Pauline Johnson, Canada's "Indian Poetess": "The Most Unique Fixture in the Literary World of Today"

Pauline Johnson, Canada's "Indian Poetess":"The Most Unique Fixture in the Literary World of Today" Carole Gerson (bio) Regarded during her lifetime as "the most unique fixture in the literary world of today" ("Literary"), Emily Pauline Johnson continues to challenge categorization. She was born in 1861 on the Six Nations Reserve in Ohsweken, Ontario. Her father was a Mohawk1 chief who worked as a translator; her English-born mother raised her four children to value their mixed heritage, an identity that deeply inflected Pauline's life as a writer and [End Page 182] a performer. Educated in the English literary classics, she published her first poems while in her teens. The loss of the family's income and elegant home following her father's death in 1884 prompted Johnson to follow the familiar women's path of turning to writing as a means of support. She quickly became known through her articles and poems in Canadian newspapers and magazines under the distinctive signature of "E. Pauline Johnson," often paired with "Tekahionwake" (meaning "double wampum"), borrowed from her paternal grandfather as she had no Indigenous name of her own. When she turned to the performance circuit in 1892, she was quickly inducted into Canada's evolving national paradigm as the country's representative "Indian poetess,"2 a role soon heightened by her creation of the buckskin dress that she wore for the first half of her program, returning after intermission in her other costume, an elegant evening gown. Her success as a performer of her own compositions (humorous skits as well as stories and poems) carried her across Canada many times, with occasional tours in the US and three trips to England, in 1894, 1906, and 1907, where she was celebrated as an exotic colonial by Brits who had enjoyed previous visits by Indigenous performers.3 Altogether, Johnson wrote about 165 poems, most of which appeared in three volumes published during her lifetime: The White Wampum (London: John Lane, 1895), Canadian Born (Toronto: Morang, 1903), and Flint and Feather, erroneously described as her "Complete Poems" (Toronto: Musson, 1912 and many later editions).4 At the time of her death from breast cancer on 7 March 1913, three days before her fifty-second birthday, Pauline Johnson was Canada's best-known female poet. Newspaper reports described her as a "poetess," usually modified as "Indian Poetess," "Canada's Indian Poetess," or "Canada's Poetess." What did these expressions signify: could one be both an "Indian" and a conventional "poetess"? Especially if one performed on stage, in costumes signalling these contrasting identities? Johnson's very public death suited the trope of the tragic Victorian poetess, as did an obituary comment that "the defeat of love runs like a grey thread through much of her verse" (Mair 281). My recent invitation to talk about Johnson in a course on modernist women poets raises a contestatory question: could Johnson be invoked into a modernist or pre-modernist paradigm, given that the publication context of her first book associated her with the avant-garde writers of John Lane's Keynotes Series? Her own publicity materials resisted the word "poetess," preferring such terms as "poet-reciter," "comedienne," "poet-elocutionist," and "poet-entertainer."5 In 1890, early in her career, Johnson wrote to a friend, "I am willing to consent to anything legitimate, that will mean success in the end" (Collected xvi). She challenged the whiteness of the poetess addressed by Tricia Lootens6 when she reportedly said, "Never let anyone call me a white woman. … There are those who think they pay me a compliment in saying [End Page 183] I am just like a white woman. My aim, my joy, my pride is to sing the glories of my own people" (qtd. in Seton 5–6). While only about ten per cent of Johnson's poems directly concern Indigenous topics, these pieces overtook her other work in constructing her reception. The outspoken first-person female voices in her best-known performance narratives counter the self-sacrificing Native woman of Felicia Hemans's "Indian Woman's Death Song," a trope that Johnson vehemently rejected.7 Asserting Indigenous rights to recognition and fairness, the speaker of...

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