After each performance, the actors recuperated in Rossin House’s lounge. Pauline relished the conversation. She described Voke to Archie as “a gleam of intellectual sunshine to poor little me.” The New York sophistication of the company was intoxicating. “They are all such thorough ladies and gentlemen, so cultured, well read and with ideas so liberating such as one never hears in a small provincial town.” It spurred Pauline to think about her own hopes. “Mr. Bell and Courtney Thorpe did some critiquing of me that will be of great advantage to me in the future. They both recite magnificently and have asked me to write them a semi-dramatic poem for this purpose.”
Pauline’s mother, Emily, was ambivalent about her daughter’s stage friends. There was a stigma of immorality attached to the word “actress,” and according to Evelyn Johnson (who thoroughly disapproved of the theatre), “Mother would never consent to [Pauline] becoming an actress.” But the whiff of greasepaint and the sound of an audience’s applause thrilled Pauline. She was not just star-struck: she hungered to have a public role herself. In a letter to Archie she mused, “I wonder how people without ambition live.” She assured the oh-so-proper Archie that she had no interest in a simple “chase for fame.” She felt that everyone should want “to better one’s self morally and materially through…the ambition that means purpose and despises to stand still.” She couldn’t stand the idea that her life might dwindle to “the purposeless humdrum life of some I know.”
The prospect of living like her sister must have appalled Pauline as she watched Evelyn leave home each morning on her way to a routine office job, dressed in her threadbare cloth coat. Modest commissions continued to come Pauline’s way; in November 1891, the Brantford Expositor asked her to write a story for its special Christmas edition. But Pauline wanted to get out of Brantford and onto a larger stage. The opportunity finally arrived in 1892.
Pauline first met Frank Yeigh when they both attended Brantford Central Collegiate. Frank was a lively, self-confident fellow whose father had begun as a reporter with the Brantford Expositor and later moved on to the Toronto Globe. Frank followed in his father’s footsteps, working in the news department first at the Expositor and then at the Globe. But he always wanted to be in the centre of the action rather than simply reporting it. He secured the job of personal secretary to Arthur Hardy, the MPP from Brantford who had sent Pauline a note of congratulation on her work. Frank also got himself elected president of the Young Men’s Liberal Club of Canada, which boasted over a thousand members. He fancied himself as an author, too; he moved in Toronto’s literary set and, along with Pauline, he had been invited to contribute to the Brantford Expositor’s Christmas issue.
Like Lampman and Roberts (although without their talent), Frank was captivated by the idea that Canada should have its own national culture. He had read William Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion, and he was fired by Lighthall’s celebration of Canadian verse. He decided to combine his two interests, literature and politics, by staging a flamboyantly nationalist “Evening with Canadian Authors,” at which the club’s new “Canadianism” policy would be publicized. He knew that he could fill with young Liberals the lecture hall at the Art School Gallery, above the new Academy of Music theatre on King Street West, and he reckoned they would supply their usual rowdy enthusiasm for speakers. He assembled a programme of eight distinguished writers, including Duncan Campbell Scott, William Wilfred Campbell, Agnes Maule Machar, William Lighthall himself—and Pauline Johnson. Frank had dropped Pauline a note only a few days earlier. She was thrilled by the invitation to appear in such distinguished company, but also appre-hensive. “I have nothing to wear!” she wailed to Eva.
The “Evening with Canadian Authors” was scheduled for the evening of Saturday, January 16, 1892. That morning, the news from Britain made Frank anxious. There were rumours that seventy-two-year-old Queen Victoria, following the recent death of her grandson the Duke of Clarence, had fallen ill. The news, as the Globe itself said, made “every artery of the empire tingle…Bombay, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Natal and Toronto.” Frank’s nerves tingled because if the Queen died, he would have to cancel his event. But by the end of the day, there were no newsboys shrieking out bad news at street corners or selling special black-edged editions of the Evening Telegram, the Empire, the Mail and the Globe. The Queen had rallied. Frank walked along King Street and was pleased to see lines for tickets already forming outside the Art School building.
Half an hour before the curtain was scheduled to rise, the hall was packed and young Liberals were scurrying to find more chairs. Sharp January winds whistled down the narrow streets outside, but the temperature inside rose steadily and people shrugged off their heavy woollen coats. Frank scuttled up and down the aisles; the place was as packed, he recalled later, as a “sardine box.” The crème de la crème of Toronto sat in the front row. There were two of the era’s greatest orators: George Ross, Minister of Education for the province, and the Reverend D. J. Macdonnell of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church. There was Graeme Mercer Adam, the author, editor and close associate of Goldwin Smith, now white-haired but in his day, as publisher of Rose Belford’s Canadian Monthly, a tireless promoter of Canadian writers. There was another leading churchman, the Reverend Dr. Dewart, who in 1864 had edited the very first anthology of Canadian poetry, Selections from Canadian Poets. The sense of anticipation was almost tangible. Was not the audience about to witness the official inauguration of Canadian literature? Frank Yeigh held a sheaf of letters from those who regretted they could not attend such a significant evening. Writers included Principal George Monroe Grant of Queen’s University, Archibald Lampman, William Kirby (whose novel The Golden Dog, published in 1877, was still a bestseller) and Louis-Honoré Fréchette, Poet Laureate of Quebec and Achille Fréchette’s brother.
The young impresario began the evening with a stirring appeal for cultural nationalism. Canadians must learn to appreciate the growing strength of their own culture, Yeigh said, instead of waiting for American critics to do it for them. It was appalling that, by his estimate, only about “10 percent of intelligent Canadians were aware of the literary feast by home talent” available to them. Unless Canadians learned to appreciate their own literature, Yeigh told his audience, they risked losing their best poets to the United States. Canada could already boast an astonishing national literature for a country so young: “the intelligent life of Canada is keeping pace with its material development.”
All those intelligent young Liberals in the hall applauded their President enthusiastically. Then they sat back to listen to the literary lions. But as the evening got underway, the spirits of the students, would-be writers and literary critics began to droop. Frank had made a miscalculation. He was used to dealing with politicians, and somehow, since both politicians and poets deal in words, he had assumed that writers could fire up a crowd in the same way as George Ross, or even the silver-tongued Liberal leader, Wilfrid Laurier.
He was wrong. Reading verse has nothing to do with fiery oratory. The first poem featured was Miss Agnes Maule Machar’s “The Mystic Singer.” It was received well because it was short and read with gusto by the Reverend Macdonnell, a personal friend of Miss Machar’s. But Wilfred Campbell, a poet with a high opinion of himself and a loud, monotonous voice, followed Miss Machar. He read a doleful work entitled “The Mother,” which described the corpse of a woman who died in childbirth, and which included such lugubrious lines as “I kenned my breasts were clammy and cold.” Next came William Lighthall, who read a lengthy and didactic chapter from his book The Young Seigneur on Nation-Making. By now an hour had passed, the heat in the hall was oppressive and less than one-quarter of the programme had been covered. The audience fidgeted and coughed. The chairs at the back of the hall began to empty.
Pauline stood in the wings, listening to Mr. Lighthall. She could see and hear what was happening. Under her white gloves, her palms were damp. But at the same time, her stage training and the lessons from Rosina Voke’s act
ors gave her confidence. She knew what the audience wanted. Unlike Campbell and Lighthall, she knew how to perform. She would not stand there, eyes focussed on the printed page as she read her verse. She would connect directly with the audience by reciting from memory. She adjusted the bodice of her pale grey silk gown and arched her neck. She swept back into place a few stray ten-drils of hair that had escaped her chignon and ran her fingers through her carefully curled bangs. She took a deep breath.
Finally, Mr. Lighthall’s reading drew to a close, and he walked off the stage to polite applause. As Frank Yeigh appeared before the footlights to introduce the next speaker, those in the wings could hear the sound of more people leaving at the rear of the hall. Pauline Johnson took another deep breath, then glided onto centre stage. Once there, she remained silent, eyes raised to the ceiling, as shapely and motionless as a Greek statue, until every last whisper had died down, every fidget was stilled.
Then she began. She had chosen to recite “A Cry from an Indian Wife,” an extraordinarily forceful poem that she had written seven years earlier and offered to Mr. Lighthall for his anthology. It concerned one of the most inflammatory incidents in Canadian history: the 1885 North-West Rebellion that took place on the plains of Western Canada. In 1869 the Métis leader Louis Riel had led an uprising to secure Métis land rights against the aggressive incursions of Ontario settlers. By and large the uprising was successful, although the execution of an Ontario Orangeman by the rebels shocked Anglo-Protestants in Ontario. But in 1885 Riel led a second uprising in support of Métis land rights which involved Métis, Assiniboine and Plains Cree warriors and which ended in disaster. Canadian troops were quickly on the spot, and the uprising rapidly spiralled out of control. Before Dominion authorities had suppressed the trouble, European settlers, rebels and soldiers had been killed. Ottawa then approved the hanging of Louis Riel and eight Indian chiefs. The 1885 Rebellion proved deeply divisive in both Central and Western Canada for years to come. Quebecers were outraged by the execution of Louis Riel; they regarded him as the champion of French-speaking Catholics who had been sacrificed to satisfy Protestant Ontario. Out west, the 1885 Rebellion, which left the Métis and the Indians defeated both politically and emotionally, was regarded as a symbol of Ottawa’s arrogant dismissal of native claims. Although the events of 1885 were seven years old when Pauline took to the Toronto stage, the memory had not faded and sensitivities were still raw.
Pauline’s poem deals with the uprising from an entirely original point of view—that of the wife of an Indian warrior. Rage ripples through the first half of the poem as the narrator deplores the treatment that Indians have received at the hands of European settlers:
They but forget we Indians owned the land
From ocean unto ocean; that they stand
Upon a soil that centuries agone
Was our sole kingdom and our right alone.
They never think how they would feel today,
If some great nation came from far away,
Wresting their country from their hapless braves,
Giving what they gave us—but war and graves.
In the later lines of the poem, there is an abrupt change of pace. The narrator considers the feelings of the “white-faced warriors’” mothers:
Yet stay, my heart is not the only one
that grieves the loss of husband and of son;
Think of the mothers o’er the inland seas;
Think of the pale-faced maiden on her knees…
Pauline lowered her voice as one tragic image followed another. In the hall, most people were at the edge of their chairs. Suddenly, her voice was loud and her arm raised. The words reverberated into the farthest corners of the room as she reached the poem’s climax. Every lesson on breath control and voice projection that Rosina Voke had ever taught her was now fully employed.
Pauline had ended the original version of the poem, published in The Week, with a fatalistic acceptance of European victory: “God and fair Canada have willed it so.” But in later versions, she toughened up the ending to reflect the injustice of the British Empire’s treatment of Indians:
Go forth, nor bend to greed of white men’s hands,
By right, by birth we Indians own these lands,
Though starved, crushed, plundered, lies our nation low…
Perhaps the white man’s God has willed it so.
It was probably this revised version, eloquent with anger, that she used for her 1892 appearance.
“A Cry from an Indian Wife” held the audience in thrall, although few of its members would have shared the poet’s views. Many people present that night had read Pauline Johnson’s work in Saturday Night, but most of her published poems dealt with canoeing, nature or love. Only a handful of people in the hall had already heard her recite or knew she was half Mohawk. Now, her musical voice and intensity of expression mesmerized them. She was both sensuously beautiful and intriguingly exotic. Few people remained unmoved by the emotional pull of a poem which reflected Pauline’s own divided loyalties, as she identified with both Indian and European women caught up in the conflict out west.
At the close of the poem, Pauline let her eyes drift down. She turned to leave the stage. There was total silence for a moment, then the audience broke into wild applause. Completely self-possessed, Pauline turned back and gave a deep curtsey as cries of “Encore” began to reverberate around the hall. Frank Yeigh was waiting for her in the wings as she walked off stage; he beamed with relief that she had rescued the evening. After a brief consultation with Pauline, he led his diva back on stage and announced that Miss Johnson would be happy to recite a second, unscheduled work.
There was yet another storm of applause. At the age of thirty-one, after nearly a decade of hard work and regular publication, Pauline had finally been discovered.
10
BEADS, QUILLS, SASHES, SHOES AND BROOCHES 1892–1894
“MISS E. Pauline Johnson’s may be said to have been the pleasantest contribution of the evening,” the Globe reviewer announced two days after the “Evening with Canadian Authors.” “It was like the voice of the nations that once possessed this country, who have wasted away before our civilization, speaking through this cultured, gifted, soft-faced descendant.”
Pauline smiled as she carefully clipped the review out of the newspaper and stuck the cutting in her scrapbook. The wild enthusiasm that had greeted her first performance in Toronto had been intoxicating. She had always found the applause for her Brantford appearances gratifying, but since she knew most of her hometown audience personally, she took the ovations for granted. The Toronto reception was different. Most of her fellow performers in January 1892 were far better known than she was. The VIPs in the front-row seats were people she was keen to impress. And the throngs of eager young Liberals, whooping at her beauty and passion, made her feel the equal of a Jenny Lind or a Sarah Bernhardt. Who wouldn’t blush with pride and pleasure at such a warm response?
But there was an additional reason for Pauline’s sense of achievement. The “Evening with Canadian Authors” confirmed her perception that her Mohawk blood was an asset to her career. Lots of Canadians were composing verse about sunsets, canoes and northern skies. A few poets, including Duncan Campbell Scott, who worked in Ottawa’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, were writing about native people. But she was the only one with aboriginal ancestry herself who was creating such poetry. Her Indian blood and use of Indian myths and history gave her an edge in the crowded literary marketplace. It also gave her an opportunity to confront the patronizing attitude displayed by some English Canadians to their country’s native inhabitants. A self-serving assumption was spreading that native bands were bound for extinction, through disease and assimilation, because they were mentally unfit to survive as separate peoples in the face of superior British “culture.” Pauline resented this arrogance. Thoughtless allusions to “Injuns” and “squaws,” and the lofty reference in the Globe’s review about Indians “wast[ing] away before
our civilization,” rankled. Although her day-to-day life was that of any Brantford young lady and none of her friends was Indian, she had not lost the pride in her dual heritage instilled in her by her parents. Her new ambition, she told Archie, was to “upset the Indian Extermination and Non-education Theory, in fact to stand by my blood and my race.”
Pauline never recorded any instances of prejudice directed against her personally during these years, but she came face to face with dismissive stereotypes of Indians in her reading matter. William Lighthall had turned down the chance to include Pauline’s “Cry from an Indian Wife,” with its implicit message of two mighty races striving to understand each other, in his 1889 anthology. Instead, nine of the twelve poems in “The Indian” section of Songs of the Great Dominion were by non-natives. (The remaining three were pedestrian translations of traditional native songs, two from the Wabanaki people and one from the Mohawks of Caughnawaga.) A chilling assumption threaded its way through the entire section: native peoples were destined to vanish. Phrases such as “fated race” and “poor red children” recurred like drumbeats. One poem, by George Martin, began, “Onward the Saxon treads” and ended with a doleful quatrain on the disappearance of the Ottawa Indians:
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