Abstract: In 1954, two red faced operas where created in British Columbia by white women: Barbara Pentland’s The Lake imagines the Okanagan from the point of view of Susan Alison, the first white women settler in the region while Lillian Estabrooks and Mary Costley’s Ashnola: A Legend of Sings Water offers a Gilbert and Sullivan cross-dressed version of pre-European contact Aboriginals. This article analyzes these operas and other 1950s texts like newspaper articles and populist histories of British Columbia to demonstrate how invader settlers seek to control the Other semiotically via red face and thus gain a sense of identity that ameliorates their settler status to make them “native.” Red face in these operas betray an imperial sense of melancholy as white women use it to trouble patriarchy while enforcing white privilege. The paper concludes by considering the persistence of neo-colonial red face in the Canadian national imaginary.
