A few months earlier, some of Pauline’s Press Club friends had decided that the most appropriate place for Pauline’s remains was Stanley Park. There was a particular landmark of which she was very fond: a column of grey granite called the Siwash Rock that jutted out of the channel by Ferguson Point. Chief Joe Capilano had first shown her the rock on an August evening while he was paddling her around the Stanley Park shoreline. She was fascinated by the way it “stood forth like a sentinel—erect, enduring, eternal.” Chief Joe explained that according to Squamish legend, the rock was a monument to “clean fatherhood.” As the old chief and the middle-aged poet sat in the canoe enjoying the glint of evening light on the water and the soft Pacific breeze, Chief Joe told her the legend of Siwash Rock. He described how emissaries of the Creator, the Grand Tyee, had turned a young father to stone because the man had refused to stop swimming and get out of the emissaries’ way while his wife was giving birth in the nearby forest. Tribal law decreed that a father must swim, in a purification ritual, while his child was being born; the young chief had kept swimming because he wanted to set a spotless example to his newborn son. Pauline loved this story, and the noble notion of “clean fatherhood.” While she was well enough, she often walked to Ferguson Point, from where she could gaze at the granite pillar rising monumentally from the water. She wrote up the legend for the Vancouver Daily Province. It was one of the fifteen pieces included in Legends of Vancouver.
The request that Pauline be buried in Stanley Park was highly unorthodox—it was a good thing that Pauline’s Vancouver friends were well connected. The park, which was still a tangled and over-grown forest, was officially a federal military reserve that had been leased to the City of Vancouver for recreational purposes. There was no provision for burials there. But Elizabeth Rogers, whose millionaire husband was a member of the Parks Commission, had sent a breezy request to Ottawa requesting that the rules be bent for Pauline. In addition, when the Duke of Connaught had visited Vancouver the previous year, Mrs. Rogers and Lionel Makovski had extracted a promise from him that he would speed up formal approval. By March 13, when the casket of ashes was placed in Mrs. Rogers’s car, permission had been granted. A small clearing on Ferguson Point overlooking Siwash Rock had been prepared for the burial, and a hole dug to receive the container of ashes.
Only Pauline’s closest friends were told that her ashes were going to be laid to rest that day. Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, Isabel
Special permission was given by the Dominion government for Pauline’s ashes to be buried in Stanley Park, within sight of Siwash Rock.
MacLean, Evelyn Johnson and the others pulled their winter coats tighter around themselves as they stood below an overcast sky on that damp and chilly March afternoon. When the Reverend Owen began to conduct a brief burial service, casual strollers through the Park joined the subdued crowd to see what was happening and stayed to show respect. Not a breath of wind stirred the giant oaks and firs as the cement container was lowered into the ground. Walter McRaye recited “The Happy Hunting Grounds,” one of Pauline’s early poems:
Into the rose gold westland, its yellow prairies roll,
World of the bison’s freedom, home of the Indian’s soul.
Roll out, O seas! In sunlight bathed,
Your plains wind-tossed, and grass enswathed.
…
Surely the great Hereafter cannot be more than this,
Surely we’ll see that country after Time’s farewell kiss.
Who would his lovely faith condole?
Who envies not the Red-skin’s soul,
Sailing into the cloud land, sailing into the sun,
Into the crimson portals ajar when life is done?
O! dear dead race, my spirit too
Would fain sail westward unto you.
Then a granite boulder was rolled over the grave, fir branches were strewn over the ground and the crowd quietly dispersed. As the light faded from the evening sky, the faint sound of water rippling around the nearby Siwash Rock permeated the clearing. Had Pauline heard it, she might have closed her eyes and imagined herself back at Chiefswood, listening to the canoes of her Mohawk relatives skimming along the Grand River.
AFTERWORD
PAULINE’S journalist friends offered to collect up all the flowers after the poet’s funeral. There was a card appended to one particularly large and beautiful wreath: “To his dearest from her dearest.”
“Those who saw the card and the flowers,” reads a note of events in the archives of the Canadian Women’s Press Club, “are still asking themselves if it was a confirmation of an oft repeated story of Pauline’s great love for a suitor who had loved her as dearly, but was steadfastly rejected since his family had once objected to the union because of her mixed blood. It may well have been true, for she was very proud of her Indian blood. We shall probably never know now.”
Who was “her dearest” who sent the large and beautiful wreath? Was it the same person as the young man whose photo was in the locket that Pauline always wore? Who were the young men to whom a youthful Pauline had addressed her passionate and erotic verses in the 1880s? What was Pauline doing in those missing months in 1901? Why did she return to London for her final trip in 1907? Were there other love poems that never appeared in print?
We shall probably never know the answers to any of these questions, because neither Pauline nor her sister Evelyn wanted us to know. Pauline never told anyone whose picture was in the locket. After Pauline’s death, Evelyn burnt as many of her sister’s papers as she could lay her hands on. Letters, unpublished verses, journals, receipts, performance schedules—they all went up in smoke. Lionel Makovski said, “Eva seemed to feel that Pauline’s life as a ‘trouper’ was something not to be mentioned.” Emily Howells Johnson’s last letter to her younger daughter, which Pauline never opened, must have gone up in that bonfire too. There were many secrets in Pauline’s private life, and she left many mysteries behind. A biographer cannot hope to reveal all the truths.
Pauline’s first biographer, Mrs. W. Garland Foster, was exasperated by Pauline’s secrets. “Her sister Eva was most difficult about giving any information,” she told Archie Kains in 1934, three years after her book The Mohawk Princess was published. “I am always hoping that she will relent and before she departs this life will leave the material she has for me to edit. There were things about Pauline’s love affairs that I could not use, and others that I could not get because the men were still living and would object.” But Evelyn Johnson never relented. She did not like The Mohawk Princess, and often repeated Pauline’s remark to her: “Anyone can write anything they like about Indians, because they had no historian of their own.” Before she died in 1937, aged eighty-one, in Ohsweken on the Six Nations Reserve, Evelyn studied Indian history and participated in debates about Indian rights. And she set down her own version of the truth about her sister and family in a memoir now in the Archives of Ontario.
“A biography is considered complete,” remarked Virginia Woolf, “if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have a thousand.” Like Mrs. Garland Foster and Pauline’s four subsequent biographers, I can only draw reasonable conclusions from the evidence available—in Pauline’s case, the letters that were not consumed in Evelyn’s flames, the newspaper clippings that Pauline herself collected, the correspondence that has turned up in the papers of Pauline’s contemporaries. There were tantalizing mentions on the Six Nations Reserve that a journal kept by Pauline Johnson existed as late as the 1950s; but if such a journal did exist, it has since vanished. From time to time, new collections of letters by Pauline Johnson emerge from attics and old boxes into the light of a new century. In 2000 the National Archives of Canada acquired eighteen letters to Archie Kains, and other letters were sent to me in the course of writing this book.
The narrative of Pauline’s life is particularly hard to track because she herself is difficult to pin down. There were many selves, many identities. A woman who was
both Mohawk and English; a native advocate who pleased non-native audiences; a lyric poet who performed comic skits; a New Woman who wrote for The Mother’s Magazine—she blurred boundaries that her contemporaries saw as impermeable. Part of her appeal in her own lifetime was the way she blended literary genres and transcended social stereotypes. How many artists could attract audiences as diverse as the American Canoe Association, the Canadian Manufacturing Association, the Toronto Young Liberals, the Illinois Chautauqua, the National Council of Women, Lady Ripon’s dinner guests, the Massachusetts Indian Association, Sir Frederick Leighton, and both Methodists and miners in the Canadian West? How many women in stuffy turn-of-the-century Canada could capture the hearts of so many young men and emerge without a stain on their character?
She has, however, left us one source which has proved a goldmine in the preparation of this biography: her own writing. Her poetry, journalism and stories follow the arc of her own life; her own experiences and emotions were her raw material. On them rests her reputation.
Yet her reputation as a writer has yo-yoed up and down and up again in Canadian literary circles. Assessments of her work have varied so wildly that it is hard to believe the critics are talking about the same pieces, the same writer. Pauline is best remembered for her poetry. Immediately after her death, the poet Charles Mair declared that “a star has fallen from the intellectual firmament of Canada” and commented that her poetry was distinguished by “its beauty, its strength, its originality.” In 1920, the essayist and literary critic W. A. Deacon declared that Pauline was “in skill, sentiment and outlook, one of the most powerful” of the Confederation Poets. He suggested that she wrote “with a mastery equal at times to the best of them, and seldom much below it.”
But only forty years later, Pauline’s star appeared to have flamed out. Her work was omitted altogether from the 1960 edition of The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse because the editor found some of her poems “empty of content” and most “theatrical and crude.” In 1961, the centenary of her birth, writer Robertson Davies dismissed her poetry as “elocutionist-fodder” and described Johnson herself as “not given to reflection.” Professor Desmond Pacey, author of Creative Writing in Canada, said that Pauline’s work was “cheap, vulgar and almost incredibly bad.”
Pauline’s mid-century downfall was largely due to changing literary tastes. The emergence of modernism (spare, fragmented and bloodless) as the preferred poetic mode relegated Pauline to a cultural back-lot. Her image, promoted by Mrs. Garland Foster, as the “Mohawk princess” (a term she would have hated) trivialized her: it made her too Hollywood, too melodramatic. “There is a primitive beat of tribal tom-toms through her verse,” quipped writer Jack Scott. Sometimes she was consigned to the pink ghetto of Victorian “parlour poets,” along with Isabella Valancy Crawford and Marjorie Pickthall; other times she was herded into the “vaudeville poets” caravan, with other stage performers such as Robert W. Service and Wilson MacDonald. Her romantic poetry was buried, her nature poetry dismissed and her overtly political support for native rights ridiculed. Pauline’s work continued to appear in school readers in some provinces until the late 1960s, but the elite ignored it. Canada as a vast, silent and threatening landscape, “empty as paper” in F. R. Scott’s words, became the preferred vision in highbrow circles. There was no place for native peoples in either Group of Seven paintings or the poetry of A. J. M. Smith or Frank Scott.
However, as the twentieth century drew to a close, Pauline began to nudge her way back into the “intellectual firmament.” In 1982, Margaret Atwood included two of Pauline’s poems in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, “one hair-raiser,” she explains, “about rape and murder, and one nature poem that is by no means inferior to much work of the Confederation group.” (The poems were “Ojistoh,” about the Mohawk wife who kills her Huron captor, and “Marshlands,” a lyric nature poem.) Atwood commented that Pauline Johnson, “usually known only for such familiars as ‘The Song My Paddle Sings,’ turns out to have been a poet of considerably more sophistication, despite her habit of dressing up in costumes and chanting in public.”
More recently, Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag have argued in Paddling Her Own Canoe that Pauline’s “often erotic love poems” were an entirely “original contribution to Canadian writing,” and that Pauline’s very complexity is the cause of “the general failure to recognise Johnson’s contribution to the national imaginary.” Literary critic Dennis Duffy says that “The Song My Paddle Sings” compares favourably with what was being written by her male competitors: “The verse of Roberts, Carman, Lampman: is it immortal for any reasons other than the nationalistic?”
There is no consensus on the quality of Pauline’s work, and there is also no consensus on the issues that she engaged in poetry and prose. Instead, we have had a heated, century-long conversation in this country about the place of aboriginal people in Canadian society, the role of women and the need for a Canadian nationalism—all issues about which she wrote. But Pauline saw both sides of each argument. Before she ended “A Cry from an Indian Wife” on a note of native defiance, for example, she gave voice to both the Anglo-Canadian mother and the Indian wife, both of whose menfolk march off to the 1885 North-West Rebellion. As debate on Indian issues became increasingly polarized after Pauline’s death, she was an uncomfortable symbol for either side to absorb.
When I sat down and read every poem I could find by Pauline, I was struck by two aspects of her work. The first was her incredible range of subjects and styles: she wrote love poems drenched in passion, hokey patriotic crowd-pleasers, lyrical nature verse, witty doggerel and the extraordinary Indian narrative ballads that can still make the hairs on the back of a reader’s neck prickle. The second aspect of her poetry is the range of quality: I found a few poems that are heart-stoppers, many that are enjoyable, some that are obviously derivative of others’ work and a handful that are awful. Taken together, they reflect a writer of talent—uneven, perhaps, but talent nonetheless. More important, they also reflect a vibrant personality and a wonderful appetite for life.
Today, it is Pauline’s personality rather than her poetry that speaks across the years. What other woman of her era crossed Canada nineteen times, visited England three times and chased the frontier because she was in love with “the last, best west”? In her day, only a handful of women managed to enter the teaching, law or medical professions and none voted; Pauline forged an independent literary and dramatic career and became an international celebrity. A performer with the commanding presence of a Jenny Lind or a Maria Callas, she held her audience in thrall from the moment she stepped onto the stage. “Though she had no training as an elocutionist,” read the Saturday Night obituary, “her natural dramatic gifts, her striking presence, and her personal magnetism won instant success for her.”
How beautiful she must have looked in her exotic buckskin costume, with the eagle feather in her hair and the silver trade brooches glinting on her blouse. She established an intimacy with her audience that could not be faked. Her vitality, her sensuality, her thrilling voice mesmerized Canadians. She gave them images of Indian bravery and nobility, delivered in ballads that far surpassed most of the doggerel served up in opera houses and town halls across the country. After the interval, she re-emerged as an elegant aristocrat, whispering enchanting verses about northern nights or imitating the pretentious hostesses she had met on her travels. If anyone in the crowd uttered a yawn or a catcall, she would reinvent herself again—with exuberant wit, she would skewer the hecklers. And she made her listeners love poetry. She was a magical storyteller. Her poetry was accessible and wildly popular, a distinction that few poets in later generations can claim. “The Song My Paddle Sings” is one of the few poems (alongside John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”) that many contemporary Canadians recognize.
Perhaps Pauline’s act played to her audience’s stereotypes. English-speaking Canadians wanted to see her metamorphose from native into non-na
tive because the transformation implicitly confirmed the government’s assumption that Indians were a disappearing race. They rarely understood, as she understood, that both the buckskin leggings and the Kensington ballgown were costumes. But they loved her—a century ago she was a star from coast to coast.
For Pauline’s fellow Indians, she was an enduring success story who promoted the dignity and historical importance of her own people and won fans on two continents. It took decades for memories of her thrilling performances to flicker out. During the 1920s, the Cree recitalist Frances Nickawa followed in Pauline’s footsteps, performing Pauline’s poems on stages across Canada. With Legends of Vancouver, Pauline encouraged native peoples to record their own stories before the stories died with their elders. In 1989, the part-native poet Joan Crate published Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson. “Your voice / scrapes the bones of time,” begins one poem in Crate’s moving sequence of verses about a Mohawk with whom she feels a visceral connection.
Pauline Johnson was far more than her various disguises. She was one of those rare, remarkable women who rise above the conventions and assumptions of their day to carve their own paths. She had a vision of a society that drew on the strengths of its citizens regardless of race, colour or religion. Ahead of her time in many ways, she embodied the plural and protean identities that still challenge Canadians today.
SOURCES
PAULINE Johnson herself is the main source for this book, particularly her private correspondence. My first challenge as a biographer was to locate as many of her letters as I could find. The best collection of Pauline’s correspondence is in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. I found other materials in institutions all over Canada, including the National Archives of Canada (where the nineteen letters in the newly acquired Archibald Kains papers proved a goldmine), the Archives of Ontario, the Trent University Archives, the Queen’s University Archives, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia Archives, the Vancouver City Archives, the Brant County Museum and Archives, and the Chiefswood Collection at the Woodland Cultural Centre Museum. Some letters were sent to me by individuals when they heard I was writing Pauline’s biography. Carole Gerson kindly gave me other letters that she and Veronica Strong-Boag had discovered while researching Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake. By the end of my trawl, I had collected in a ring binder 100 letters and cards in Pauline’s flowing, forward-leaning handwriting, with its stylish loops and emphatic underlinings. The letters allowed me to hear Pauline’s own voice, unfiltered by editors or reporters.
Flint and Feather Page 42