DENISE S. McCONNEY
When I was first asked to review this book, I was quite excited. I had just finished teaching a second year Native Studies course on Native Literature. Two of my students had done their presentation on E. Pauline Johnson. Despite the fact that these were Native students talking to a group of Native students, they did not appear to perceive Johnson's appeals to the nineteenth-century images of a Pan Indianness. For example, they saw no contradiction in Johnson, as a Mohawk--an agricultural people--using buffalo hunt imagery. I was, therefore, quite interested to read a new work on E. Pauline Johnson to see what was being discussed about this and other issues.
The book took quite awhile to come from the publisher. In the meantime, I received a package of promotional material from the publisher. In this package, I discovered that prior to writing this book, the author (a non-Native woman) had "performed Johnson's poems dressed in a copy of her Native outfit." I began to have grave concerns about the possibility of appropriation in this work. I was also scheduled to attend a conference in the Grand River Territory and I hoped to receive the book before going there so I could speak with people in the community and hear some of their responses and analyses of the book. Unfortunately, the book did not arrive in time for this.[1]
Since then, and I admit I have taken a long time with this (about 8 months), I have mostly been struggling with the various aspects of and perspectives on E. Pauline Johnson. This is not to suggest that she is a controversial figure, rather that she is seen in a number of very different ways by different peoples. As a beginning, there are the poet and the performer. Within those categories, she may be seen as a Canadian poet, a Confederation poet, a woman poet, an Indian poet, an Iroquois poet or even a Mohawk poet. These "adjectives" can be repeated with "performer." There are also very different understandings of who she is/was as an Indian woman, differences her own work contributes to rather than clarifies. Analyses of her art range from Daniel Francis's inclusion of her in his chapter "Celebrity Indians and Plastic Shamans" in The Imaginary Indian to Beth Brant's--a current Mohawk poet--consideration of Johnson as the grandmother of all contemporary Indian writers. Clearly there are many ways to celebrate and/or challenge ideas about E. Pauline Johnson. Equally clearly, Shelia Johnston was not up to this task. Although the title claims the book is a celebration, it is more like a compote of the good, the bad and the ugly from E. Pauline Johnson's life and times. Even more problematic is a lack of analysis either from a historical or a contemporary perspective.
What we do get are relatively brief commentaries from Sheila Johnston about the various stages of E. Pauline Johnson's life. I assume these are supposed to introduce, for they do not contextualize, these stages. Following these commentaries are fragments of stories from Pauline's contemporaries. Neither the introductory commentaries nor the fragments offer any analysis of her life or times. This is especially problematic in three ways: Sheila Johnston's descriptions of Mohawk society; E. Pauline Johnson's own understanding of her culture; and the inclusion of gratuitous, unanalysed or unacknowledged racism.
While Sheila Johnston acknowledges assistance from the late Condoled Cayuaga Chief, Jake Thomas--a renowned expert on Iroquois law--in her first chapter, Johnston misses the crucial difference between Pauline, her siblings and her mother being Mohawk in Canadian law but not in Mohawk law (where membership in the Nation is matrilineal.) This is a distinction of which Chief Thomas and other Six Nations community members listed in the acknowledgements would have been well aware.[2] There is, therefore, no comment or explanation of Pauline's adoption of her grandfather's "Indian" name rather than Pauline having a Mohawk female clan name of her own.[3] Indeed, the stories by her sister Evelyn reinforce these questions as Evelyn's stories--even with the irritating ellipses--demonstrate a far greater understanding of Mohawk ways. See for example, "Catherine Rollstone's adoption by the Mohawks" (26). The Mohawk and Indian sections raise more issues than reveal explanations of this aspect of Pauline's life.
This biography also has little to offer in terms of some greater understanding of Pauline's role as an early spokeswoman for Indian peoples. It merely repeats both the accolades of her time: "the bashful and frightened Indian Princess-Maiden has captured the town [...] She captured the press critics as well, and the next day they sounded her praises to the skies" (Yeigh in Johnston, 104), as well as the more explicit racism, "A man who was leaving the hall was overheard to saying: 'Isn't she savage! I wouldn't like her for a wife'" (137). None of these racist fragments, and there are many other examples in the book, receive any comment or even acknowledgement by Sheila Johnston.
Similarly, nothing assesses or even describes the very different perspectives in poems such as "A Request" and "A Cry From An Indian Wife." Both of these are reproduced in the book. "A Request" takes the rather gushingly grateful stance that in 1886, Christian missionaries are heading West to save Indian souls rather than the troops who had been sent out the year before to kill Indians during the NorthWest Resistance of 1885 (105). Yet, "A Cry From An Indian Wife," a showpiece during Pauline's performances, has a narrator who decries both the intervention by government troops and the general treatment of Indians who have been "starved, crushed and plundered [...] Perhaps [because the same] white man's God [of the missionaries] has willed it so" (105). Sheila Johnston acknowledges that this later poem is a bold one for its time. I agree, but question why, when Sheila Johnston's project was to produce a more inclusive portrayal of Pauline's life works, by including uncollected poems like "A Request", could there not be some effort made to at least note these and the other conflicts within Pauline's work?
In conclusion, I have no doubt that in this book Sheila Johnston has uncovered and made more accessible a great deal of new material here which others may find interesting or useful, although the organisation of the material means that some searching through its contents will be required. Connected explanatory fragments frequently appear very far apart. The revealing explanation of the source of the famous buckskin stage costume,[4] for example, does not appear until page 112, although its full story must be gleaned from many sections of the book. In the final analysis, Buckskin and Broadcloth remains distressing and unsatisfactory.
NOTES
1. I did discuss my Prairie students' failure
to understand that all Indians, especially those of the Haudenausuanee, would
not have seen themselves as buffalo hunters with Mohawk legal scholar, Patricia
Monture-Angus, and Osage literary scholar, Robert Warrior, while we were at
the conference. Unfortunately, on one of our excursions, we went to a shopping
centre in the area where, lo and behold, there was a giant (plastic) buffalo
atop a "Western" restaurant. Sigh.
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2. See for example, Brian Maracle's discussion
of this in Back to the Rez.
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3. For a detailed description of this breech
of protocol, see Porter's Clanology.
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4. I am using the term "costume" deliberately.
I am well aware that it is inappropriate to use the term costume to describe
traditional outfits. Pauline's stage buckskin dress was not a traditional
outfit.
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WORKS CITED
Note: All of these texts pre-date the publication of Buckskin and Broadcloth.
Brant, Beth. Writing as Witness: Essays and Talk. Toronto: Women's Press, 1984.
Frances, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992.
Maracle, Brian. Back to the Rez: Finding the Way Home. Toronto: Viking, 1996.
Poster, Tom. Clanology: Clan System of the Iroquois. Cornwall: North American Indian Travelling College, 1993.