Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  “Canadian Born,” Pauline’s patriotic recital piece, reflected the same inclusive spirit. Birth in Canada under the British flag, rather than race or blood, was the glue for the new nation, in which people of different languages and blood could flourish. She revealed her own dual loyalties when she introduced “Canadian Born” from the stage. If there were “unpatriotic citizens in Canada,” she told her listeners, “they are certainly not the Iroquois Indians.” From Halifax to Vancouver, audiences rose to their feet and roared their approval as the beautiful and passionate poet, her dark curls cascading around her shoulders and the silver brooches on her buckskin tunic glinting in the stage lights, repeated the jingoistic refrain: “And we, the men of Canada, can face the world and brag / That we were born in Canada beneath the British flag.”

  At one level, Pauline’s ability to balance her English and her Mohawk loyalties appeared to have both enriched her view of the world and brought her professional success. By now she was a poet with a national reputation, popular amongst Ottawa politicians and Prairie farmers alike. When a writer named Henry Morgan put together an album of well-known Canadian women entitled Types of Canadian Women, he wrote to Pauline requesting a photograph for inclusion. (She did not send him one because, as she explained to Harry O’Brien, Morgan “demanded that I pay ten dollars for the ‘privilege’ of being included in this book. I have become horribly wary, for twice I have been caught with this ten dollar scheming.”)

  Her support was sought for the great causes of the era. In January 1900, she left Winnipeg to travel to Toronto to give a concert in aid of the Canadian troops who were fighting the Boers in South Africa. English-speaking Canada was gung-ho to fight alongside the British on the dusty veldt, but Quebec was not enthusiastic about contributing to one of Britain’s Imperial adventures. With typical dexterity, Sir Wilfrid Laurier navigated safely through competing currents of opinion. Canada would recruit and send a contingent of 1,000 troops, but Britain would foot the bill for transportation, equipment, supplies and pay. In order to channel Ontario’s pro-British pugnacity into constructive activity, Laurier decreed that the costs of medical services, family and widows’ benefits, and personal comforts for the Canadian boys would be covered by volunteer efforts within Canada.

  When Pauline stepped off the train at Toronto’s Union Station, she plunged into war fever. Newsboys selling copies of the Star, the Globe and the Mail and Empire yelled out the latest news of the Siege of Ladysmith, where Imperial troops were defending the British military depot. “Boers Repulsed at All Points After Many Hours of Fighting,” read the headline in the Globe. Travellers whistled popular airs such as “Who Would Not Die for England?” and “Goodbye Dolly Gray.” As she sat in the cab on the way to Rossin House, she saw Union Jacks in all the store windows and heard trumpet players on the street corners belting out martial music.

  Le tout Toronto was gathered at Massey Hall on the evening of Wednesday, January 10, for the Red Cross fundraiser organized by Mrs. G. Allan Arthurs and Mrs. Grayson Smith. All the old Family Compact dynasties were represented, including the Denisons, the Cawthras and the Ridouts, plus plenty of members of the city’s new industrial class, such as the Gzowskis and the Gooderhams. The two front rows were occupied by the contingent of volunteers due to leave three days later for South Africa. “How very young most of the men look, mere boys many of them,” commented the Globe’s reviewer, adding that, nevertheless, they were “such men as any country would be proud to own.” The evening began with a series of patriotic tableaux vivants in which Toronto’s jeunesse d’orée (including Miss Heaven and Miss Evelyn Cox) depicted scenes from the Siege of Ladysmith and a tableau of Queen Victoria. Next, a popular local baritone sang “Take the Muzzle off the Lion” and “We Won’t Stand It Any Longer.” But the star attraction of the evening was Pauline Johnson, who appeared in the second half of the programme. Her renditions of “Canadian Born” and “Riders of the Plains” brought the audience to their feet.

  There were several rival fundraisers for Canadian boys in the Transvaal during the winter of 1900. In Ottawa, a similar tableau vivant starred the Governor General’s niece, and later in January, Owen Smily gave a recital in Toronto. However, the Massey Hall fundraiser was the highlight of the season. By popular request it was repeated on both Thursday and Saturday nights. Pauline’s jingoistic verses hit just the note of Imperial fervour that the audience wanted to hear. At the same time, her Indian costume reassured her audience that while French Canadians might not support the war, anti-Boer feeling was not confined to Anglo-Saxons.

  Lady Ishbel Aberdeen (1857–1939), wife of the Governor General, founded the National Council of Women and the Victorian Order of Nurses.

  Pauline’s stature was further enhanced when she was asked to contribute to a booklet about Canadian women to be distributed at the Paris International Exhibition of 1900. The handbook was the brainchild of Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, the formidable wife of the Marquess of Aberdeen, Governor General from 1893 to 1898. It included sections on various aspects of women’s lives and achievements, including their legal and political status, educational and career opportunities, achievements in the arts and sciences, and volunteer activities. By the time Lady Aberdeen started lobbying for the handbook, she had already established the National Council of Women and the Victorian Order of Nurses. Not surprisingly, the handbook’s tone was staunchly feminist and its prose drenched in her well-meaning but relentlessly bossy personality. Lady Aberdeen believed that Canadian women had the capacity, as yet untapped, to be a wholesome influence in an untamed country. She herself tapped the potential of some of Canada’s most important hostesses for her handbook, including the wives of Thomas Ahearn (a prominent Ottawa businessman) and R. L. Borden (the Halifax MP who would later become Prime Minister), and the widows of the late Sir James Edgar, Speaker of the House of Commons, and Dean Boomer, of the Diocese of Hurontario. The contributors also included Marie Gérin-Lajoie, who taught at the Université de Montréal; writer Mary Agnes FitzGibbon, granddaughter of Susanna Moodie; Adelaide Hoodless, founder of the Women’s Institutes; and Clara Brett Martin, Canada’s first woman lawyer. All in all, it was a prestigious list that Pauline had been invited to join.

  The final section of the handbook was entitled “Indian Women.” The first three essays were smug accounts of how the lives of Indian women had improved since the white man arrived. “Twenty-five years ago…their lot was indeed hard,” wrote Madame Henriette Forget, Honorary President of the Daughters of the Empire and wife of the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Territories. “Polygamy was the general practice…The marriage ceremony was as meagre as the bride’s dress—among some tribes nothing but a cedar-bark petticoat.” Now a visitor to the Canadian West “sees bright-eyed, chubby, happy-looking damsels.” Although most of these damsels “are not brilliant successes as cooks,” at least the cedar-bark petticoats had been replaced by “the neat dress of modern make.”

  The fourth essay, however, struck a different note. “The Iroquois Women of Canada” was proudly identified as being “by One of Them—Miss E. Pauline Johnson, Brantford.” In her opening paragraph, Pauline launched her well-polished broadside at European stereotypes:

  To the majority of English speaking people, an Indian is an Indian, an inadequate sort of person possessing a red brown skin, nomadic habits, and an inability for public affairs. That the various tribes and nations of the great Red population of America, differ as much one from another as do the white races of Europe, is a thought that seldom occurs to those disinterested in the native of the western continent. Now, the average Englishman would take some offence if any one were unable to discriminate between him and a Turk—though both are “white”; and yet the ordinary individual seems surprised that a Sioux would turn up his nose if mistaken for a Sarcee, or an Iroquois be eternally offended if you confounded him with a Micmac.

  Pauline went on to write specifically about the Iroquois: “This people stand undemolished and undemorali
zed today, right in the heart of Canada, where the lands granted a century ago in recognition of their loyal services to the Imperial Government, are still known as the ‘Six Nations’ Indian reserve of the Grand River.” An Iroquois woman, she argued, “is behind her white sister in nothing pertaining to the larder, the dairy or the linen press.” Onlookers were mistaken when they presumed that an Iroquois woman’s “placid, brown face” suggested she was “quite unintelligent.” In Pauline’s view, the Iroquois people were the aristocracy of North American natives, and “Miss Iroquois” was treated with far more respect by Iroquois men than the women of many so-called civilized races were treated by their menfolk.

  Yet Pauline was less in control of her world than her firm opinions and popular success would suggest. For all her spirited defence of the Iroquois, her connection to them grew more tenuous each year. There is no evidence that she visited the Six Nations Reserve during these years. The only cousin with whom she kept in close touch was her mother’s niece Katie Howells. Katie had married Stephen Frederick Washington, and the Washingtons’ house in Hamilton, Ontario, became a regular refuge for Pauline. Her visits became even more frequent in 1901, when her sister Evelyn left Brantford to study domestic science at Toronto’s Technical School. Evelyn then moved to New York State, where she took a series of low-paid but genteel posts, including matron of a girls’ hostel and companion to a wealthy widow. Pauline’s older sister remained close to Iroquois friends and relatives on both sides of the border, mixing more easily in Indian than non-native society. But Pauline’s own circle was dominated by middle-class Canadians of European origin—the kind of people to whom she gave her recitals. She was a sturdy defender of Indian interests, proud to be labelled “One of Them” by the likes of Lady Aberdeen, but her contact with the day-to-day lives of Indians dwindled.

  At the same time, Pauline could see that the gap between Canada’s indigenous peoples and Anglo-Canadian society was widening rapidly. In poems like “Canadian Born” and “Riders of the Plains,” she played along with the myth that allegiance to Britain and its laws was what defined and united Canadians of every colour and creed. This was the story her audiences wanted to hear. But she also told a reporter from a Western paper that “she deplored the condition of her noble race in the great lone land. Of the reserves she visited she always spoke in tones of regret.” And a powerful short story she wrote around this time painted a darker picture. “As It Was in the Beginning,” which appeared in the 1899 Christmas issue of Saturday Night with illustrations by the Canadian academician Carl Ahrens, reflects an angry assessment of what was really going on.

  The story begins dramatically: “They account for it by the fact that I am a Redskin, but I am something else too—I am a woman.” Esther, the narrator, is a spirited and beautiful young woman of part-Cree, part-European heritage. When she is a little girl, a black-robed missionary, Father Paul, persuades her father to send her to a residential school so she can be raised as a Christian and forget the “evil pagan influences” of her people. Esther is stripped of her buckskin dress, forced to wear a stiff calico uniform and leather shoes, and forbidden to speak in the Cree tongue. However, she is befriended by Father Paul’s young nephew, Laurence. As Esther matures, she hungers for her old way of life, but she is always called back to the mission by Laurence. By now Laurence has changed from a cheerful young boy into the classic Johnson hero: “a tall slender young man…with laughing blue eyes, and always those yellow curls about his temple.” Laurence and Esther declare their love to each other, although Esther recognizes that if she marries Laurence, she will have to surrender her own culture: “No more the wild stretch of prairie, the intoxicating fragrance of the smoke-tanned buckskin; no more the bed of buffalo hide, the soft, silent moccasin; no more the dark faces of my people, the dulcet cadence of the sweet Cree tongue.”

  Laurence tells Father Paul about their love. The black-robed old man, whom Esther has loved and trusted, is appalled by Laurence’s news. Within earshot of Esther, the priest tells Laurence he cannot marry Esther because she comes of “uncertain blood,” and “you can never tell what lurks in a caged animal that has once been wild… You can never trust her…She reminds me sometimes of a strange—snake.” Esther, devastated by such venomous words, must then suffer a second betrayal: she watches Laurence accept his uncle’s reasoning. Esther immediately gathers up her belongings and creeps out of the mission building—but not before she has leaned over Laurence’s sleeping form: “His curving mouth that almost laughed even in his sleep, his fair, tossed hair, his smooth, strong-pulsing throat. God! How I loved him!” But Esther cannot forgive the treachery of either the priest or his “weak, miserable kinsman.” Without waking Laurence, she scratches his arm with a flint covered in deadly snake venom. The final line of this story of vengeance and murder echoes the opening line: “They account for it by the fact that I am a Redskin. They seem to have forgotten I am a woman.”

  Pauline’s raw hurt about her broken engagement to Charles Drayton underscores “As It Was in the Beginning”; there are obvious similarities between the weak-willed Laurence and Charlie. The story also echoes “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” the tale Pauline published in 1893 in which another heroine of mixed race, Christie, punishes her lover for bowing to British prejudice. But the tone of “As It Was in the Beginning” is much angrier, and the climax more brutal. It reflects Pauline’s disillusion with Anglo-Canadian attitudes and her deepening concern with the predicament of Canada’s native peoples. Since 1893, she had travelled across Canada several more times, and she had seen what was happening on the Prairies and farther west. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Dominion government in Ottawa had grown increasingly impatient with the slow pace of its assimilation policy amongst Indians. So it had toughened up measures to reshape Indian behaviour into “civilized” patterns. Polygamy was banned. Indians were prohibited from being on reserves other than their own without official approval. Important cultural practices such as the prairie Indians’ Sun Dance and the coastal Indians’ potlatch ceremonies were prohibited.

  The most significant, and coercive, initiative taken to Europeanize natives was the extension of the system of residential schools, run on the same lines as the Six Nations Reserve’s Mohawk Institute, which Pauline’s two brothers had attended. Father Paul, the priest in “As It Was in the Beginning,” is only describing official policy when he says to Esther’s father, “Give me this little girl, chief. Let me take her to the mission school; let me keep her, and teach her of the great God and His eternal heaven. She will grow to be a noble woman.” As the 1889 annual report of the department of Indian Affairs put it, “The boarding school disassociates the Indian child from the deleterious home influences to which he would otherwise be subjected. It reclaims him from the uncivilized state in which he has been brought up. It brings him into contact from day to day with all that tends to effect a change in his views and habits of life. By precept and example he is taught to endeavour to excel in what will be most useful to him.”

  Pauline herself believed strongly in the importance of literacy. She made a point of visiting residential schools. According to a reporter who accompanied her to the Lebret Industrial School in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley, “her greatest interest when visiting the industrial school was in the musical attainment of the children.” But the portrait of a mission school in “As It Was in the Beginning” is blisteringly critical. Esther’s nostalgia for “the intoxicating fragrance of the smoke-tanned buckskin;…the dulcet cadence of the sweet Cree tongue” is an elegy for a lost culture: Pauline recognized that uprooting children from their families and traditions was harmful. And the portrayal of Father Paul illuminates the hypocrisy of the religious authorities who ran most residential schools.

  At the Dunbow Residential School, built in 1884, Indian children were schooled in English and the catechism, and forbidden to speak their own languages.

  Pauline had almost certainly heard complaints about ha
rsh discipline, corporal punishment and poor food. Clearly she also recognized the more subversive damage that the schools were perpetrating. One of the most powerful poems that appeared on her recital programme in this period was entitled “His Sister’s Son,” and it dealt specifically with the plight of residential school students. The poem was never published, perhaps because it made audiences so uncomfortable. An assiduous reporter preserved one bitter, tragic verse:

  For they [killed] the best that there was in me

  When they said I must not return

  To my father’s lodge, to my mother’s arms;

  When my heart would burn—and burn!

  For when dead is a daughter’s womanhood

  There is nothing left that is grand and good.

  If Pauline was troubled by the deliberate campaign to eliminate native traditions, she must have been dismayed by the complacent assumption, now spreading with accelerating speed, that Indians themselves were headed for extinction. “A Dwindling People,” read a headline in the Globe of July 5, 1895, in an account of a confrontation on the Blackfoot Reserve, near Gleichen in what is now Alberta, between a native man and a missionary. The confrontation, suggested the reporter, “may be taken to be the last flicker of an expiring lamp, for the Indians of those reserves appear to be a doomed people. The change of life appears to be fatal, and the evil effects are still felt of the carnival of drunkenness and disease which succeeded the signing of the treaty [establishing the reserve] a dozen years ago, just before the C.P.R. was built through the country. There is something rather pathetic in this dwindling away of a famous race.”