Life of Johnson: from Biography to Celebration


Sheila M. F. Johnston, Buckskin and Broadcloth: a Celebration of the Life of E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake 1861-1913. Toronto: Natural Heritage/Natural History Inc., 1997.
254 pp.

 

Much has been written about this extraordinary Mohawk poet-performer since her death in 1913. Most of it has been interpretive and subjective. I believe the time has arrived for Pauline to regain her own voice. She left us enough of herself that if we listen closely, we can hear what she has been saying all along. (10)

This is not an interpretive biography. The narrative I have written aids the reader in enjoying this showcase of her life and work. The excerpts from her short stories, the recounting of interviews, the anecdotes written by her sister, all are woven together to bring her story to life. (10)

Following the death of E. Pauline Johnson in 1913, the poet-performer’s sister Eva Johnson packed up her late sister’s residence. As part of this task, she sifted through Johnson’s personal papers and, in at least one account, burned anything that might compromise her public persona as a widely respected writer (Keller 275),1 anything that would shed light upon the private life of a woman who, in performance, was a Mohawk aristocrat and a patriotic Canadian. For later students of Johnson, Eva’s destruction of these documents means that even the most thoroughly researched biography can only sketch in some periods of Johnson’s life. Her experience demands detective reconstruction, and conjecture based on the extant papers by or about her is inevitable. Sheila M.F. Johnston does not call Buckskin and Broadcloth: a Celebration of the Life of E. Pauline Johnson—Tekahionwake (1997) a biography; rather, as she writes in her introduction, her work is a "showcase" of Johnson’s life, a gathering together of documents authored by Johnson or by those who knew her. Since Johnston affirms that her book is not a biography but a "celebration" (10), the first question that it raises is that of how it should be read. What is the difference between "biography" and "showcase"? What are the obligations of the latter to its readership?

Judging from Johnston’s statements quoted above, the distinction resides in the biographer’s function as an interpreter. The biographer is "subjective," and his or her narrative idiosyncratic; the "celebrant’s" is not. This raises another question: is the biographer’s interpretation of her subject’s activities really the defining feature of biography, and therefore something from which other works—works with a biographical interest but that are given a name other than biography—can legitimately distinguish themselves? In her chapter on biography for the Literary History of Canada, Clara Thomas lists the characteristics that define biography as a literary genre. The biographer’s function consists of "framing, containing, and elucidating the complexities of a personality and a time" (180). Fully to discharge these responsibilities demands thorough, discerning documentation and research. While "every biographer finally recognizes…that there is no possibility of building a verbal structure that will entirely contain and illuminate a life" (181), he or she is obligated to try, for the biographer’s inescapable function is carefully to reconstruct this life for readers. Documentation is the element of biography that renders this framing function clear to readers because it foregrounds "the frame of reference within which the writer works," and also "support[s] and enhance[s] the measure of [the biography’s] success" (Thomas 182). Thomas gives two general categories for biography as she sees it at the moment she writes—there is the "‘definitive’" or "‘scholarly’," and there are the "‘critical’, ‘journalistic’, or ‘popular’" (181). There is no category called "interpretive biography" in her overview because the adjective is redundant. All biography is "interpretive and subjective." Different kinds of biography are distinguished not by the degree of authorial imagination involved in the composition of the work, but by the quality of the documentation which supports that work.

Buckskin and Broadcloth is a research text of some value. Any student of early Canadian literature knows how difficult of access archival materials frequently are in a country the size of Canada, and also how rare it is to find indexes to early Canadian magazines, in which writers often published pieces before they authored a book. These readers will appreciate this collection of correspondence and photographs together in a single volume. Johnston makes available to a wide audience much of interest that far fewer would see and read otherwise. In a field of (still) often uncollected materials, there are several advantages to the collage format (as opposed to the narrative mode more common among biographers) in which Johnston has chosen to put her text, for in this format the researcher can transcribe these documents for readers’ perusal. Johnston organizes her text into chapters that divide her subject’s life chronologically. These begin with "The Great Peace of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy" (written by Raymond R. Skye), which recounts Hiawatha’s founding of the Six Nations, a chapter entitled "Ancestry," which supplies a history of the Johnson and Howells families from the Revolutionary War and emigration from England respectively, followed by "Chiefswood Days 1854-1884," "Brantford Days 1884-1892," "Star! 1892-1897," "On Her Own 1898-1901," "Johnson and McRaye 1901-1909," "Vancouver Days 1909-1913," and "Gone, But Not Forgotten 1913-1997." After her own brief prefaces describing Pauline Johnson’s experiences during the period under discussion, Johnston supplies an array of photographs, the poet’s correspondence (as well as that of those who knew her), her poetry (much of which, as Johnston says, was never collected by Johnson into any volume, although several of these pieces were published in magazines and periodicals of the day), newspaper articles about her, and her friends’ anecdotes. She gives these documents to readers in the form of short passages (few are more than a page long), a presentation technique that allows for browsing through the book if readers do not wish to read it in sequence. This organization of the text as a series of extracts seems most appropriate for a younger reading audience, or one that knows little about Pauline Johnson, for it appears to be designed to stimulate interest without requiring the sustained attention that the biography in longer narrative form requires. Johnston’s claim that this is not biography, however, is untenable. A collage still creates a picture of its subject that the biographer determines, not readers and not the subject him- or herself. Biographers may celebrate a life, but it is a life that they have re-created at least partly from their imaginations. Readers cannot witness the emergence of Pauline Johnson’s "own voice" in Buckskin and Broadcloth apart from Johnston’s fashioning of that voice.

Johnston’s authorial control over the text seems minimal owing to her choice of the collage mode. It is useful, however, to test the possible impression of unmediated contact between readers and the poet against the documentation that supports this work. Such a test indicates that the collage configuration only presents a generous profusion which obscures the selecting hand behind it. Though some of the archival material published in Buckskin and Broadcloth has never been published before, much is culled from sources whose interest in Johnson was biased for one reason or another. A comparison of Sheila Johnston’s text with the other two biographies of Pauline Johnson—Annie (Mrs. Garland) Foster’s The Mohawk Princess (1931), and more substantially Betty Keller’s Pauline: a Biography of Pauline Johnson (1981), a work the chronology and accounts of which Johnston’s text often parallels—underlines some of the problems with simply giving these accounts over to readers without some discussion of their authors. Stories about Johnson by her sister Eva and by Walter McRaye, of which Johnston makes recurrent use, are shaped by the desire that both had to entrench the idea of Johnson as the princess-poet. Johnston does not make this point clear. Of Eva’s response to Johnson’s death, for example, she tells her readers little more than that "Eva remained in Vancouver for seven months before returning east, having taken care of her late sister’s estate" (47). While she refers in passing to T.S.H. Shearman’s report that Eva Johnson burned some of her sister’s papers while sorting through her effects (209), she prefers to pay most attention to Eva Johnson’s discovery, in the process, of the poet’s "And He Said, ‘Fight On’" (the poem was included in each edition of Flint and Feather subsequent to the first one), with the result that she de-emphasizes the ramifications of Johnson’s document-tampering after her sister’s death. Johnson’s will, which bequeathed several family heirlooms to various friends (from whom Eva would try without success to retrieve them in the coming years),2 offers a picture of sisters who had grown apart. As Johnston acknowledges, it was McRaye rather than Johnson herself who asked Eva to move from New York to Vancouver so as to attend her dying sister (Johnston 204; Foster 143; Keller 261). It seems that the arrangement made no one happy; Johnson was already in the care of several friends and a doctor whom she trusted when Eva arrived. Eva’s memoirs of her sister after Johnson’s death may have been stimulated by the best motives, but its idealizing portrait of Johnson probably does not reflect the relationship that the two actually had. Her writing is closer to eulogy than to biography.

Much more caution is required with McRaye’s stories. Keller casts doubt on the information in his memoirs, noting a few instances in which he recounts meetings between himself, Johnson, and various well-known people that could not possibly have taken place (171). On the basis of these inaccuracies, Keller goes so far as to say that it is "entirely within reason…to assume that many of McRaye’s memories were nothing more than lies" (171), or, at best, misremembrances of experiences twenty to thirty years past by the time that he wrote about them. This is not to suggest that the excerpts that Johnston takes from Eva Johnson and Walter McRaye are wholly to be discredited, but to caution that in the absence of Johnson’s private papers, legend plays a substantial part in the Pauline Johnson story as such people later tell it. It is important to make visible to readers the presence of legend as a substitute for missing facts, especially in the accounts of two people who had an interest in promoting Johnson after her death. Documents are not straightforward clues to a life, and this is why the social, political, and familial contexts provided in narrative forms of biography can be valuable.

If "collage" means a compendium of material that is relevant to the study of a given topic, moreover, then a balanced and complete presentation of documents is indispensable to this biographical project, because readers should have all the information from which to make their own informed reading of the subject. To this end, Johnston’s coverage of Johnson’s career is not entirely one-sided. She includes some negative commentary about Johnson’s writing, for example from The Guardian critic’s review of The White Wampum (136).3 She also includes a letter, dated 4 February 1894, that Johnson wrote in response to one from her friend Harry O’Brien, in which she admits that she "play[s] to the public" (117), presumably by interspersing her poetry with pieces of locally-specific doggerel designed to appeal to particular regional audiences. But in the ellipses that mark this letter as it is excerpted for Buckskin and Broadcloth (not to mention in the near-absence of other published criticisms of Johnson’s poetry and performances,4 and examples of the doggerel itself, some of which survives5), Johnston’s role as the editor of Johnson’s "voice" is obtrusive. The parts that she removes from this letter are ones in which Johnson makes more explicit the reasons why she caters to her public. The occasional vehemence of her feeling towards that public, as well as towards the compromises that she has made as a performer, are the more vital for their difference from the unendingly ethereal or gamesome Johnson of Eva Johnson’s and Walter McRaye’s creation. This is part of the letter as Johnston transcribes it:

I felt that you looked at me with unforgivable eyes when I tricked myself into the confession that I played to the public. That I must make myself a favourite, whether it reflected credit upon my literary work or not…the public will not listen to lyrics, will not appreciate real poetry, will in fact not have me as an entertainer if I give them nothing but rhythm, cadence, beauty, thought…. I have had dreams of educating the vulgar taste to Poetry, not action. (qtd. in Buckskin and Broadcloth 117, ellipses Johnston’s)

Compare to part of the letter as quoted by Betty Keller:

You thought me more of a true poet, more the child of inspiration than I have proved to be. The reasons of my actions in this matter? Well, the reason is that the public will not listen to lyrics, will not appreciate real poetry, will in fact not have me as an entertainer if I give them nothing but rhythm, cadence, beauty, thought. You will not like your friend—(I am, am I not?)—to bend to public favor, when she has the power and ability to rise above it, and yet you know, though thank your guiding star and saint you have never experienced my reason for this vulgar "catering" to an applauding crowd. Ye Gods, how I hate their laughter at times, when such laughter is called forth by some of my brainless lines and business. I could do so much better if they would only let me. I have had dreams of educating the vulgar taste to Poetry, not action. I will do it some time, when this hard, cold, soulless "reason" for bending to their approval ceases to exist. (72)

(Keller, too, chooses to leave out parts of the letter, and what she omits is often what Johnston decides to include, so that the simultaneous reading of the two biographies offers the most complete second-hand reading of Johnson’s reply to O’Brien.) The omissions that Johnston makes appear to be small ones, but they remove those portions of the letter which suggest that while Johnson was admirably determined to fulfill her potential as a writer of excellent verse, she did not always think well of the public from whom she earned her living. She occasionally used that public as a scapegoat, blaming it for flaws in her writing or her slowness to grow as a poet. The letter may also reveal Pauline Johnson in a moment of self-evaluation, in which she queries her own need for the applause of the crowd. Johnston’s ellipses transform the poet more definitely into a well-meaning damsel who was enslaved to a tyrannical but beloved audience. All editors must exclude some material, but an extreme excision restricts the sense of the original.

Other troublesome documents—troublesome in the sense that they offer a more nuanced picture of Johnson than the cloying sweetness that many of these anecdotes would suggest—go missing entirely. Johnston includes a letter to the then federal Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton in which Johnson tries to finance a tour to Australia through a government loan, with the annual rent owed her as her share in the family estate, Chiefswood, as security (155-6). The trip never took place, although she did obtain the necessary five hundred dollars. On the other hand, she omits a letter that Johnson wrote to Ernest Thompson Seton offering to sell the wampum belt in her possession at a discount so as to pay her way to England for the second time (Keller 206).6 Formerly her grandfather’s, the belt may well have been the most valuable heirloom she owned, dating as it did from the founding of the Six Nations Confederacy. The omission is troubling because, in her introduction, Johnston implies that Pauline Johnson was an early activist for Native rights. I will return to this suggestion presently. Of the letter from John Greenleaf Whittier, Johnston includes that portion that Johnson herself chose to quote in after-years (Keller 52), the portion in which the elderly American poet comments that the poems she sent him "have strength as well as beauty, and study and patient brooding will enable [her] to write still better" (76). However, she leaves out the part of the letter in which Whittier associates the young poet with a troupe of Native singers once brought to sing for him (one maiden of which, he tells Johnson, is shortly to be married). As Keller observes, it is as if there is no difference to him between Johnson’s art and a group of amateur warblers (52). In this instance, Johnston performs exactly the same editorial pruning that Johnson did for her own publicity. Obviously this is "interpretive biography"—it is just interpretive biography that does not conflict with Johnson’s own self-portrait. Because Johnston’s choice of collage as the vehicle to Johnson’s "real voice" implies that the documents in the book should be read as reflections of Pauline Johnson’s life, such editorial decisions have the appearance of excisions made because they undermine the picture of Johnson that Johnson liked best, as well as the one that her admirers fostered in their memoirs of her.

The writings from Johnson’s own hand also require some contextualization before readers take them to be representative of her "real voice." Among Johnston’s selections are excerpts from a series of articles that Johnson was asked to write for Mother’s Magazine between 1907 and 1912, which Johnston presents as descriptions of Johnson’s family history and childhood years at Chiefswood. The stories were also published posthumously in The Moccasin Maker (1913). These selections seem to supply the details of her parents’ marriage and the Johnson children’s upbringing. What Johnston fails to consider, apart from the passing mention in her introduction of the stories from which she made some of her choices, is the likelihood that Johnson composed her stories as fiction—autobiographically based, perhaps, but created substantially from the author’s imagination. Her foremothers are "idealistic representation[s] of real life on the frontier of nineteenth-century Upper Canada" (Thompson 5) in precisely the same ways as Elizabeth Thompson argues that the fictional heroines of early Canadian letters, from Catharine Parr Traill’s through Ralph Connor’s, are idealistic representations of pioneer women. Catherine Rollston, Helen Martin Johnson, and Emily Howells Johnson all display "the ability to act decisively and quickly in cases of emergency, and the strength to accept adverse circumstances on the frontier, combined with the courage to attempt an improvement of these frontier conditions" (Thompson 5). By Johnson’s mother’s time, the geographical frontier had metamorphosed into contested spaces such as the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, from which white speculators tried to remove lumber in exchange for a few quarts of liquor over George Johnson’s vehement opposition. Here is a passage that describes Emily’s care for George after he has been injured during an attack on him by these lawbreakers:

For hours, days, weeks, she waited, tended, watched, administered, labored and loved beside the sick man’s bed. She neither slept nor ate enough to carry her through the ordeal, but love lent her strength, and she battled and fought for his life as only an adoring woman can. Her wonderful devotion was the common talk of the country…. She never left the sickroom save when her baby needed her. (qtd. in Buckskin and Broadcloth 33, ellipsis Johnston’s)7

As a mother, Emily Johnson also bears unmistakable resemblance to the version of the pioneer woman that Connor and others popularized in the first decade of this century, in which "the frontier and pioneering became metaphors for Christian struggle," a struggle in which "[d]ifficulties and moral dilemmas are conquered by faith in a manner comparable to the process of pioneering on a real, physical frontier" (Thompson 90). "How the Johnson Children were Reared" is impossibly idyllic, and "George Johnson Encounters a Remorseful Man" strongly echoes the Biblical story of Peter and Jesus’ conversation about forgiveness (Matthew 18: 21,22), as well as the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-gatherer at prayers (Luke 18: 9-14). Johnston relies heavily on the "My Mother" sequence—in the chapter entitled "Ancestry," eleven of seventeen excerpts derive from these stories.

It would be wrong to criticize Johnston alone for allowing readers to take the narratives from "My Mother" as fact, for both of the poet’s other biographers do the same thing. With a little background reading, it is easy enough to see their rationale for treating these stories as directly autobiographical—Johnson prefixed the stories with a note assuring readers that every event in her account was related to her by her mother, that she has "neither exaggerated nor curtailed a single circumstance in relating this story," and that she has "supplied nothing through imagination" ("My Mother" 23). Still, it was a rare thing for Pauline Johnson to claim that there was no invention at all in a piece of her writing—of her poems, Keller says that Johnson "did not purport to be writing historical fact even if people chose to look upon it that way" (100). Should readers take Johnson’s prefatory note to "My Mother" as the last word on the subject, or should they read with the awareness that there is a certain amount of fictionalizing in her memories? If, in the absence of other sources, her biographers understandably mine her stories for information about her, they should forewarn readers as to the origin of their information, or at least cite Johnson’s own disclaimer to explain their reading. Johnston exacerbates the misleading impression of authenticity in these selections by claiming first that these passages present Johnson’s "own voice," and then by offering an apparently spontaneous selection of articles as the justification for her argument.

One might conjecture about Johnston’s decision in this matter on the basis of further statements in her introduction. She believes that Johnson is an early and, it seems, unrecognized Native activist:

She eschewed the required sycophancy and politesse regarding her heritage in a predominantly white society. She proudly, unabashedly and defiantly celebrated her nativeness by performing her poetry, much of it dealing with Native issues, in buckskin with pride, dignity and integrity. (10)

I do not wish to suggest that this is untrue. Johnson certainly was very conscious of Natives’ uncertain social position and of the economic and political disadvantages of belonging to a nonwhite race. She resented audiences who she thought came to her recitals only to see the spectacle of a performing Indian.8 Yet Johnston’s assertions are surely reductive, fitting Johnson into an idea of political commitment that is at least fifty years premature. Johnson’s writing belongs to her identity not solely as a Mohawk but also as a performer, a woman who celebrated her heritage and spoke on behalf of Native peoples, but who also competed with other touring performers and who had to create a niche for herself on the Canadian entertainment circuit. Often she altered her repertoire to appeal to those who bought most of her tickets in small rural communities across the country. This is a poet who recited to audiences from country market centres like Kentville, Nova Scotia and Minnedosa, Manitoba, to mining towns like Rossland, British Columbia, in which the miners would simply demand their money back if the show did not please them (Keller 184). One such alteration for the paying audience was probably the famous costume that Johnston mentions in the above quotation, a costume that Johnson wore for the first time in the autumn of 1892, after she had begun seriously to tour. Johnston includes this story in a way that demonstrates one advantage that the collage mode offers—it can be deployed ironically to juxtapose different perspectives on the same subject. In "Pauline Creates Her Stage Attire," Eva describes the making of Johnson’s "Indian" costume as an act of invention:

She held out both her arms to me to show me the buckskin strips about two inches in width, which were to serve as a covering for her arms. These were embroidered from shoulder to wrist. On either side of the strip was buckskin fringe about five inches long. This part of the garment she had sent to the North-West for. The rest of her Indian costume and silver brooches were copied from a picture we had of Minnehaha…. After contemplating the dress for a few minutes I said to Pauline, "Why not leave one sleeve the way it is and make the other of the wild beast skins you have?" Pauline thought a moment then said, "That is exactly what I shall do." (qtd. in Buckskin and Broadcloth 113)

In other words, there was very little authentic, and very much imagined, about the outfit. Later in the volume, admiring critics of Johnson like Kit Coleman ("Prominent Female Columnist Writes of Pauline" [139]) applaud the costume’s "accura[cy] in every detail" (139); The Magnet Magazine’s critic refers to the outfit as Johnson’s "national dress" ("Literary Gossip" [143]). Generally, however, Johnston does not exploit this potential of collage because she underemphasizes the influence that Johnson’s having to survive as a performer had on her political sentiments, not to mention Johnson’s sense that poetry is, as she had written to Harry O’Brien, "not action." I would argue that this does a subtle disservice to Johnson and to writers of the period. As one reviewer in The Week put it, Pauline Johnson was a composer of "word painting—word music rather."9 This reviewer’s preference for "word music" over "word painting" may be significant—by the 1890s, the latter term for the verbal evocation of vivid images had acquired pejorative connotations, thanks partly to Wilfred Campbell’s pieces in The Globe’s influential column "At the Mermaid Inn," which ran from February 1892 to July 1893. Campbell’s articles in the final number of the column are singularly disparaging of "landscape painting in words," which he implies is found in contemporary Canadian "minor verse." Word painting is the mark of an "absence of real poetic imagination and creative ability" among minor poets (Campbell, Lampman and Scott 341).10 The critic from The Week may have wished to put some distance between the fledgling poet and the offending term, while at the same time insisting upon her attention to the craft of poetry, to the aesthetic qualities of her work. Moreover, Johnson was as concerned with the art of memorialization (pace her many autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writings) and with the past as she was with her present context.

The turn of the century is a moment in Canadian letters that should not be reduced to a series of politicized statements, as Roy Daniells cautioned over thirty years ago:

It is unfashionable at the moment to oppose the argument that culture appears by extrusion from everyday communal living. Sociological and political preoccupations obscure the concept of culture as a body of experience based upon traditional standards. The phrase "literary culture" has almost ceased to have a meaning. It is therefore natural to praise the "socially significant" poet at the expense of other levels of sensibility, intuition, or vision. What needs to reasserted in any study of nineteenth-century Canada is the primacy and autonomy of cultural tradition at that time. (194)

One need not accept the sweeping tone of Daniells’ statement to respect the basic difference to which he points in this passage. I do not wish to argue that Johnson should be read without reference to the political ideas of the time or that her writing is divorced from its social context, but, on the contrary, for a renewed attention to that context as a very different one from that with which contemporary readers would be familiar. It is not difficult to imagine that Pauline Johnson, the author of such contradictorily-themed poems as "A Cry From an Indian Wife" and "The Riders of the Plains" (a poem that pays tribute to the North West Mounted Police, who helped to enforce laws favorable to European settlement of the Canadian West), worked within a fairly autonomous "literary culture" much like the one that Daniells describes.

In this biography as well as in Foster’s and Keller’s, the identity with which Johnson really appears to have associated herself most clearly is that of the interpreter, if the term may be understood to refer to persons of Native descent who have a family history of loyalty to the British empire in America. Her great grandfather emigrated north with Brant after the Revolutionary War. Her grandfather, father, and brothers identified themselves as United Empire Loyalists. Allen and Beverly Johnson were active in the Loyalist brotherhoods. Johnson’s father George was "appointed interpreter for the Anglican mission on his reserve" (22), and later as official interpreter for the Canadian government on the reserve. According to Keller, she was "tremendously proud of [her father’s] ability to move between the two cultures, tuned to the requirements of both" (27). This seems to be the definition of "interpreter" that Johnson had in mind and with which she affiliated herself—the person who moves easily between two different cultural worlds. The following gives some sense of the idealized place that she awarded her father in her imagination:

George Mansion [the pseudonym is an English translation of George Johnson’s Mohawk name], still the veriest right hand of the missionary, had grown into a magnificent type of Mohawk manhood. These years had brought him much, and he had accomplished far more than idle chance could ever throw in his way. He had saved his salary that he earned as interpreter in the church, and had purchased some desirable property, a beautiful estate of two hundred acres, upon which he some day hoped to build a home. He had mastered six Indian languages, which, with his knowledge of English and his wonderful fluency in his own tribal Mohawk, gave him command of eight tongues, an advantage which soon brought him the position of Government interpreter in the Council of the great "Six Nations," composing the Iroquois race. ("My Mother" 33-4)

Johnson’s writing also suggests that, inasmuch as she linked herself with both Native and non-Native heritages, she was an interpreter in Ashcroft, Griffiths’, and Tiffin’s more recent, now well-known sense of the term. Interpreters always come from the colonized culture, and since the role entails two antithetical tasks in a colonial setting—"to acquire the power of the new language and culture in order to preserve the old, even whilst [interpretation] assists the invaders in the overwhelming of that culture"—the interpreter cannot (and realizes he or she cannot) ever again "live completely through either discourse" (80). The interpreter’s position is perennially ambiguous. Foster, Keller, and Johnston all recount the story of how George Johnson came to hold a seat on the Council of the Six Nations. As the eldest woman of the matrilineal bloodline of the chief’s family, George’s mother Helen held the band’s deciding vote in the election. She chose her son. The other Mohawk Council members rejected her choice on the grounds that he was already a powerful employee of the Canadian government. (Contrary to Johnson’s intimation above, there was no permanent place for a government interpreter in the Council, for that governing body had no need of one. Rather, the two positions were separate, and George Johnson held them simultaneously.) As government interpreter and Council member, they believed that he would often be in a conflict of interest. Later, however, the Mohawk band ratified Helen Johnson’s choice. Pauline Johnson’s narrative of this event turns it into a tribute to her grandmother’s strength of will, and the tenacity of her argument that the Council could not reject a man on the basis of something that he had not yet done. What she either did not realize or would not admit, though, is that the members of the Council objected because the interpreter’s role is not merely a prestigious one, but one linked with imperial power. When Sheila Johnston describes George Johnson’s role after this vote as "[i]n essence, the Reservation’s chief executive officer" (23), she oversimplifies the historical moment, using a phrase that presently signifies power in the corporate world to refer to a complicated role for which the term is inappropriate. Interpretation is one component of the transfer of power to the colonizer, and it is an activity that changes both cultures, rather than one that defends and preserves one or the other. The mediation between two cultures on which Johnson embarked as a poet and recitalist is ambivalent too. She was a woman who traveled unchaperoned throughout her performance career and who may have had lovers, and yet retained the full support of the various community chapters of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, which frequently sponsored her recitals in their communities; a woman who never lived on a reserve among other Native families, and who occasionally sounds like a person who views Native peoples from the outside, but who maintained a close friendship with at least one native chief in Joe Capilano of the Squamish in British Columbia.

In some ways, Buckskin and Broadcloth returns oddly to Eva Johnson’s image-making project after her sister’s death, when she apparently believed that Pauline Johnson’s writing could not survive any scandalous disclosures, any aspersions on her character or on her motives that may have been inferred from her private papers. I think that it is no longer necessary to represent any writer as an extraordinarily virtuous, wise, or far-seeing person to argue that people should read her more often or more closely. The problem at the root of such a representation is hyperbole—it asks readers to imagine the writer of an earlier moment as someone who did or was something that she could not possibly have done or been. It also implies that the life was exceptional because the subject was a prototype of the contemporary individual. Ultimately, such an approach means that readers may well remain imaginatively in their own time rather than try to remove themselves to the earlier context that the biographer has camouflaged, however unintentionally. It is sufficient that Pauline Johnson lived in her own fascinating time and interpreted it, not future ideas or society. While Buckskin and Broadcloth proves a useful supplementary text, it works best together with other reference works on Johnson.

 

Notes

 

  1. One source that Keller cites in support of her theory is T.S.H. Shearman’s "Pauline Johnson’ Shy Sister Devoted Life to Her," Daily Province 25 Nov. 1939. [back]

  2. Keller 275. Cites a letter from Evelyn (Eva) Johnson to J.S. Rowe, 27 May 1924, Brant County Museum, Brantford, Ontario. [back]

  3. Johnston cites her source as an "unidentified" clipping in the Ready collection in the McMaster archives in Hamilton, although Keller identifies the review located in the same archival collection as the review published in that London newspaper. [back]

  4. Less positive reviews of The White Wampum were published in The Literary World, The Sketch, and the Westminster Gazette. Keller reports that earlier in her career Johnson suffered an especially irksome rejection from her distant cousin, William Dean Howells, while he was editor of Harper’s magazine. On the other hand, reviewers from the St. James Budget and Canada’s The Week gave The White Wampum their enthusiastic approval. [back]

  5. For instance, see "Little Vancouver" in E. Pauline Johnson and Owen Smily, "There and Back," The Globe 15 Dec. 1894: 17-18. "Little Vancouver" is also found in Pauline: a Biography of Pauline Johnson (94-95) and is partially quoted at the beginning of The Mohawk Princess (5). [back]

  6. Letter to Ernest Thompson Seton, 2 August 1905, Seton Papers, Seton Village, New Mexico. The letter also merits attention as part of the dialogue between different biographies of Johnson; Foster strangely claims that Johnson was trying to buy a wampum belt from Seton before sailing for England (51), although this seems unlikely given the contents of Johnson’s letter to Seton. [back]

  7. E. Pauline Johnson, "My Mother," The Moccasin Maker (Toronto: Ryerson, 1913; Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987) 66. [back]

  8. Keller 234. [back]

  9. "Miss Pauline Johnson’s Poems," The Week 23 Aug. 1895: 927. [back]

  10. See also Campbell’s column of 17 June 1893 (Campbell, Lampman and Scott 331-4). For an interesting comparison with Johnson’s letter of 4 February 1894 to Harry O’Brien (quoted above), see Campbell’s contribution of 25 February 1893 (Campbell, Lampman and Scott 263-4). [back]

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

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Shelley Hulan