E. Pauline Johnson | |
|---|---|
 E. Pauline Johnson, c. 1885–95 | |
| Born | Emily Pauline Johnson 10 March 1861 Six Nations, Canada West |
| Died | 7 March 1913 (aged 51) Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Resting place | Stanley Park, Vancouver |
| Language | Mohawk, English |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Citizenship | Mohawk Nation British subject |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable works |
|
Emily Pauline Johnson (10 March 1861 – 7 March 1913), also known by her Mohawk stage name Tekahionwake (pronounced dageh-eeon-wageh, lit. 'double-life'),[1] was a Canadian poet, author, and performer who was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her father was a hereditary Mohawk chief of mixed ancestry and her mother was an English immigrant.[2]
Johnson—whose poetry was published in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain—was among a generation of widely-read writers who began to define Canadian literature. She was a key figure in the construction of the field as an institution and has made an indelible mark on Indigenous women's writing and performance as a whole.
Johnson was notable for her poems, short stories, and performances that celebrated her mixed-race heritage, drawing from both Indigenous and English influences. She is most known for her books of poetry The White Wampum (1895), Canadian Born (1903), and Flint and Feather (1912); and her collections of stories Legends of Vancouver (1911), The Shagganappi (1913), and The Moccasin Maker (1913). While her literary reputation declined after her death, since the late 20th century there has been a renewed interest in her life and works. In 2002, a complete collection of her known poetry was published, entitled E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose.
The Mohawk ancestors of Johnson's father, Chief George Henry Martin Johnson, had historically lived in what became the state of New York, United States. Theirs was the easternmost territory in the homelands of the Five Nations of the Iroquois League (later the Six Nations), also known as the Haudenosaunee. In 1758, her great-grandfather Tekahionwake was born in the province of New York. When he was baptized, he took the name Jacob Johnson. He was named after Sir William Johnson, the influential British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, who acted as his godfather.[3] The Johnson surname was subsequently passed down in the family.
After the American Revolutionary War started, Loyalists in the Mohawk Valley came under intense pressure. The Mohawk and three other Iroquois tribes had allied with the British rather than the rebel colonists. Jacob Johnson and his family moved to Canada. After the war they settled permanently in Ontario on land given by the Crown in partial compensation for Haudenosaunee losses of territory in New York.
His son John Smoke Johnson spoke English and Mohawk fluently and had a talent for oration. Due to his demonstrated patriotism to the Crown during the War of 1812, Smoke Johnson was made a Pine Tree Chief at the request of the British government. Although his title could not be inherited, his wife Helen Martin was a descendant of the Wolf Clan and a founding family of the Six Nations reserve.[4][5] Through her lineage and influence (as the Mohawk had a matrilineal kinship system), their son George Johnson was named chief.
George Johnson inherited his father's gift for languages and began his career as an Anglican Church missionary translator on the Six Nations reserve. Whilst working with the Anglican missionary assigned there, Johnson met the man's sister-in-law, Emily Howells.
Emily Howells was born in Bristol, England, to a well-established British family who had immigrated to the United States in 1832. Her father, Henry Howells, was a Quaker and intended to join the American abolitionist movement. Emily's mother, Mary Best Howells, died when the girl was five, when they were still in England. Her widowed father married again before they left for the US. In the US, he moved his family to several American cities, where he founded schools to gain an income, before settling in Eaglewood, New Jersey. After his second wife died (women had a high mortality in childbirth), Howells married a third time; he fathered a total of 24 children. He opposed slavery and encouraged his children to "pray for the blacks and to pity the poor Indians". His compassion did not preclude his believing that his own race was superior to others.
At the age of 21, Emily Howells moved to the Six Nations reserve in Ontario, Canada, to join her older sister, who had moved there with her Anglican missionary husband. Emily helped her sister care for her growing family. After falling in love with George Johnson, Howells gained a better understanding of the Native peoples and some perspective on her father's beliefs.
Much to the chagrin and displeasure of both their families, Johnson and Howells married in 1853. The birth of their first child reconciled the rift between their respective families. Several prominent Canadian families were descended from 18th- and 19th-century marriages between British fur traders, who had capital and social standing, and elite daughters of First Nations chiefs, in what were considered valuable economic and social alliances by both sides. Shortly after their marriage George became a chief of the Six Nations and was appointed as Crown interpreter for the Six Nations.[6][full citation needed] In 1856 Johnson built Chiefswood, a wood mansion at his 225-acre estate. He and his family lived here for years at the Six Nations reserve outside Brantford, Ontario.
In his roles as government interpreter and hereditary chief, George Johnson developed a reputation as a talented mediator between Native and European interests. He was well respected in Ontario. He also made enemies because of his efforts to stop illegal trading of reserve timber. Physically attacked by Native and non-Native men involved in this and liquor traffic, Johnson suffered from severe health problems; he died of a fever in 1884.[7]
E. Pauline Johnson was born at her family home Chiefswood at the Six Nations reserve outside Brantford, Ontario. She was the youngest of four children of Emily Susanna Howells Johnson (1824–1898), an English immigrant, and George Henry Martin Johnson (1816–1884), a Mohawk hereditary clan chief. Because George Johnson worked as an interpreter and cultural negotiator among the Mohawk, British, and representatives of the government of Canada, the Johnsons were seen as part of Canadian high society. They were visited by distinguished intellectual and political guests of the time, including The Marquess of Lorne, Princess Louise, Prince Arthur, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, painter Homer Watson, anthropologist Horatio Hale, and the third Governor General of Canada, Lord Dufferin.[8]
Johnson's mother emphasized refinement and decorum in raising her children, cultivating an "aloof dignity" that she felt would earn them respect in their adulthood. Pauline Johnson's elegant manners and aristocratic air owed much to this background and training. George Johnson encouraged their four children to respect and learn about both their Mohawk and English heritage. Because George Johnson had partial Mohawk ancestry, his children were, by British law, legally considered Mohawk and wards of the British Crown. But, according to the Mohawk matrilineal kinship system, children are considered born into the mother's family, and take their status from her. Thus the Johnson children were considered to belong to no Mohawk family or clan, and were excluded from important aspects of the tribe's matrilineal culture.[9]
A sickly child, Johnson did not attend Brantford's Mohawk Institute, a residential school established in 1834. Her education was mostly at home and informal, derived from her mother, a series of non-Native governesses, a few years at the small school on the reserve, and self-guided reading in her family's expansive library. She read deeply in the works of Byron, Tennyson, Keats, Browning and Milton, and enjoyed reading tales about Indigenous people such as Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha and John Richardson's Wacousta. These informed her own literary and theatrical work.[10]
Despite growing up in a time when racism against Indigenous people was normalized and common, Johnson and her siblings were encouraged to appreciate their Mohawk ancestry and culture. Her paternal grandfather John Smoke Johnson was a respected authority figure for her and her siblings. He educated them by traditional Indigenous oral storytelling before his death in 1886.[9] Johnson taught his life lessons and stories in Mohawk; the children understood it but were not fluent in speaking it.[8] Smoke Johnson's dramatic talents as a storyteller were absorbed by Pauline, who became known for her talent for elocution and her stage performances. She wore artifacts passed onto her by her Mohawk grandparents, such as a bear claw necklace, wampum belts, and various masks. Later in her life, Pauline Johnson expressed regret for not learning more of her grandfather's Mohawk heritage and language.[11]
At the age of 14, Johnson went to Brantford Central Collegiate with her brother Allen. She graduated in 1877. A fellow schoolmate was Sara Jeannette Duncan, who eventually developed her own journalistic and literary career.
Pauline Johnson attracted many potential suitors, and her sister recalled more than half a dozen marriage proposals from Euro-Canadians in her lifetime. Though the number of official romantic interests remains unknown, two later romances were identified as Charles R. L. Drayton in 1890 and Charles Wuerz in 1900.[12] But, Johnson never married nor remained in relationships for very long. She was said to have flirted with boys in Grand River. Later she wrote what was described as "intensely erotic poetry." Due to her career, she was unwilling to set aside her racial heritage and adapt to placate partners or in-laws.[12] Despite everything, Johnson consistently had a strong network of supportive female friends and attested to the importance they had in her life.
Johnson said:
Women are fonder of me than men are. I have had none fail me, and I hope I have failed none. It is a keen pleasure for me to meet a congenial woman, one that I feel will understand me, and will in turn let me peep into her own life- having confidence in me, that is one of the dearest things between friends, strangers, acquaintances, or kindred.[12]
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During the 1880s, Johnson wrote and performed in amateur theatre productions. She enjoyed the Canadian outdoors, where she travelled by canoe. Shortly after her father's death in 1884, the family rented out Chiefswood. Johnson moved with her widowed mother and sister to a modest home in Brantford. She worked to support them all, and found that her stage performances enabled her to make a living. Johnson supported her mother until her death in 1898.[5]
The Young Men's Liberal Association invited Johnson to a Canadian authors evening in 1892 at the Toronto Art School Gallery. The only woman at the event, she read to an overflow crowd, along with poets including William Douw Lighthall, William Wilfred Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott. "The poise and grace of this beautiful young woman standing before them captivated the audience even before she began to recite—not read, as the others had done"—her "Cry from an Indian Wife". She was the only author to be called back for an encore. "She had scored a personal triumph and saved the evening from turning into a disaster."[13] The success of this performance began the poet's 15-year stage career.
Johnson was signed up by Frank Yeigh, who had organized the Liberal event. He gave her the headline for her first show on 19 February 1892, where she made her debut with a new poem written for the event, "The Song My Paddle Sings".
At 31 years old, Johnson was perceived as a young and exotic Native beauty.[12] After her first recital season, she decided to emphasize the Native aspects of her public persona in her theatrical performances. Johnson created a two-part act that would confound the dichotomy of her European and Indigenous background. In act one, Johnson would come out as Tekahionwake, the Mohawk name of her great-grandfather, wearing a costume that served as a pastiche and assemblage of generic "Indian" objects that did not belong to one individual nation. But, her costume from 1892 to 1895 included items she had received from Mohawk and other sources, such as scalps inherited from her grandfather that hung from her wampum belt, spiritual masks, and other paraphernalia.[14] During this act she would recite dramatic "Indian" lyrics.
At intermission, she changed into fashionable English dress. In act two, she came out as a pro North West Mounted Police (now known as the RCMP) Victorian English woman to recite her "English" verse.[13] Many of the items on her native dress were sold to museums such as the Ontario Provincial Museum, or to collectors such as the prominent American George Gustav Heye.[15] Upon her death she willed her "Indian" costume to the Museum of Vancouver.
There are many interpretations of Johnson's performances. The artist is quoted saying "I may act till the world grows wild and tense". Her shows were tremendously popular. She toured all across North America with her friend and fellow performer, and later business manager, Walter MacRaye. Her popularity was part of the immense interest by European Americans and Europeans in Indigenous peoples throughout the 19th century; the 1890s were also the period of popularity of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and ethnological aboriginal exhibits.[12]
In 1883 Johnson published her first full-length poem, "My Little Jean", in the New York Gems of Poetry.[12][16] She began to increase the pace of her writing and publishing afterwards.
In 1885, poet Charles G. D. Roberts published Johnson's "A Cry from an Indian Wife" in The Week, Goldwin Smith's Toronto magazine. She based it on events of the battle of Cut Knife Creek during the Riel Rebellion. Roberts and Johnson became lifelong friends.[17] Johnson promoted her identity as a Mohawk, but as an adult spent little time with people of that culture.[5] In 1885, Johnson travelled to Buffalo, New York, to attend a ceremony honouring the Haudenosaunee leader Sagoyewatha, also known as Red Jacket. She wrote a poem expressing admiration for him and a plea for reconciliation between British and Native peoples.[8]
In 1886, Johnson was commissioned to write a poem to mark the unveiling in Brantford of a statue honouring Joseph Brant, the important Mohawk leader who was allied with the British during and after the American Revolutionary War. Her "Ode to Brant" was read at a 13 October ceremony before "the largest crowd the little city had ever seen".[13] It called for brotherhood between Native and white Canadians under British imperial authority.[8] The poem sparked a long article in the Toronto Globe, and increased interest in Johnson's poetry and heritage. The Brantford businessman William Foster Cockshutt read the poem at the ceremony, as Johnson was reportedly too shy.[17][13]
During the 1880s, Johnson built her reputation as a Canadian writer, regularly publishing in periodicals such as Globe, The Week, and Saturday Night. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, she published nearly every month, mostly in Saturday Night. Johnson is considered among a group of Canadian authors who were contributing to a distinct national literature.[18][14] The inclusion of two of her poems in W. D. Lighthall's anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), signalled her recognition.[12] Theodore Watts-Dunton noted her for praise in his review of the book; he quoted her entire poem "In the Shadows" and called her "the most interesting poetess now living". In her early works, Johnson wrote mostly about Canadian life, landscapes, and love in a post-Romantic mode, reflective of literary interests shared with her mother, rather than her Mohawk heritage.[12]
After retiring from the stage in August 1909, Johnson moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she continued writing. Her pieces included a series of articles for the Daily Province, based on stories related by her friend Chief Joe Capilano of the Squamish people of North Vancouver. In 1911, to help support Johnson, who was ill and poor, a group of friends organized the publication of these stories under the title Legends of Vancouver. They remain classics of that city's literature.
One of the stories was a Squamish legend of shape shifting: how a man was transformed into Siwash Rock "as an indestructible monument to Clean Fatherhood".[19] In another, Johnson told the history of Deadman's Island, a small islet off Stanley Park. In a poem in the collection, she named one of her favourite areas "Lost Lagoon", as the inlet seemed to disappear when the water emptied at low tide. The body of water has since been transformed into a permanent, fresh-water lake at Stanley Park, but it is still called Lost Lagoon.
Johnson drew on her mixed ethnic background and cultural heritages as a major theme in her work. The heroine of her short story "The De Lisle Affair" (1897), was disguised. Readers were discomforted due to the uncertainty of appearances, particularly amongst women.[12] Due to their subordinated social, economic, and political positions, women often had to play the roles as mediators for men, practising ambiguity and disloyalty for the sake of their safety and sanctity. The notion of shifting identity is seen in "The Ballad of Yaada" (1913), where a female character explains "not to friend – but unto foeman I belong ... though you hate, / I still must love him," which suggests the potential for communities to understand one another through love and kindness.[12] But she also explores the risk of the coming together of communities and cultures. Johnson's mixed-race heroine Esther, in "As It Was in the Beginning", kills her unfaithful White lover. With the words "I am a Redskin, but I am something else, too – I am a woman", Esther is demanding recognition of multiple subjectivities. Johnson was trying to convey that the real world consists of much more than oppressive ideologies and artificial divisions of race and nation enforced by authoritative figures such as the racist Protestant minister in this story, revealingly nicknamed "St Paul" after the biblical misogynist.[12]
The posthumous Shagganappi (1913) and The Moccasin Maker (1913) are collections of selected stories first published in periodicals. Johnson wrote on a variety of sentimental, didactic, and biographical topics. Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson provided a provisional chronological list of Johnson's writings in their book Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (2000).
Johnson died of breast cancer on 7 March 1913 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Devotion to her persisted after her death. Her funeral was held on what would have been her 52nd birthday. It was the largest public funeral in Vancouver history to that time. The city closed its offices and flew flags at half-mast; a memorial service was held in Vancouver's most prestigious church, the Anglican cathedral supervised by the Women's Canadian Club. Squamish people also lined the streets and followed her funeral cortege on 10 March 1913. The Vancouver Province headline on the day of her funeral said, "Canada's poetess is laid to rest". Smaller memorial services were also held in Brantford, Ontario, organized by Euro-Canadian admirers.
Johnson's ashes were placed in Stanley Park near Siwash Rock, through the special intervention of the governor general, the Duke of Connaught, who had visited during her final illness, and Sam Hughes, the minister of militia.
Her will was prepared by the prestigious firm of Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper, son of the former 6th prime minister of Canada. Despite Johnson's preference for an unmarked grave, the Women's Canadian Club sought to raise money for a monument for her. In 1922, a cairn was erected at her burial site with the inscription stating, in part, "In memory of one whose life and writings were an uplift and a blessing to our nation".[17] During World War One, part of the royalties from Legends of Vancouver went to purchase a machine gun inscribed "Tekahionwake" for the 29th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Johnson left a mark on Canadian history that has carried on long after her death.
Scholars have had difficulty identifying Johnson's complete works, as much was published in periodicals. Her first volume of poetry, The White Wampum, was published in London in 1895. It was followed by Canadian Born in 1903. The contents of these volumes, together with additional poems, were published as the collection Flint and Feather in 1912. Reprinted many times, this book has been one of the best-selling titles of Canadian poetry. Since the 1917 edition, Flint and Feather has been misleadingly subtitled The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson.
But in 2002, professors Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag produced an edition, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, that contains all of Johnson's poems found up to that date. A number of biographers and literary critics have downplayed her literary contributions, as they contend that her performances contributed most to her literary reputation during her lifetime.[10][20] W. J. Keith wrote: "Pauline Johnson's life was more interesting than her writing ... with ambitions as a poet, she produced little or nothing of value in the eyes of critics who emphasize style rather than content."[21]
Despite the acclaim she received from contemporaries, Johnson had a decline in reputation in the decades after her death.[14] It was not until 1961, with commemoration of the centenary of her birth, that Johnson began to be recognized as an important Canadian cultural figure. This was also the beginning of a period when the writing of women and First Nations people began to be re-evaluated and recognized.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood admitted that she did not study literature by Native authors when preparing Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), her seminal work. At its publication, she had said she could not find Native works. She mused, "Why did I overlook Pauline Johnson? Perhaps because, being half-white, she somehow didn't rate as the real thing, even among Natives; although she is undergoing reclamation today." Atwood's comments indicated that Johnson's multicultural identity contributed to her neglect by critics.[22]
As Atwood noted, since the late 20th century, Johnson's writings and performance career have been reevaluated by literary, feminist, and postcolonial critics. They have appreciated her importance as a New Woman and a figure of resistance to dominant ideas about race, gender, Native Rights, and Canada.[12] The growth in literature written by First Nations people during the 1980s and 1990s has also prompted writers and scholars to investigate Native oral and written literary history, to which Johnson made a significant contribution.[12]
E. Pauline Johnson has received much less attention than one might expect for an accomplished and controversial literary figure. Older critics often dismissed Johnson's work; in 1988 critic Charles Lillard characterized her readers dismissively as "tourists, grandmothers ... and the curious".[12] In 1992, a Specialized Catalogue of Canadian Stamps, issued by Canada Post misrepresented Johnson as a "Mohawk Princess", ignoring her scholarly accomplishments. And in 1999 Patrick Watson introduced the History Channel's biography of Johnson by deprecating "The Song My Paddle Sings". Even in regard to scholarship, Johnson was often overlooked in the 1980s in favour of Duncan Campbell Scott for writing about indigenous life, although he was Euro-Canadian.[12] But a new generation of feminist scholars has begun to counter narratives of Canadian literary history and Johnson is being recognised for her literary efforts.[citation needed]
An examination of the reception of Johnson's writing over the course of a century provides an opportunity to study changing notions of literary value, and the shifting demarcation between high and popular culture. During her lifetime, this line scarcely existed in Canada, where nationalism prevailed as the primary evaluative criterion. The Vancouver Province headline on the day of her funeral in March 1913 simply stated, "Canada's poetess is laid to rest".[12] During the following decade, an "elegiac quality often imbued references to Pauline Johnson".[12] To Euro-Canadians, she was considered the last spokesperson for a people destined to disappear: "The time must come for us to go down, and when it comes may we have the strength to meet our fate with such fortitude and silent dignity as did the Red Man his."[12]
Johnson is capable of remarkably clear dissections of the racist habits of the time, a clarity that comes out of her standpoint as a privileged Mohawk educated in both Haudenosaunee society and white Anglo-Canadian culture.[7] Her deft use of analogues between Iroquois traditions of government and religion and those of the dominant culture, works to show the Six Nations to be as politically responsible as, and far less sexist than, the British; the one God of the Longhouse to be more benign than the Christian God; and Iroquois traditions to be more time-tested, healthy, and virtuous than those of a corrupted urban modernity.[7] However, her patriotic enthusiasm for Canada and the Crown, as expressed in "Canadian Born" and elsewhere, seems at odds with her Indigenous advocacy.[7]
In the 21st century, some have questioned the moral ambiguity of Johnson's work and whether she herself was racist. In 2017 school administrators at the High Park Alternative Public School in Toronto characterized the song "Land of the Silver Birch" as racist, mistakenly asserting that Johnson wrote the poem on which the song is based. In a letter to parents, they said, "While its lyrics are not overtly racist ... the historical context of the song is racist." Some experts disagreed with this assertion, and the music teacher, who arranged for the song to be performed at a school concert, sued the administration for defamation.[23][clarification needed]
A 1997 survey by Hartmut Lutz of the state of Canadian Native Literature in the 1960s, pointed to the importance of this era as establishing the foundation for the new wave of Indigenous writing that surged in the 1980s and 1990s. Lutz identified "1967 as the beginning of contemporary writing by Native authors in Canada", marking the publication of George Clutesi's landmark work, Son of Raven, Son of Deer.[12] His discussion briefly mentioned Johnson but he did not acknowledge that 1961 marked the centennial of Johnson's birth; the resulting celebration nationally demonstrated the endurance of her prominence in Indigenous and Canadian literature and popular culture.[12]
As a writer and performer, Johnson was a central figure in literary and performance history of Indigenous women in Canada. Of her importance, Mohawk writer Beth Brant wrote "Pauline Johnson's physical body died in 1913, but her spirit still communicates to us who are Native women writers. She walked the writing path clearing the brush for us to follow."[12]
Johnson influence over other female Indigenous Canadian writers was expressed by their references to her throughout various decades, for example:
Broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild (Cree) remembers stumbling across "The Cattle Thief" in the public library: "I hand-copied that entire poem right then and there and carried it around with me, reading it over and over." Later she wrote a poem about Johnson entitled "she writes us alive." There are numerous other examples of contemporary Indigenous artists, women and men alike, who were inspired by Johnson, notably within Canadian literature.[7]
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, government policies towards Indigenous Canadians were increasingly cruel. Across the continent, Indigenous children were forcibly removed to residential schools; on the Prairies, communities such as the Dogrib, Cree and Blackfoot were confined to artificial reserves; settler attitudes towards the Dominion's original inhabitants curdled and hardened. Johnson critiqued some Canadian policies that resulted in such legalized and justified mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. For example, in her poem "A Cry From an Indian Wife", the final verse reads:
Go forth, nor bend to greed of white men's hands,
By right, by birth we Indians own these lands,
Though starved, crushed, plundered, lies our nation low ...
Perhaps the white man's God has willed it so.[24]
Because of the Indian Act and faulty scientific blood quantum racial determinism, Johnson was often belittled by the term "halfbreed".[25][26]
Know by the thread of music woven through
This fragile web of cadences I spin,
That I have only caught these songs since you
Voiced them upon your haunting violin.
This list cites the first known publication of individual texts, as well as first appearance in one of Johnson's books, based on the work of Veronica Jane Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson.[12]
