Mixed Race Studies

This is Not a Biography: Pauline Johnson and the Process of National Identity

Canadian Poetry
Volume 48 (Spring/Summer 2001)

Shelley Hulan, Associate Professor of English
University of Waterloo, Canada

Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag. Paddling Her Own Canoe: the Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson–Tekahionwake. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. 331 pp.

Anyone familiar with the literary criticism on early twentieth-century Canada knows that the writer and performer Pauline Johnson has long been a source of fascination for students of the period. Because she occupied both Native and White worlds, and because her work contributes something to dialogues on race, women, performance, and imperial identity in the young Canada, she has been the subject of several studies, most of them biographical. As biographies must, these examinations of the poet and performer seek the identity of their subject by attempting to recreate the person. Biographies often serve as bellwethers for the interests of the times when they are written, and the continuing appearance of new ones about Johnson demonstrates that she still provokes many questions for contemporary scholars. Biographies also require their authors to make inferences, sometimes tenuous, about the subject’s life on the basis of documentary evidence, sometimes sparse. This practice is especially difficult in the case of someone like Johnson, many of whose private papers were burned by her sister Eliza shortly after her death. In Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson–Tekahionwake, Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag do not attempt another biography of Johnson but undertake, instead, an analysis of the texts that she wrote in the contexts of her own time. Freeing themselves in this way from the necessity of heavy speculation on a life that is inaccessible to readers, they devote the book to a reconstruction of the milieu in which Johnson lived and to a scrutiny of writings by and about her.

This is an ambitious and exhaustively researched study, both in its quest for new documentary clues to Johnson’s situation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada and in its bibliographical search for Johnson’s many uncollected prose publications. Gerson and Strong-Boag believe that a thorough survey of Johnson’s writing is necessary in order to understand her place in the history of Canadian ideas. They forego nothing in Johnson’s life work, considering everything from her ode to Joseph Brant, which was read at the unveiling of the monument raised to the Native chief in 1886, to her early literary essays, her memoirs of her mother, and the occasional verse that she wrote for different towns on her performance circuit in later years. One of the fruits of their bibliographical research is a detailed chronology of her publications, a chronology that enables them to challenge the pattern of development into which other critics have persistently tried to place the poet-performer. Their inquiry into the expectations of the markets for which Johnson wrote suggests that writers like her addressed, at different times, two very different audiences. On one hand, there were the readers of Johnson’s poetry (which was largely unremunerated and found in anthologies and newspapers), and on the other there were the readers of her fiction and memoir-writing (which was paid writing for specific audiences with well-defined expectations). Framed by their research into her historical context and into her publication record, Gerson and Strong-Boag’s argument is that Johnson alternated between expressing popular Canadian imperialist sentiments and challenging prevailing preconceptions of Native peoples as vanishing, weak, and invisible.

Like Johnson’s biographers, Gerson and Strong-Boag view Johnson as a figure through whom many questions about turn-of-the-century Canadian culture may be asked, and they want to know how her many identities–as a woman, as a person of Mixed-race heritage, as a member of the middle class, and as a performer–made her such an enduring contributor “to the national imaginary” (11). The first chapter extensively reviews the various attitudes toward race at the end of the nineteenth century, dwelling particularly on ideas of racial hybridity in Canada. By examining a variety of texts published in Canada during Johnson’s lifetime, including anthropological studies of Native North Americans, newspaper clippings, and correspondence, Gerson and Strong-Boag argue that “in enforced encounters with English language, texts, and laws, Indians increasingly confronted attitudes that designated them and their traditions as subordinate” (27). In this way, they begin to outline the sense of conflict under which they subsequently argue that Johnson lived and worked. Johnson’s immediate family (she had a White mother and a Native father) captures the complicated situations of Native and Mixed-race persons who, like Johnson’s father, simultaneously held positions of authority on a Native reserve and worked closely with federal imperial authorities. The authors draw attention both to the mixed feelings of some Reserve members towards this Native elite and to the settler community’s equally noncommittal stance towards it, and they suggest that the two groups’ always-reluctant acceptance of Native leaders shaped Johnson’s early consciousness…

Read the entire review here.