The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Some Reflections on Indigenous Biography

Somehow it is very telling that I have not been able to find any documentation of who E. Pauline Johnson was visiting stanley park with in 1904. For such a well-known author, the actual information about her life tends to the very sketchy, and most of the documentation available about her appears to be related to her professional life. Perhaps this is precisely as Johnson intended, since she does not seem to have left any longform, explicitly autobiographical writing. I have to hedge on this point because it is unclear what and how much of her papers her sister destroyed after her death, nor is it wholly clear whether this action itself followed Johnson's wishes. Yet I can't help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, there is far more we might someday learn via knowledge and records maintained at her home community of Six Nations on the Grand River. By this I don't mean we may learn whether her sister followed her wishes when it comes to her papers, or any possible answers to the various lingering questions about whether she was ever seriously engaged and why she never married. Rather, we may learn more about how her life and work is part of the Grand River community and Haudenosaunee oratory and literary tradition more generally, should the community choose to share information about her in this way.

I also don't mean by this wistful speculation to suggest the relatively recent biographies of Johnson we have available are not very good. The two I have on my own shelves are counted among the best, Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake, by Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson (University of Toronto Press, 2000) and Charlotte Gray's Flint and Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson (HarperCollins, 2002). As their titles indicate, these books take two different angles on recounting and exploring Johnson's life. Strong-Boag and Gerson are focussed on her texts, both written and performed, and began important bibliographical work to identify and locate copies of Johnson's many short essays. While all too often she had to write these for serials and so could not write as freely as we might hope in terms of length and subject, Johnson could do a remarkable amount in a hostile space in only a few paragraphs. Her essay, "A Strong Race Opinion" is one of the best known examples. Gray, a respected author of what the association of canadian publishers refers to as "literary fiction," wrote a more traditional treatment of Johnson's life. It is another respectful and substantially documented outsider's view, taking full advantage of at the time a more accessible and substantial collection of archival photographs. Today a biographer could also take better advantage of archived newspapers to examine Johnson's performance advertisements, which sometimes included line drawings, thanks to Canadiana and the internet archive. There are also a few intriguing articles available, and these help show why a person may be biographied more than once besides the older versions slipping out of date.

E. Pauline Johnson with friends during a 1904 visit to stanley park, vancouver. Vancouver public library historical photograph, item number 9431, via wikimedia commons.

One article in particular caught my eye and then admittedly sent my eyebrows upward, because it had a title that nowadays we would refer to as "clickbait." Linda Revie's "Pauline Johnson's Sapphic Wampum" appeared in the 2002-2003 volume of the Journal of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Studies Association, and it is a thought-provoking read in the best way. The article has a bit of a bumpy start, lumbered with some dreadfully worded material about Johnson's chosen Kanyen'kehà:ka name – alas by chance no one pointed Revie to several helpful pages in Barbara Alice Mann's 2000 book Iroquian Women on wampum and that very name – and what sails very close to accidentally depicting what she is doing as a form of appropriation of Johnson by a scholar interested in lesbian history. (And to be honest, I found Revie's periodic reference to Johnson as "the Mohawk Princess" just plain weird, even though it was probably meant to flip between her supposed "savage" and "civilized" personas.) Overall it is clear this is not what Revie intends, and far from this she is seeking to better understand Johnson's life through evidence few biographers seem to have read closely. Revie sets this lack down to a general habit of forcing women's lives into more acceptable scripts. This is particularly the case for lesbian lives, although remains an issue for women's biography to this day.

Spoiler alert, yes, Revie is arguing that Johnson was a lesbian, and the remarkable dearth of materials left for study by Johnson's sister does suggest something about her life caused her sister to be panicky about her journals and letters. Revie sets out a reasonable argument based on contemporary cultural references, including to the poetic milieu Johnson's own works joined, as well as a close reading of the relevant portions of Johnson's personal as well as professional writing. It is a tour de force of strongly suggesting how much more we could understand of Johnson's life and work by tracing references and connections between the books she owned and looking beyond the narrow scope of her double wampum poetry performances. This is an admittedly tough remit considering they spanned seventeen years of her life. This is also true whether or not we have any desire to know if Johnson might have been a lesbian, and whether or not we are convinced by Revie's argument. On the question of victorian era ideas about how to understand a person, male or female who died without marrying, more books and articles have appeared since on this vexed topic. There is another famous author who died relatively young and unmarried, and whose posthumous personal papers suffered similar editing by family members. That author is Lewis Carroll, and while the reason for an infamous excision from his diary remains open for debate, in 2009 biographer Karoline Leach argued the editing effort came down to a struggle to control how his unmarried state would be understood and depicted in any subsequent biographies. This may sound a bit extreme to us now, but among better off british and british-affiliated families, to die unmarried and not a child apparently bordered on scandalous. Deceased women were best off if they had a tragically cut off engagement or something of that nature, which a laboured reading of Johnson's remaining biographical materials can be made to provide, and apparently even into the early twenty-first century biographers could feel they should undertake such a reading.

Unfortunately, so far no biographer of Johnson has been either Indigenous or very well educated in Haudenosaunee culture. So we are in the remarkable position of having a thicker reconstruction of the "mainstream" or professional side of her life, an at best coarse-grained depiction of her as a person, and an almost complete absence of any sense of her as a Haudenosaunee person at all. Hence we can find such stereotypical declarations as "Nor was she financially secure: throughout her life she earned little from her publications, while income from touring tended to evaporate quickly, given her expenses and her well-known generosity and lack of financial acumen." I should be more specific. Yes, Johnson was never financially secure after the loss of her father. Biographer Marilyn J. Rose notes Johnson also had to cope with the fallout from a manager who took advantage of her in 1900. Nevertheless, her generosity is interpreted as a lack in herself. An Indigenous reader might well wonder whether Johnson was so bad with money, or whether she was living according to a widespread practice among Indigenous peoples of sharing freely when she her fortune was good, trusting her friends and broader community would come through for her. And when it came right down to it, so they did. They helped raise money to cover her medical costs during her final illness, preserve and publish her major works, arrange her funeral, and ensure the honouring of her last request, that she be buried in her beloved stanley park in sight of siwash rock. It seems to me there is a bigger story here, but we can't see it without replacing Johnson in her own Indigenous context.

There are newer biographies of famous Indigenous people, especially of those who engaged in forms of writing settlers find easiest to access, such as the all-important letters, diaries, and newspaper articles. One of the most recent and intriguing of these is of another member of Six Nations of the Grand River who was also related to Johnson, Doctor Peter Oronhyateka Martin. His biographers Keith Jamieson and Michelle A. Hamilton build up their exploration of his life by examining not only his papers, but also the evidence of his clothing and a substantial museum collection. They identify and consider more carefully Martin's motivations including as he described them in his own words. Perhaps this is a bit easier to do in his case precisely because he was explicit about it. Johnson, juggling a different combination of sex- and race-based stereotypes, does not seem to have been quite as blunt, although the direct and indirect evidence of her need and determination to support herself and pursue an independent life is manifest. The same biographer who commented on Johnson's money troubles also noted she "...performed or lectured on Mohawk traditions from time to time as her health permitted" after 1909. This is a lesser-known element of Johnson's later work, as is her series of articles on Mohawk silversmithing, North American Indian Silver Craft, finally printed in 2004 (Vancouver: Westcoast Words).