Few poets perform at poetry slams dangling real human scalps from their belt, but this Huron trophy was a gift from her grandfather.
Emily Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake was an unknown poet on a Brantford reserve one moment, and the next, after just one Toronto reading in 1892, a celebrity. Her first book of poetry, The White Wampum, was published in 1895. Books of more poems and stories followed, including Flint and Feather and Canadian Born.
Pauline Johnson was the daughter of a white Ohio Englishwoman and a Mohawk chief. She was a fierce, theatrical spirit with an offbeat sense of humour. A northern Pocahontas, but clearly Canadian, Pauline loved hamming up the savage naïf thing, parading around in full-on Indian-postcard regalia: buckskins, moccasins, dangling rabbit pelts, intricate Mohawk metal work, hunting knives, and yes, a scalp or two.
She was a great comic, and a charismatic orator, and her poems were dramatic and proud canoe and nature stories. Song my Paddle Sings is as quintessential to the Canadian grade school experience as Raffi: “August is laughing across the sky, Laughing while paddle, canoe and I, Drift, drift, Where the hills uplift, On either side of the current swift.”
Johnson was unique in that she somehow did belong to all of Canada, touring as she did in vaudeville style acts, circuiting the provinces at a demanding clip. She was as familiar a sight on stage in Halifax as Vancouver, but she launched her career in Toronto. Born in 1861, she was an unmarried spinster of nearly 30 when her work began. (There was love, possibly two different affairs both by the name of Charles, but it didn’t work out.) Her last years were spent in Vancouver, and she is the only person ever buried in Stanley Park, at her own request. Pauline did not want a marker or headstone, but a memorial monument was erected there nonetheless.
Her work received mixed reviews among critics, some calling her the best Canadian poet, and some expressing open disdain for her dramatics. It didn’t much matter- she was phenomenally popular, and a rare writer able to make a living at her art. This was indeed an achievement for any writer, but perhaps never duplicated at the time and seldom now for an aboriginal woman. And just as she had written incessantly before recognition, she wrote prolifically after. “My verses just sung themselves in my head until I had to write them. Then, of course, I wanted to read them to people. That is all there is to tell,” she told a newspaper.
Much inspiration and contemplation came from her parental inheritances: from her mother, Emily Susanna Howells, a deep love of reading, and as an English woman who married an Indian, a strong and unconventional spirit; and from her beloved father, George Johnson, her love of Mohawk history and legends. He died when she was 23, and to honour their bloodline, she wrote extensively about Indian lore. But Pauline was not a fool to turn down bread: she also tailored her work for white audiences and often sold pulpy, stereotypical adventure rhetoric to magazines.
Many dared condescend that such an act was ‘selling out’- these would do well to consider that today millionaire celebrities will peddle tawdry tinsel cosmetics for another cool mil. Smart writers accept pay cheques, especially in times when the general labour market for women, for aboriginals, and for artists and writers was even worse than it is today. Indeed, Pauline wrote and sold material throughout her short life, even after becoming ill with breast cancer. She was only 52 when she died in 1913.
A provocative book by Daniel Francis is The Imaginary Indian: the Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Pauline Johnson’s story is told here, focusing on the mixed-messages of her heritage, image and content of her work. While a very thoughtful piece in a truly brilliant and sweeping book, I’m uncertain that the author fully appreciated Johnson’s humour. She most certainly was aware of her image and of stereotypes, and of what whites wanted from an Indian Princess.
She played it up for all it was worth, but often spoke of her creative enslavement to the silly Victorian whims of early Canadian literary traditions. The way she played with- sometimes by playing into- social mores was caustic and tinged with something sarcastic and funny, faintly reminiscent of both Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman. But more importantly, her conflicting imagery was in fact utterly genuine.
She WAS halfway bred in flowery Victorian poetry and parlour-reading traditions, never formally educated but reared by polite if disgraced society (her mother’s family never approved of the interracial marriage) and voracious devouring of books. And she WAS the daughter of two generations of Indian chiefs. Her grandfather Chief John Smoke Johnson WAS a revered orator and a legendary warrior.
Joan Crate, an underappreciated Canadian poet, did a better job of portraying the complexities of Pauline’s duality, and recognizing her performance flair as a part of her creative gift. In Pale as Real Ladies, 1991, Crate’s writing persona fused on a Greyhound trip with the ghost of a writer who had walked before her, and the rest of the poems were creatively channeled through Pauline’s inspiration. The poems are very much Crate’s, however, exquisite and reverent tributes. Here she explores with a woman’s touch and a deep reverence the cultural issues along with intuitive projections of Pauline’s possible personal feelings.
“Tonight let me tell you of a world swallowed in one quick gulp,” Pauline’s ghost writes in Crate’s The Poetry Reading. “I speak of a history/ pieced from a jigsaw of flesh…Under my skin/ blood beats along roadways barred with DO NOT ENTER signs, /walls of small scars. I will not return to silence. Do you hear me?”
Lorette C. Luzajic is the girl at thegirlcanwrite.net. A graduate of Ryerson’s School of Journalism, she has had an offbeat career with the written word and her mixed-media paintings. She writes a column called Fascinating Writers for Book Slut online, and is the resident Spice Girl columnist at Gremolata magazine, where she also writes features about food and a blog about gluten-free life. You’ve seen her poetry, profiles, and stories in Adbusters, Geez, Fiddlehead, Grain, Kairos, Modern Poetry, Dog Fancy, Style Republic, I Love Cats, Ergocentric, X-tra: Toronto’s queer community paper, Blood and Aphorisms, Canadian Woman’s Studies Journal, Canadian Baptist, off our backs, Writer’s Journal, and all over the web. She has also appeared in various anthologies, and is formerly the editor of Idea Factory: an exquisite whateverly.
Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.
