"I may act till the world grows wild and tense": The Performances of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake

This dissertation documents and analyzes the performance history of Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka)-English poet and performer E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake. She was born in 1861 on the Six Nations Reserve of white and Mohawk parentage. By 1892, Johnson had developed a professional career as a travelling actress. Until her breast cancer diagnosis in 1909, she performed across Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. While on tour she recited her poetry, enacted adaptations of her prose stories, dressed up in fancy costumes, and performed comedic sketches (often in character-based dialect) with various acting partners. Although her performance history is intriguing, most scholarship about Johnson concentrates on the immense impact that her poetry had on the development of Canadian culture and mythology. However, this doctoral study explores the reasons that Johnson’s performances were largely overlooked in critical assessments of her impact. I propose a new set of paradigms and methodological tools to account for very divergent assessments (both appreciative and critical) of this important Indigenous performer by engaging with evocative fragments of Johnson’s archive. To this end, I explore the mutable and transformative quality of Johnson’s theatre history, mostly in chronological format. In addition, I address the substantial sophistication of her strategies and approaches, and the difficulties that she encountered as an Indigenous woman performing to settler audiences, within a framework of specific economies of representation. My examination of Johnson’s theatre history begins with a micro-historical focus on Johnson’s performances of 1892, when she was developing her theatrical skill set and arriving at a set of conventions on which she would rely during her touring life. Next, my dissertation discusses the variations of Johnson’s performances—the constant revision of her persona through both costuming and repertoire. Finally, I offer a detailed analysis of the dramatic repertoire that Johnson enacted in her later years. I draw on a plethora of primary research artifacts (clippings, reviews, performance photos, and scripts related to Johnson’s performance history) and glean significant historical information from these sources through a careful study of theatrical cultures active in the late nineteenth century. This allows for an exploration of the biases that underpin many responses to Johnson’s theatrical history – biases that are, so often, attached to broader critical engagements with Indigenous performance histories.

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