thirty miles north under the same conditions, the settlers should be determined to not only make a living but flourish where they are. There are, of course, ravenous wolves, grumpy bears, and poisonous mushrooms, but there are also streams of freshwater, ripe blackberries on bushes, and non-poisonous mushrooms. Until they take up courage and conquer the land on its terms by clearing trees, setting up camp, and finding food to eat, they cannot truly settle onto the land.
But even after they have cleared their share of trees, there will always be an endless thicket beyond their bounds. Their resolved problems will only face more obstruction than fathomed.
Furthermore, it is upon acknowledging the perpetual, environmental challenges that the settlers can begin to accept and feel acceptance from their communities. Take Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground, where the families of post First World War veterans from cultures all across Canada took up the government’s promise of free farming land on Vancouver Island and populated the Portuguese Creek settlement. Despite the arduous toil of the people, the land was desolate and fruitless, and the obstinate nature of the deeply rooted trees demanded perilous explosives to clear the area, but it was the forest fire that touched their community and took the life a little girl that proved to be the event that finally established a sense of community.
The uprooting of an individual’s former roots and the courage and willingness to lay down roots where they settle drives them to become a local community. Even as the loggers of Odds and Ends were unable to uproot the stumps with simply an axe, and nor were the settling “farmers” of the families in Broken Ground, roots are the stubborn treasure that individuals carry to remember and learn of surrender if they desire acceptance in their new communities.
Thus the challenges of settling are daunting for both immigrants and relocators, but the struggle of finding acceptance binds all of their circumstances together. As Odds and Ends has a shadowy, intimidating landscape that seems impossible to conquer, yet is filled with fragments of light that promise warmth, settlers who understand that victory does not lie in defeating the daunting environment, but rather in illuminating their settling communities with flickers of hope, are the ones who successfully pioneer better lives amidst hardship.