(1861-1913)
Mohawk writer and performed
Born at Chiefswood on the Grand River Reserve of the Six Nations, near Brantford, Ontario, Emily Pauline Johnson was the daughter of George Henry Martin Johnson, Mohawk (Chief Teyonnhehkewea), and Emily Susanna Howells, English-born cousin of William Dean Howells. Johnson's father and paternal grandfather were strong influences on her life. The latter, John "Smoke" Johnson (Sakayengwaraton), was a hero of the War of 1812 and a renowned orator in the Iroquois councils. A gifted speaker in his own right, her father frequently made speeches on behalf of his people and served as a liaison between the Six Nations community and the outside world.
Johnson was reared at Chiefswood, the impressive house built by her father that became a gathering place for Indian and white visitors. She was primarily educated at home by her mother, who stimulated her children's love of literature by reading them works by the English romanticists. At age fourteen, Emily entered Brantford Collegiate Institute, where she remained until 1877. Her greatest pleasure there was performing in plays and pageants, although her parents opposed her desire to become an actress. After her return to Chiefswood, she devoted the next two years to visiting friends and writing poetry.
Not all of Johnson's childhood was idyllic. Because her father fearlessly tried to eradicate illegal traffic in alcohol and timber on the reserve, he was severely beaten in 1865, clubbed and shot in 1873, and assaulted again in 1878. George never fully recovered from these attacks; he died in 1884. The family then abandoned Chiefswood and a gracious lifestyle to live in nearby Brantford. After Smoke Johnson's death in 1886, Johnson assumed her great-grandfather Jacob Johnson's Indian name, signing all her poems "E. Pauline Johnson" and "Tekahionwake."
After the family was settled in Brantford, Johnson returned to writing poems, several of which were published in the Week, a Toronto journal. Johnson's public career began in 1892, when her recitation of her poem "A Cry from an Indian Wife" electrified a Toronto audience. Thereafter she supported herself primarily as an interpreter of her own works in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. Often billed as "the Mohawk Princess," Johnson performed the Indian portion of her program in a fringed buckskin dress of her own design and the remainder in an evening gown. In 1894, Johnson traveled to London, where under the patronage of such prominent figures as Sir Charles Tupper, Canadian high commissioner to London, and Lady and Lord Ripon, former viceroy of India and Britain's colonial secretary, she met members of London society and gave recitals in their salons.
She also arranged for the publication of her first volume of poetry, The White Wampum (1895). Approximately half of the poems in the volume had Indian themes; many of these poems characterize Indian women. In reviewing the volume, the Canadian critic Hector Charlesworth called Johnson the most popular figure in Canadian literature and "in many respects the most prominent one." Critics were especially impressed by her "Song My Paddle Sings," a lyric later memorized by generations of Canadian schoolchildren.
The White Wampum's appearance greatly increased interest in Johnson's performances. In 1898, she became engaged to Charles Robert Lumley Drayton, whose parents strongly opposed their son's marriage to a mixed-blood older woman and stage performer. Drayton broke the engagement a year later. After her mother died in 1898, Johnson made Winnipeg her home. Vulnerable after her broken engagement and the loss of her mother, she may have become romantically involved with her unscrupulous manager, Charles Wurz (or Wuerz) in 1900-1901. She alludes to a tragic love affair in three of her best poems, unpublished in her lifetime: "Morrow Land," "Heidelburgh," and "Song." Undoubtedly Johnson's grief over these relationships led to her frequent use in her writings of the theme of the betrayal of Indian women by white men. In 1901 J. Walter McRaye, with whom she had toured briefly in 1897, became her business partner and manager.
Her second book of poems, Canadian Born (1903), disappointed her critics because it included many poems written years earlier and because the new ones lacked the fresh voice of the earlier volume. In 1906, she traveled to Great Britain again, where she received rave reviews for her London performances and met such influential people as Algernon Swinburne. From 1907 to 1912, she frequently contributed stories and articles to Mother's Magazine and Boys' World, both published in the United States by the Cook Publishing Company. Her small income as an author enabled her to retire from performing in 1909 and settle permanently in Vancouver.
During this period, she began her collaboration with Joe Capilano, a Squamish chief she had met during her 1906 visit to London. Her imaginative and dramatic re-creations of his Chinook stories were published as The Legends of Vancouver (1911), one of her best works. Here Johnson revealed an acute sense of the importance of setting, the interaction between storyteller and audience, and the act of storytelling. In 1912, Johnson published the poetry collection Flint and Feather, which included poems from her two earlier volumes as well as additional work. She died of cancer in Vancouver in 1913.
Two collections of her prose were published posthumously in 1913: The Shagganappi, boys' adventure stories; and The Moccasin Maker, which contains memorable portraits of Indian and non-Indian women on the frontier, a loving fictional account of her parents' courtship and marriage, and the essay "A Pagan in St. Paul's." The Moccasin Maker, which focuses on the role of Native American and white women on the frontier, is more important to the development of American Indian literature than is Johnson's poetry. The family focus in this book reflects the traditions of the women's domestic romances popular at the turn of the century; however, the heroines of such stories as "The Red Girl's Reasoning" and "As It Was in the Beginning" display far more independence and strength than the traditional heroine in the mainstream literature of the time.
Although critics have praised the lyricism of some of Johnson's poems, they have also noted her tendency to sentimentalism. Nevertheless, her Flint and Feather and The Legends of Vancouver have remained in print since her death. Johnson was the first American Indian woman to publish books of poetry and a collection of short fiction. She was also one of the first Native American authors to explore the theme of the mixed-blood Indian's search for identity, a dominant concern of twentieth-century Native American writers.
See also
Literature by Indians.
E. Pauline Johnson, The Moccasin Maker (1913; reprint, with an introduction and notes by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987); Betty Keller, Pauline: A Biography of Pauline Johnson (Vancouver: Douglas, 1981); Walter McRaye, Pauline Johnson and Her Friends (Toronto: Ryerson, 1947).
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
University of Illinois at Chicago
