Flint, Feather, and Other Material Selves: Negotiating the Performance Poetics of E. Pauline Johnson

Flint, Feather, and Other Material SelvesNegotiating the Performance Poetics of E. Pauline Johnson Manina Jones (bio) and Neal Ferris (bio) archaeology, poetry, performance In her recent work on celebrated Anglo-Mohawk poet-performer E. Pauline Johnson (1861–1913), Mishuana Goeman writes that scholars "have the responsibility to excavate [this writer] from the mire of racial trappings and approach her work in a new light."1 In this article we take that advice literally by situating a discussion of Johnson on the borders between literary and material culture studies, including archaeology, in order to read her work as a continuation of the long-standing tradition of performative Indigenous negotiations with the evolving colonialism of the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. We do this to highlight a continuity between material, social, and aesthetic practices in the ongoing construction of identity, a process that both informs and exceeds Johnson's poetic performances. At the heart of this process are family, Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee-centric understandings of self in agential relation to the emergent colonial world of Canada.2 While Johnson as a cultural figure has been the subject of considerable conversation in literary scholarship, as one of her most prolific critics observed in 2012, "Nearly a century after her death, the question of how to read Pauline Johnson's poetry and prose concerns fewer critics than it should."3 Johnson's renowned public poetry performances between the 1880s and the early twentieth century, along with her publications, made her the most widely known woman poet of her time in Canada. Her work must not, we argue, be read within segregated "aesthetic" or "social" conceptualizations of performance produced by disciplinary silos. Rather, we would like to place these literary occasions [End Page 125] within a broader cultural and historical spectrum that includes the Haudenosaunee and Mohawk community from which Johnson emerged, in which significance and value are encoded in the improvisational performance of everyday life and material culture. Johnson's recitals, in which she appeared in both European and Indigenous costumes to deliver original poetic material and dramatic "character sketches," took place, in effect, on the borders of cultures and at the thresholds of nations, where identities are practiced, contested, and reconceptualized in a continual process of becoming.4 They thus reflect neither a singular and fixed transhistorical Indigenous authenticity nor a capitulation to encroaching European modernity; instead, they emerge from a heritage of creatively performed polyphonic identities in progress. This active negotiation of identities extends back to Mohawk and Iroquoian-speaking peoples' first engagements with the developing colonialism of the eighteenth century and continues, arguably, to the present day.5 Kristina Fagan has made the case that insufficient attention has been paid to the ways in which Johnson might be understood as a specifically Mohawk writer.6 More recently, Rick Monture's work has sought to read Johnson's writing in terms of its efficacy in representing Iroquois/Haudenosaunee sovereignty; Monture places her at odds with the majority of Six Nations people because she failed to argue with consistency for Haudenosaunee autonomy and nationhood.7 While we do not dispute Johnson's shifting and sometimes self-contradictory positioning in relation to the emergent Canadian nation-state, Aboriginal sovereignty, and British imperialism, we think there is merit in considering her work within long-lived Haudenosaunee traditions of bridging political and cultural boundaries in active enactments of identity, engagement, and affiliation with other Iroquoian-speaking, Indigenous, and colonial people. One challenge to understanding Johnson's poetry recitals in cultural context is the tendency in some past scholarship to reify Johnson's role as an exceptional poetic figure. Johnson's exceptionality is in part based on colonial-centric nostalgia for a perceived disappearing ancestral identity and legitimacy (the myth of "the last of the race"), which Johnson in fact cultivated as part of her romanticized public image. It is also reinforced by the retrospective singularity of her widely mourned death in 1913, unmarried and childless, at the age of fifty-two from breast cancer, sentimentalized in the popular press of the time. In more recent times, scholarship has tended to place Johnson within a limited disciplinary [End Page 126] framework that does not account...

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