In the Wake of Kane: ROM ethnologist sheds new light on Canadian
art icon   For Kenneth Lister, the door to a ROM art storeroom
would prove to be a portal to a world that would intrigue,
enchant, and some might say obsess the intrepid ethnographer for
decades to come. Just out of university and working as a
technician in the ROM’s Ethnology department, he first became
aware of the ROM’s extensive collection of art by Paul Kane, the
artist-adventurer who in the mid 19th century chronicled
Canada’s Native peoples, their customs and material culture.
The ROM’s Anthropology section holds the world’s largest
collection of Kane’s art—a hundred oil paintings and 373
sketches. Between 1845 and 1848, travelling by steamboat, canoe,
York boat, and bateau, and by snowshoe and on horseback, Kane
made two trips among the Great Lakes and from southern Ontario,
across the western plains, and on to the Pacific coast. At the
time it was thought that North America’s Native peoples were
vanishing, victims of assimilation and a