Pauline Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose

By Pauline Johnson and Michael Gnarowski

Half-Mohawk, half-English author Pauline Johnson astounded Canada with her unique poetry, prose, and presentations.

Pauline Johnson was an unusual and unique presence on the literary scene during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Part Mohawk and part European, she was a compelling female voice in the midst of an almost entirely male writing community. Having discovered her talent for public recitation of poetry, Johnson relied on her ancestry and gender to establish an international reputation for her stage performances, during which she appeared in European and native costume. These poems were later collected under the title of Flint and Feather (1912) and form the source of the selections appearing in this volume.

Later, suffering from ill health, Pauline Johnson retired from the stage and devoted herself to the writing of prose, collected in Legends of Vancouver, The Moccasin Maker (1913), and The Shagganappi (1913), gleanings from which form part of this collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jun 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781459704282

Pauline Johnson

Pauline Johnson (1861–1913) was Canada’s first native author. Her most famous collection of verse, Flint and Feather went into many printings and was successfully followed by two volumes of short stories, The Moccasin Maker and Legends of Vancouver.

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Introduction

Emily Pauline Johnson, more readily known as Pauline Johnson (and, on occasion, by her Indian stage name, Tekahionwake), the centenary of whose early death is marked, in part, by the publication of this new edition of her work, bringing together for the first time her poetry and her prose, left a remarkable legacy that has kept critics and literary historians at odds for almost a century.

Born the youngest child of a marriage between a white British immigrant mother, Emily Susanna Howells (1824–1898), and a Mohawk chief, George Henry Martin Johnson (1816–1884), she has left us with confusion about her date of birth, with 1861[1] emerging as the likeliest year. Raised at Chiefswood, the manorial property of her father, Pauline was looked after by a nanny and homeschooled with a stint at the Indian school on the Six Nations Reserve. Her mother was intensely aware of and committed to her British heritage, a heritage which included devoted reading of the best books of English literature that formed a fine collection at Chiefswood. Pauline grew up reading major British authors, including prominent writers such as Tennyson and Swinburne, whose influence would linger years later in her own writing. But, as we shall see, there would be a price to be paid in terms of her originality and acceptance with modern critics for allowing echoes of the likes of Swinburne to sound in her poems. The modernist generation, which would come to dominate the scene from the 1920s onward, would reject Swinburne and his likes as convincingly as they would shrug off the lingering influences of Victorianism in general in Canadian poetry.

Chiefswood — front of the house.

Upon the death of Pauline’s father, the family left Chiefswood, which was a hereditary residence, and moved to Brantford. Pauline had begun to write verses and to recite poetry as a young adolescent, and there would have been recitations in the family circle, as well as for the entertainment of distinguished guests who, while Chief Johnson was alive, were frequent visitors at Chiefswood. Governors general, highly placed officials, and members of touring royal parties frequently called upon the Six Nations Reserve, and were usually entertained to tea in the best English manner at the Johnson residence. Of course, circumstances changed materially when Chief Johnson died. Pauline was twenty-two years old with no real prospects for earning a living or having a career. The youngest child and daughter of Chief Johnson would have been expected to make an acceptable marriage. Pauline chose writing, and from her early twenties shows an increasing tempo of published verse, so that from about 1885 her poems began to appear in the more important cultural and literary periodicals. Johnson’s contemporary, Charles G.D. Roberts, soon became one of many admirers and supporters of her work, and readily accepted her poems for publication in Toronto’s The Week, where he worked as poetry editor. Roberts himself, destined to become known as a prime figure in Canadian poetry, had had a successful start as a poet, when as a nineteen-year-old novice he had published, to acclaim, his first collection of verse, Orion and Other Poems (1880). Roberts was to become a leading figure among other contemporaries who were later dubbed the Confederation Poets. All of them had been born in the years 1858–1862. Pauline was set to join this group of Canadian-born writers, marked by a keen sense of their own nationality, a sense that found its way into a repertoire of images and concerns that were strongly of their native land. This could easily be the land of Pauline, who, as a not-quite full-blooded Mohawk, could still speak in the voice of the Native peoples. Her own Indianness would find such popularity and appeal on the stage with essentially white or European audiences that it would open the door for another similar aboriginal performer, a full-blooded young Cree recitalist[2] who, a generation later, became an elocutionist and interpreter of Pauline Johnson’s own poetry. She followed Johnson in the style of her performances, appearing first in European dress, then changing into an Indian costume. Hers was a tragically short-lived career on the stage, with much of the benefit, financial and otherwise, going to the Methodist Church. Her name was Frances Nickawa. Years later, when as a resident in London, Charles G.D. Roberts accompanied his daughter Edith to a reception where, clad in Indian dress, Frances Nickawa recited Pauline’s poems. As E.M. Pomeroy in her generous biography of Roberts would describe it: Miss Nickawa, a full-blooded Cree from the region of Hudson Bay wore an Indian costume of white doeskin and recited in her lovely soft voice a number of poems by Pauline Johnson, who was a Mohawk (Pomeroy, 268).

Pauline Johnson in European dress early 1890s.

A growing list of poems published in magazines and periodicals in the first half of the 1890s suggests that Johnson had been establishing a reputation as a serious writer, helped, in part, by some of her poems being included in William D. Lighthall’s landmark anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), and in J.E. Wetherell’s more modest collection, Later Canadian Poems (1893). Appearance in the influential cultural periodical The Week (1883–1896) in the years 1886 to 1894, and the friendly support of Charles G.D. Roberts seemed to point in the direction of a full-time literary career for Pauline Johnson. However, for a young woman, carving out a living from writing was a formidable challenge. There were few options open to Johnson, who lacked formal education or training in any of the skills that normally gave a living to young women of her time. Her ability as a recitalist or elocutionist, as she was sometimes called, indicated a possible career on the stage. It must have been a daunting choice. It was one thing to do well with readings to a politely attentive audience in the salon of one of the great houses of London; the public stage, on the other hand, would be a very different kind of experience. She would have to enter the world of public entertainment, in which she would have to compete with other kinds of popular amusements. The music hall, at that time, being foremost in that category, where, as novelist John Buchan (1875–1940), and future governor general of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir[3] (1935–1940), put it, silly shows of … capering women and monkey-faced men…. were the norm. Johnson would have to take that in stride, just as in her later years when she took part in the Chataqua movement she had to contend with making herself heard over the noise of bible-thumping preachers, yelling children, and barking dogs.

All of this may have helped to point Pauline Johnson towards a career on the stage, where she appeared as a recitalist, sometimes known as an elocutionist, a performance art requiring an attractive appearance, a pleasant voice, and considerable dramatic flair. From 1894 onwards, until her retirement from public performances, Johnson submitted herself to an arduous schedule of travel, performance, and more travel, in a circuit that took in many Canadian towns and cities, as well as American venues, mostly along the border and farther afield. Boston and other larger centres all gave Johnson good reviews. But the crowning success of her public performances were her appearances in England in the great houses of London’s elite society and in the drawing rooms of London’s most prominent hostesses. Entertainment by visiting artists and performers in the salons of the rich and powerful had become an essential part of society life in the last years of the nineteenth century, and Pauline’s act as part Indian poet, part elegant recitalist of English poetry, was a welcome departure from the steady fare of all too familiar entertainments of singers, violinists, and the occasional wild west type, in the eyes of slightly jaded London socialites. Moreover, Pauline was apparently a lively conversationalist who could hold her own at dinner table chat.

What these remarks were to bring us to is the recognition that Pauline Johnson’s career had swung away from the purely literary and the printed page to that of the performance of poetry as an act of public reading, associated, as was the custom, with other forms of theatrics such as songs, joke telling, and the occasional juggler or ventriloquist. Pauline seems to have taken this in stride, even though a close friend and advisor, Harry O’Brien, felt that she was debasing her art.

Her foray into London had made it possible to find a publisher for her first collection of poetry, The White Wampum, a slim volume of some sixty-odd pages that came out in 1895 under the prestigious imprint of John Lane, the London publisher. There would not be another collection until an equally slim volume, which she called Canadian Born, was published in Toronto in 1903. These two collections, together with a small group of miscellaneous poems, were eventually assembled under the title Flint and Feather and brought out in 1912, the year before Johnson’s death — a sum total of barely one hundred poems for which she had written a prefatory note explaining the words flint and feather. The emphasis was entirely on Johnson’s Indian heritage, and could be said to have been in keeping with an ever-present set of concerns and sentiments. Had she not declared at a dinner party in London at the table of Lord and Lady Ripon[4] that … there was no government existing [in Canada?] since the confederated government of the Iroquois … (Keller, 78). It may have been said in jest, but it contained an important kernel of truth about what Pauline believed, for she carried a torch for the aboriginal people of Canada.

Flint and Feather enjoyed great success, being reprinted many times, while the story of Pauline Johnson’s life has had at least two serious biographical treatments, the most recent and elaborate one being by Charlotte Gray, also under the slightly confusing title of Flint and Feather. From the critical standpoint her work has been subject to a challenging examination through the prism of recent feminist scholarship. The unanswered question, then, for the present-day reader is why did Johnson’s reputation suffer such a decline as far as the critical reception of her writing is concerned? Her contemporaries, mainly male poets and critics alike, took her seriously, noting especially the Indian cultural idiom that she projected in and through her poems. Her departure, so to speak, from the purely literary scene in Canada, and her absence from that scene for more than a dozen years while she moved and worked in the world of stage and performance, coupled with an understandable decline in productivity as a poet, and her move into literary journalism in her last years may have served to confuse those who had been interested in, and sought to promote her career as a writer and Indian poetess.

Having settled in a then-distant Vancouver, she had removed herself from her Mohawk heritage and the literary centres of eastern and central Canada. Moreover, seriously ill from about 1910 to her last days in early 1913, she wrote prose sketches and short magazine articles, and collected Indian legends, always trying to earn a living under the most difficult conditions of terminal illness. Her Legends of Vancouver, issued privately in 1911, a collection of prose pieces based on conversations with Chief Joe Capilano, a Squamish Indian, would have some success, being reprinted several times. Other prose writings, The Moccassin Maker (1913) and The Shaggannapi (1913), were posthumous collections of prose pieces that well-intended admirers of Johnson made possible. The latter, with a strong element of the northwest coast of British Columbia, had a generous introduction by no less a figure than the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, who poignantly remembers his first meeting with Johnson whom he calls … Tekahionwake, the Indian girl…. The publication of these prose collections of Johnson’s work came too late to make a difference in the last months of her life. She was dying of breast cancer, helped as much as possible by a few devoted friends, and buoyed up greatly by a visit from the Duke of Connaught,[5] who had visited Chiefswood during her adolescence, and to whom she had dedicated her first and subsequent collections of poetry. These, gathered later under the title Flint and Feather, continued to enjoy great popularity well after her death. Designated as her collected poems, they had gone into twenty-eight printings by 1972, and a library card, in at least one instance, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, records a steady checkout traffic and an interested readership for this collection.

Popular success notwithstanding, other major factors entered into play after Johnson’s death that had an effect on her reputation.

The advent of the First World War put an end to many cultural institutions and tastes of the Edwardian era. British critics such as Theodore Watts-Dunton,[6] who reviewed her poetry admiringly and wrote a prestigious introduction for Flint and Feather, had lost their authority and hold on the reading public, while friendly sensibilities such as Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) and others of his period, with whom Pauline Johnson shared affinities, had lost their audience and much of their appeal. However, John Garvin, in his impressive anthology Canadian Poets (1926), and Bliss Carman and Lorne Pierce in their own anthology Our Canadian Literature, published somewhat earlier in 1922, gave Johnson ample coverage, while John Logan and Donald French had high regard for Johnson, giving her a chapter in their influential Highways of Canadian Literature (1924).

But the modernists were already at the gates. Their uncompromising attitude to all things Victorian would enshrine itself in the new doctrine of modern Canadian criticism, so that while Johnson’s poetry survived in modest appearances in some anthologies, a hard-edged modernism sought to turn its back on anything that smacked of sentiment or rhyme or the wishful dreamy idiom of the preceding era. Modernist ideologues such as Robert Ayre, writing in the Canadian Forum, struck uncomfortably hard, calling Johnson a pretty legend and a genteel lady with … nice thoughts about Nature and the proper sentiments … Arthur Smith, the influential theorizer about Canadian modernism and an even more influential mid-twentieth-century anthologist, described Johnson as the author of … graceful and airy lyrics as Shadow River which make no claim to significance as did her once popular and theatrical Indian poems (The Book of Canadian Poetry, 1943, 211). Smith modified his view in the third edition of his anthology (1957), saying of Johnson, Her education was literary and her poetry is in no way primitive or aboriginal (205). In his chapter Minor Poets in The Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (1976), Roy Daniells, West Coast poet and scholar in his own right, gave Johnson a page of thoughtful reading for an adequate understanding of her status as a writer of consequence and note. He wrote, … what value her poems will have when the memory of her vigorous personality has faded it is difficult to say. He went on to add

Pauline Johnson’s reputation would appear to be securely based, not on her poetry as such but on the need felt in England at the turn of the century for fresh contact with primitive life, and on the continuing secret desire of all Canadians to reach back into our innocent and heroic world of wild woods and waters before the white man came and the guilt of conquest whether French or English was incurred. (History, 442)

This, of course, was a sentiment similar to that of Pauline Johnson’s admirer, the English critic Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose introductory essay would be featured in the many reprintings of Flint and Feather. In reviewing W.D. Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), in the prestigious English periodical The Athenaeum, Watts-Dunton was struck by what he saw as a new note in English-language poetry, which he described as … the note of the Red Man’s Canada. A graphic motif sprang readily from this idea, and editions of Flint and Feather had canoes with Native paddlers in a wilderness setting as their end papers. The Musson Book Company of Toronto, which had become Johnson’s publisher of record, saw the sales potential of exploiting Native visual motifs in their successfully frequent reissues of Flint and Feather, the most elegant and elaborate edition being bound in limp leather with stylized Native arrows on its cover, and a large arrow on the title page with a facsimile signature of Johnson under the wording The Complete Poems. The biographical sketch in this edition features a superb photograph of Johnson in profile with the famous bear claw necklace showing to advantage. Scattered through the text are full-page paintings by J.R. Seavey, a Hamilton artist, as illustrations serving to support the text. This is a truly lavish treatment of Johnson’s poems, and explains a popularity that prompted a British publisher, Hodder and Stoughton of London, to issue the twenty-eighth impression in 1972.

Title page of the deluxe leather-bound edition of Flint and Feather (1930?). Note the stylized Native arrow.

It remains for Margaret Atwood to round out this discussion of Pauline Johnson. In her introduction to The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (1982), Atwood points to three poets, William Henry Drummond (1854–1907), Robert W. Service (1874–1958), and Johnson, who, she says, have been frequently dismissed as not serious. But Pauline Johnson … turns out to have been a poet of considerably more sophistication despite her habit of dressing up in costumes and chanting in public …[7] (Oxford Book, xxxiv).

The last word must go to Johnson, who in her author’s foreword in Flint and Feather, explained as follows:

This collection of verse I have named Flint And Feather because of the association of ideas.Flint suggests the Red man’s weapons of war … [the] feather may be the eagle plume that crests the head of a warrior chief; so both flint and feather bear the hall mark of my Mohawk blood." (E.P.J.)

Pauline Johnson died on March 7, a hundred years ago to the day that this introduction is being completed. She had left careful instructions about her funeral, the carrying out of which had been undertaken by the Women’s Canadian Club, assisted by her closest friends. A request that the city of Vancouver mark the occasion resulted in the lowering of flags on public buildings. The funeral service was held in Christ Church Cathedral on March 10. The funeral cortege, it is reported, moved slowly through silent streets lined with respectful mourners, with bowed heads and doffed hats, many of whom were Native people. A memorial service had been held in the Mohawk Church on the Six Nations Reserve on March 9. Pauline’s ashes were buried (after extraordinary civic permission) in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, and a monument, despite Pauline’s wishes to the contrary, was erected on a site specially cleared by city workers in what was then a wild forested setting.

Note: The texts assembled here are derived from several sources. The poetry is based on Pauline Johnson’s collected edition which was called Flint and Feather (1913). The prose comes from different sources, but mainly from Legends of Vancouver, The Moccasin Maker (1913), and The Shagganappi (1913).

Notes

1. It is curious to see the confusion surrounding Pauline Johnson’s year of birth. Although 1861 has been generally accepted by her biographers and Canada’s Post Office Department, which issued a commemorative stamp in 1961, a mystery persists, with 1862 having some claim to our attention. First, the biographical note on Johnson in W.D. Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889) says: Miss Johnson was born at the Johnson estate ‘Chiefswood,’ on the Grand River, on 10th March 1862. One assumes that this information must have been supplied by Pauline Johnson herself. Other sources of some authority include R.E. Watters, who gives 1861 as Johnson’s year of birth in his authoritative A Checklist of Canadian Literature and Background Materials 1628–1960 (1972). Her monument in Stanley Park also gives 1862 as the year of her birth.

2. Frances Nickawa, also known as Fanny Beardy, whose Cree name was Nai-ka-way-a, was born in Manitoba in 1898 and died in Vancouver in 1928. An adopted child who had shown early promise as a recitalist, she was absorbed into the activities of the Methodist Church, touring and performing as an elocutionist on behalf of the Church. Accompanied by her adoptive mother, Frances carried out a gruelling schedule begun in 1919, which took her abroad to England and Australia. For dramatic effect she wore an Indian costume of her own design comprising buckskin fringes and beads, and frequently recited the poems of Pauline Johnson. She married in 1926, but already in failing health she retired