Poet inspires new generation

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Paddling Her Own Canoe-The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake will be a welcome addition to the libraries of Native and Canadian history aficionados and to women's studies courses in universities. Published by the University of Toronto Press in June, the heavily referenced book-a third of its 331 pages comprise the appendix, bibliography and index-is, despite its scholarly approach, immensely readable for an educated general audience.

Most people who have heard of Johnson, a part-Mohawk woman from Six Nations territory in Brantford, Ont., probably have read or have had read to them poems from her acclaimed 1912 book of poetry called Flint and Feather. Johnson's "The Song My Paddle Sings" is perhaps her best known poem.

She was also a popular late 19th- early 20th-century stage performer in North America and Britain, who alternately coddled colonial sensibilities and challenged them when they demeaned or repressed women and Native people. She was both a champion of Native and women's rights and of "a perfected Canadian confederation." Her utopian vision "rested with a more inclusive British Empire."

Paddling Her Own Canoe states that "something of a mixed-race aristocracy had emerged in North America" in Johnson's time. The book devotes a chapter to explaining the Johnson family's place both as Empire Loyalists within a class-stratified society and as powerful voices within the Iroquois Confederacy.

Emily Pauline Johnson was born into a privileged middle-class family in Brantford in 1861 and lived until 1913. She was light-skinned: her mother was British, her father mostly Mohawk. Johnson's mother told her children that they belonged to their father's people, and Johnson's writings said little about their non-Native family relations.

"Never let anyone call me a white woman. . . . My aim, my joy, my pride is to sing the glories of my own people," Johnson has been quoted as saying throughout her life. Yet although she claimed to have been taught "the legends, the traditions, the culture and the etiquette of both races," and was evidently raised on the reserve, she did not learn much of the Mohawk language and leaned to Christian rather than Longhouse values.

The poet's attachment to Britain as expressed in "My English Letter," is attributed not only to the influence of her mother but to simple pragmatism. The point is made that her reverence for England is "rooted in the practical realities of someone trying to make a living as a Canadian writer," with its minor markets and colonial attitudes.

Johnson's ambiguity around her dual identity is cogently uncovered and will resonate with many Metis people today. But Johnson "by not explicitly recognizing the Metis as a major element in the Northwest rebellion, as well as Canada's most visible mixed-race community," reflects her "general indifference to the French-speaking portion of Canada."

In one speech she emphatically states "I am an Iroquois," yet aligns herself with notions of superiority that are usually attributed to Christian colonizers.

"Do you know that the Iroquois have done more in the last hundred years than it took the native Britons all their time to do? Indian families who fifty years ago were worshipping the Great Spirit, in the old Indian way, have turned into professional men and finely educated women who hold responsible positions . . . the Red Man . . . is no savage if only given a chance," said Johnson.

In Johnson's day, for a woman to publish under her own name, much less travel alone as an entertainer, was frowned upon, but Johnson possessed an actor's ability to charm and manipulate and she could enjoin both admiration and sympathy for her causes through the power of her bi-racial mystique.

She did have detractors, including men who believed they had the credentials to define Canada's literary canon. They left Johnson on the periphery or out of the Canadian literary elite altogether; from the 1930s to the 1960s her populaity declined. Its latter-day resurgence may be attributed to the search for Native voices in literature and to feminist scholarship.

The authors of Paddling Her Own Canoe are Veronica Strong-Boag, a professor of women's studies and educational studies at the University of British Columbia, and Carole Gerson, a professor in the department of English at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. They have done an admirable job of piecing together obscure and fragmentary references to Johnson's less-known literary works and performances. They reveal there was much more to Johnson than the Mohawk princess image that stuck to her for decades, an image that Johnson herself exploited when it suited.

Readers who don't remember when "respectable" women could not put themselves forward or even express political opinions publicly, will nevertheless be astonished that Johnson's public persona wasn't quashed. That's to the credit of the authors, who have delivered a succinct sample of the19th century mores that shaped Johnson's upbringing.