Morley people the favored subject of painters

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The portraits of a number of Aboriginal people will be on display at the Whyte Museum for a new theme called Spirits of the West that started Oct. 11 and runs through to January 2003.

One of the five exhibits that speaks to the theme is entitled Friends and Neighbours: Portraits by Peter and Catharine Whyte. This particular exhibit (held in Swiss Guides Room) portrays people who the Whytes befriended at home and abroad.

Most of the portraits in this exhibit are of Stoney people from Morley, said curator Carol Black.

The Whytes had a close relationship with the Stoney Indians, which is documented in their letters to each other and to their friends and family.

Excerpts from some of the Whytes' letters are included in the exhibit with the appropriate paintings.

It was in the 1930s that the Whytes painted their Stoney friends, people with strong faces and of historic importance. By the 1940s their focus shifted to landscape painting.

However, in summer 1968, Catharine joined Toronto painter Kathleen Daly Pepper for a sketching trip to Povungnituk, a northern Quebec Inuit settlement.

She wrote to friends, "A great experience living in an Eskimo settlement with such fine friendly people...it was especially good for me to do portraits again after so many years." Her Inuit portraits are part of the exhibit.

The Whytes' interest in culture led to the development of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, which was opened in 1968.

Ten years earlier, however, the Wa-Che-Yo-Cha-Pa Foundation-the earliest name for the present Peter and Catharine Whyte Foundation, which operates the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies-was registered.

When the foundation was created, "they wanted the name for their foundation and they asked Chief Walking Buffalo for a Stoney name," explained Black. The name he gave "meant a place where all things good, wise and beautiful are brought together in harmony," said Catharine in her speech at the museum's 10th anniversary.

After Peter's death in 1966, Catharine remained involved in the museum construction and helped the local Native people by providing a loan service.

"A lot of the Stoneys when they needed money, they would come to Catharine and ask her if they could borrow some money and then leave some beadwork, so that when they paid back some money they would pick up the beadwork....It was just something that the Stoneys as a way of borrowing money in good faith would offer [objects] to Catharine with the promise that they would come back, and get them, and repay the money," Black explained.

"And Catharine also did a lot of promoting of Stoney handcrafts, and made a lot of effort to have the Stoneys compensated fairly for their work in places that their crafts were sold in town."

For her help, Black added, " (Catharine) was given lots of gifts by the various members of the Stoney Tribe."

In a letter to her friends at Christmas 1970, Catharine wrote: "Easter Monday at a powwow in Morley the family of Walking Buffalo [Chief George MacLean] made me a blood sister with the name Princess White Shield. Mary Kootenay and other members of George MacLean's family made me a beautiful white buckskin costume. Friends of over 40 years."