Walter Scott, E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), and the Vancouver Picturesque

This article tracks, first, the influence of the Scottish poet and novelist Walter Scott on early picturesque depictions of the city of Vancouver and, second, the critique of that picturesque in Legends of Vancouver (1911), by the Mohawk Canadian writer E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). Vancouver artists adapted the picturesque, with Scott’s poetry as one of its touchstones, to depict the commercial activity of the city’s coasts surrounded by the North Shore Mountains, to where Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh communities were displaced. Scott’s dialectical articulations of the picturesque also provided a template for Johnson to evince its dispossessive effects and its critical power.