Kovacs Alexandra V 201611 PHD Thesis

“I may act till the world grows wild and tense”:
The Performances of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake
by
Alexandra V. (Sasha) Kovacs, M.A.
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto
© Alexandra Kovacs
November 2016

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Alexandra V. (Sasha) Kovacs

“I may act till the world grows wild and tense”:
The Performances of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake
Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies
University of Toronto
2016

ABSTRACT

This dissertation documents and analyzes the performance history of Mohawk
(Kanien’kehá:ka)-English poet and performer E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake. She was born
in 1861 on the Six Nations Reserve of white and Mohawk parentage. By 1892, Johnson had
developed a professional career as a travelling actress. Until her breast cancer diagnosis in 1909,
she performed across Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. While on tour she recited
her poetry, enacted adaptations of her prose stories, dressed up in fancy costumes, and
performed comedic sketches (often in character-based dialect) with various acting partners.
Although her performance history is intriguing, most scholarship about Johnson
concentrates on the immense impact that her poetry had on the development of Canadian
culture and mythology. However, this doctoral study explores the reasons that Johnson’s
performances were largely overlooked in critical assessments of her impact. I propose a new set
of paradigms and methodological tools to account for very divergent assessments (both
appreciative and critical) of this important Indigenous performer by engaging with evocative
fragments of Johnson’s archive.
To this end, I explore the mutable and transformative quality of Johnson’s theatre history,
mostly in chronological format. In addition, I address the substantial sophistication of her
strategies and approaches, and the difficulties that she encountered as an Indigenous woman
performing to settler audiences, within a framework of specific economies of representation.
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My examination of Johnson’s theatre history begins with a micro-historical focus on Johnson’s
performances of 1892, when she was developing her theatrical skill set and arriving at a set of
conventions on which she would rely during her touring life. Next, my dissertation discusses
the variations of Johnson’s performances—the constant revision of her persona through both
costuming and repertoire. Finally, I offer a detailed analysis of the dramatic repertoire that
Johnson enacted in her later years. I draw on a plethora of primary research artifacts (clippings,
reviews, performance photos, and scripts related to Johnson’s performance history) and glean
significant historical information from these sources through a careful study of theatrical
cultures active in the late nineteenth century. This allows for an exploration of the biases that
underpin many responses to Johnson’s theatrical history – biases that are, so often, attached to
broader critical engagements with Indigenous performance histories.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It takes a village, and it takes time. This dissertation began with a performance. Thanks to
Donna Vittorio at Queen’s University for including Johnson’s work in her Women’s Writers
class. It was there that I first encountered Pauline Johnson’s words. That meeting inspired
theatre—a performance in the Vogt Studio theatre in Kingston Ontario under the supervision of
Dr. Natalie Rewa and Dr. Craig Walker. The main collaborators on that piece —
actor/dramaturges Jonathan Heppner and Emily Hincks— supported my interest in Johnson’s
history and allowed me to work through what it meant to perform Pauline Johnson. They
joined me in exploring her work through a taxing and strenuous theatre model that was new to
us. Enthusiastic and curious, we did it for free. That same spirit sustained me during my
research and the writing of this dissertation.
Since 2007, I have pursued my interest in Johnson with the encouragement of these two
dear friends, but also with the tremendous support of Dr. Stephen Johnson, my supervisor at the
University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. From him, I
learned the value of the artifact, and the thrilling performativity of history. For his patient
guidance, his demand for rigor, his feedback and support, I offer deep thanks. So much of what
has been achieved here is because of his mentorship and encouragement. To my other
committee members—Dr. Nancy Copeland and Dr. Alan Filewod—I also extend my heartfelt
acknowledgments. Nancy: you continued to push me to move through historical texts with
more care. Alan: you invited me to risk sharing even imperfectly formulated ideas and insights.
My committee was composed of very different energies that came together symbiotically in
support of this project.
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I am indebted to the archivists, knowledge keepers, and generous scholars who
continually shared information with me about Johnson’s performance in person, by email, at
conferences, and even by ‘snail’ mail. Specifically, I would like to give profound thanks to
Carole Gerson at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Gerson’s thorough and rigorous
scholarship on Johnson opened up avenues for further study. She models the best of both
personal and intellectual generosity. After spending years searching through archival
collections that Carole had already explored, I valued the rigor and comprehensive scope of her
research and writing all the more.
Niá:wen to Paula Whitlow and Virve Wiland at the Woodland Cultural Centre and
Library who granted me access to different materials related to Johnson’s performances, and
who offered me support through conversation in person and via email. I send my appreciation
to Dawne Antone (Tewentahawitha) and Carrie Lester at the Native Canadian Centre who
invited me to join their study of the Kanien’kéha language. Gratitude also to Karen Dearlove
(former curator at Chiefswood Historic Site), Wendy Nicols at the Museum of Vancouver, and
Nancy Hodgson at Canadian Stamp News.
The Canadian theatre research community has undoubtedly shaped and informed the
approaches I take to this work: special thanks to Dr. Marlis Schweitzer, Dr. Jennifer Roberts-
Smith, Dr. Heather Davis-Fisch, and Dr. Natalie Alvarez for shepherding me along during the
tumultuous journey of graduate school. From the beginning, these amazing scholars were my
role models. They continue to inspire my work and I now count them as some of my dearest
friends.
Without the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Joseph Armand Bombardier
Canadian Graduate Scholarship and the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Heather
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McCallum scholarship, I would not have been able to complete the archival work required for
this project. I am grateful to the funding bodies that continue to value the importance of theatre
in the development of Canada’s cultural and political ecology.
Thanks further to my artistic collaborators who stood by me and continually supported
my research work: Natalie Mathieson, Vojin Vasovic, and Joe Culpepper. We started Ars
Mechanica together and we all asserted, without apology, that artistry and intellectualism could
and should go hand in hand. Thank you for teaching me the true meaning of praxis. The subject
of Johnson intersected with almost all of our creative projects—her ghost lurking in our
exploration of Alexander Graham Bell, her spirit present in the hair work we did on SISI.
Thank you for valuing the connections, and making life feel whole when it seemed almost
fragmentary.
I could not have arrived at this place without the support of my writing group friends:
Noam Lior, Shelley Liebembuk and Art Babayants. We sat in rooms together, silently, for
hours upon hours, and I would do it all over again in a second because it brought me enriching
conversations that made me question my assumptions and proposals. Thanks also to my friends
outside academia who kept my spirits light when the writing became draining: Emma Hunter,
Megan Deeks, and Megan MacKeigan.
Finally I offer my deepest thanks to my closest family: to my mother Eva Kovacs, always
the outlier, and the woman on the other end of the phone in moments when I thought I could
never get to the end—when I thought I had to quit; to my father Frank Kovacs who would take
me on journeys through the Muskoka region—who taught me to love the landscapes and waters
that Johnson wrote about within her poems; to my brother Derek for his pragmatism; to my
devoted partner, Laird White, for his unrelenting support and overwhelming optimism; and
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most of all to my two aunts Lucia Van Wouw and Hendrika Van Wouw for their invaluable
suggestions and help as secondary readers. In addition, they opened up their doors to allow me
the time and resources to study Johnson at her resting place in Vancouver.
All these tireless and persistent supporters allowed me to take time: to travel, to talk, to
perform, to learn, to fail, to create, to write. And while they waited, they also always made time
to listen. Above all, they assured me in moments of doubt that it was all worth it. I now see and
feel what they meant.
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O! pathless world of seeming!

O! pathless life of mine whose deep ideal
Is more my own than ever was the real.
For others Fame
And Love's red flame,
And yellow gold: I only claim
The shadows and the dreaming.
-Selection from E. Pauline Johnson’s “Shadow River: Muskoka”
Flint and Feather. First published in Saturday Night, 20 July 1889.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………..ii-iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………iv-vii
DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………………..ix-x
LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………xi-xiv
INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………............1-40
Methods and Approaches: The Recirculation of E. Pauline Johnson as the “Canadian
Indian” on a Postage Stamp
i. The Recirculation of E. Pauline Johnson as the “Canadian Indian”

ii. A Stamp and a Performance
iii. Essaying Pauline Johnson
iv. Accepted Design: Circulating a False Personality
v. From Falsity to Imagination
vi. Failure
vii. A Philatelic Approach to Performance History?
CHAPTER ONE…………………………………………………………………….41-83
Framing the Beginning of E. Pauline Johnson’s Theatre History
Early 1892
i. Identifying the “beginning”: January 1892

ii. Revisiting the “Beginning”: An Evening with Canadian Authors, January 1892
iii. E. Pauline Johnson--- identity politics and perceptions
iv. Scripting a “Canadian Indian”: February to June 1892
v. “A Real Live Indian Girl”: portrayal in performance
CHAPTER TWO…………………………………………………………………..84-115
Developing a Costume; Or, “The Most Difficult Thing in the World”
September to December 1892
i. Interpreting Johnson’s Early Costumes

ii. Adapting from Story to Stage: December 1892
iii. A Bridge to the Future
CHAPTER THREE……………………………………………………………....116-172
Tekahionwake: Shaping a “Canadian Girl” for Foreign and Domestic Audiences 1893-
1911
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i. A “Canadian Girl” is an “Indian” actress

ii. Performing, not Paddling, at the Canoe Club
iii.Which “Canadian Girl” in America?
iv. Performances Back in Canada: E. Pauline Johnson (not Tekahionwake)
v. Across the Atlantic: Introducing the Apostle Tekahionwake and an “Indian
Boadicea”
vi. Pauline Johnson the “Show Person”
CHAPTER FOUR………………………………………………………………..173-214
Beyond the ‘Double Wampum’: Partnerships, Dialects, and Multiple Personalities
i. Inconsistencies in Johnson’s Performance History

ii. Doubling with the Voice in Ottawa
iii. Doubling in Dramatic Comedietta
iv. What Is Still Lost?
v. The Remains of Johnson’s Comedy
CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………...........215-230
Losing, Weaving, and Masking Pauline Johnson’s Theatrical Histories
WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………….231-250
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1-
First Day Cover by “Rosecraft.” Obtained by Sasha Kovacs at National Postage Stamp
Show. Queen Elizabeth Building, Exhibition Place. Toronto. November 2011.
Figures 2, 3, 4-
Pauline Johnson stamp essays. Library and Archives Canada; Copyright: Canada Post
Corporation
Figure 5-
Poster for Johnson’s 1906 performance at Steinway Hall. McMaster University Pauline
Johnson Archive. Box 6, in Map Cabinet 10.
Figures 6 and 7-
Images of accessories used in Johnson’s performances. Held at the Museum of
Vancouver. Photos by Sasha Kovacs. Access to costume provided by Museum of
Vancouver.
Figure 8-
Image of Johnson in performance costume with red blanket in her later touring years.
Museum of Vancouver
Figures 9, 10, 11-

Pauline Johnson stamp essays. Library and Archives Canada; Copyright: Canada Post
Corporation
Figure 12-
Photo of Siwash Rock by Sasha Kovacs
Figure 13-
Pauline Johnson Essay designed by Bernard James Reddie. Library and Archives Canada;
Copyright: Canada Post Corporation. Online MIKAN no. 2264657
Figure 14-
Final accepted Pauline Johnson stamp design. Library and Archives Canada; Copyright:
Canada Post Corporation. Online MIKAN no. 2213028.
Figure 15-
Rowland Hill’s Penny Black design. From The British Postal Museum and Archives
online. See http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/explore/history/pennyblack/
Figure 16-
Same as fig. 14. Final accepted Pauline Johnson stamp design. Library and Archives
Canada; Copyright: Canada Post Corporation. Online MIKAN no. 2213028.
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Figure 17-
Image of Thomas Moore, 1896, Southern Saskatchewan. Published in Enns, 164.
Figure 18-
Image courtesy of Chiefswood National Historic Site.
Figure 19-
Image courtesy of Chiefswood National Historic Site.
Figure 20-
Johnson’s letter to Laurier in 1900. Features her letterhead. National Archives of Canada.
Online MIKAN no. 449658.
Figures 21-24-
Portraits by John Verelst (c. 1675–1734). Oil on canvas, 1710. Library and Archives
Canada. Reproductions of images located at the Woodland Cultural Centre Museum (Six
Nations of the Grand River, Ontario).
Figure 25-
Library and Archives Canada. Iroquois Chiefs from the Six Nations Reserve reading
Wampum belts. Online MIKAN no. 3193501.
Figure 26-
Image of Johnson in “boating” costume. Courtesy of McMaster University Pauline
Johnson Archive.
Figure 27 & 28-

Images pulled from 1894 Canadian Entertainment Bureau catalogue. Canadian
entertainment bureau, Toronto, Ont. -- [electronic resource] [s.l. : s.n., 1894?]
([Toronto] :Toronto Lith. Co.) Jos. Patrick.
http://archive.org/details/canadianentertai00slsnuoft
Figure 29-
Snapshot of program for Johnson’s performance with Owen Smily.
Figure 30-
Illustration of Johnson’s short story featured in The Dominion Illustrated.
Figure 31-
Image of Johnson’s photographs featured in The Globe September 1893.
Figure 32-
Johnson’s portrait as featured in Hector Charlesworth’s article “The Canadian Girl.” See
Canadian Magazine, May 1893 issue, page 187.
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Figure 33-
Image featured in December 1893 Chicago Tribune Article “Indian Princess Captures
Boston.” See works cited for publication details.
Figure 34-
Advertisement for Johnson’s performance in Indiana. November 1896. Snapshot from
The Fort Wayne Sentinel. See “To Appear Here. ONE NIGHT ONLY.”
Figure 35-
Advertisement for Chautauqua Performance. The Times. Clay Center, Kansas. Image not
to original size. Original article accessed on newspapers.com.
Figure 36-
Advertisement page pulled from 1894 Canadian Entertainment Bureau catalogue.
Canadian entertainment bureau, Toronto, Ont. -- [electronic resource] [s.l. : s.n., 1894?]
([Toronto] :Toronto Lith. Co.) Jos. Patrick.
Figure 37-
Advertisement for Johnson’s performance in The Windsor Evening Record. 4 February
1895. Pg. 4.
Figure 38-
Advertisement for Johnson’s performance in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Manitoba Morning
Free Press. 3 February 1899. Pg 3.
Figure 39-
Preview image of Johnson’s performance in Winnipeg. “Music and the Drama.”
Manitoba Morning Free Press. 2 February 1899.
Figure 40-
Letter written during Johnson’s 1905-1906 season. Features her letterhead. From Joseph
Keppler Jr. Papers. Reel 7. Slide 203. Cornell Library. See Johnson “My Dear Mr.
Keppler.”
Figure 41-
Letterhead used during Johnson’s “Farewell tour” in 1907. In Joseph Keppler Jr. Iroquois
Papers. Reel 7, Slide 258. Cornell University Library. See Johnson “Big Chief.”
Figure 42-
Johnson’s name card. Pauline Johnson Archives McMaster University. Series 10, file 11.
Figure 43-
Letter from Agent (Keith Prowse and Co. Ltd.) to Johnson. McMaster University Pauline
Johnson archive. Box 1, File 8.
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Figure 44-
Poster for Johnson’s 1906 performance at Steinway Hall. McMaster University Pauline
Johnson Archive. Box 6, in Map Cabinet 10.
Figure 45 & 46-

One of many postcards collected by Johnson. This one is annotated with description
“Riders of the Plains.” In McMaster University Pauline Johnson collection. Series 5, box
2.
Figure 47-
Poster for Johnson’s Performance in 1906 of “Fashionable Intelligence.” Courtesy of
McMaster University’s Pauline Johnson Archives, box 10.
Figure 48-
Museum of Vancouver website image of Pauline Johnson’s performance costume.
Figure 49-
Death mask of E. Pauline Johnson by Charles Marega, 1913. Museum of Vancouver.
Reference code AM1102-S3-: LEG427.5.
Figure 50-
Photo by Sasha Kovacs of George Littlechild’s art hanging in Banff Centre. May 19th
2015. Banff, Alberta.
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INTRODUCTION: METHODS AND CONTEXTS
The Recirculation of E. Pauline Johnson as the “Canadian Indian”
In 1961, on the centenary of her birth, E. Pauline Johnson was honored on a
Canadian commemorative stamp. The decision to celebrate Johnson on the stamp
represented a posthumous recognition of Johnson’s own dreams of international exposure
and appreciation. As a successful “platform recitalist” and “comedienne” (Keller 8) from
1892-1909, the Mohawk-English poet-entertainer always meant to tour the world, but her
plans for voyage to places like Australia and Jamaica were doomed to failure by illness or
other unforeseen events. Instead, her travels were confined to Canada’s canoe clubs and
music halls, the Chautauqua circuit, and two trips to England (1894/1906). The
commemoration of Pauline Johnson as a culturally important person on a Canadian
postage stamp finally allowed her image to travel, as she might have liked, within a more
global circuit.
In 2013, on the centenary of Johnson’s death, I am still struck by the ‘story’ of the
postage stamp. Early in my research, I discovered that there were multiple essays
(philatelic drafts) of this stamp, housed in the National Archives of Canada. I started my
analysis there, and immediately gained an introduction to the somewhat elusive nature of
Johnson as a research subject. Initially, I found essays of only one designer. Then, after a
typing error led me to search under the name ‘Johnston’, I found more. They had been
incorrectly catalogued. How ironic, I thought, that the National Archives in Ottawa, the
repository of Canadian iconography, should itself contribute to the discourse of
appearance and disappearance that is associated with Johnson by incorrectly cataloguing
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an important memorial of her under the name ‘Johnston’. Such errors underscore the
opaque and contradictory nature of Pauline Johnson’s legacy.
As I pieced together the ‘story’ of this stamp’s creation, questions began to
emerge about the ways in which any examination of E. Pauline Johnson, and especially
her performance, might contend with issues of reality and inauthenticity, history and
reconfiguration, memory and denial. The essays and the final commemorative stamp
offer an interesting metaphor for the evolution of Johnson’s performance history.
Johnson’s performance career is a complex site, fraught with the same kinds of
expectations, difficulties, and disappointing features that are also encountered in the 1961
Johnson stamp. In attempting to capture the mutable, substantially contrived subject of
Pauline Johnson on a stamp, the design process itself represents a fascinating exercise in
historical and cultural positioning.
I believe that the representational issues of the stamp offer a compelling and
accessible starting point for an examination of Johnson’s identity, presentation, and
performance. The dismissal of this stamp, on the grounds of its inauthentic depiction of
Johnson, may be illustrative of a broader failure by critics to acknowledge the
sophisticated and ‘mutable’ aesthetics that underpin the complex site of Johnson’s
performance. Perhaps a philatelic approach, that values not only perfect exemplars but
also production imperfections (i.e. errors and alleged “failures”), can enrich our analysis
of Johnson’s performance work that, in itself, is criticized for error, failure, and
misrepresentation.
A lifetime has passed between the creation of the stamp, and the creation of the
scholarly analysis that I offer here. It is my hope that this dissertation will reflect the
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methodological progress (so indispensible to the analysis of E. Pauline Johnson’s career,
life, and performance) that has occurred between then and now. It represents yet another
step in the progression of divergent critical approaches. September 2013
A Stamp and a Performance
In 1959, Miss Mae Hanselman, president of the Brantford Stamp Club, proposed
the idea for a Pauline Johnson commemorative stamp (“Good Cornwall Showing”).1 The
Canadian postal department approved her suggestion but with its own agenda in mind for
the stamp’s 1961 release. According to the postal department, this stamp was intended to
celebrate not only Johnson’s birth but also “all the members of her [“Miss Johnson’s”]
race.” Its release coincided with an important legislative achievement. That same year
“Canadian Indians2 [had] achieved the federal franchise, and [were] contributing at a
vastly accelerated pace to the economic and industrial growth of the nation” (Patrick

1 VanSteen claims that Richard Pilant of the Institute of Iroquoian Studies in Brantford opened
up the “reapprais[al]” of Johnson’s life and work which eventually led to the creation of the
stamp (40).
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The term “Indian” is now discredited as an appropriate or respectful identifier for the
descendants of the original inhabitants of the land we now call Canada. It is considered “outdated”
and offensive “due to its complex and often idiosyncratic colonial use in governing identity”
(“Terminology”). This term remains in use because Federal legislation defines the legal identity
of a First Nations person (an Aboriginal person of Canada who is ethnically neither Métis nor
Inuit) under the terms of the “Indian Act.” At the turn of the century, Johnson herself sometimes
self-identified as “Indian”, but she also resisted the broad application of this terminology. She
was aware of the importance of “tribal distinction” (Johnson “A Strong Race Opinion” in Gerson
and Strong-Boag 178). Today “tribal” is no longer a term in usage, but “national” affiliation is
stressed as important to foreground in research on Indigenous subjects (the national political
organization that represents Indigenous peoples within Canada is called the Assembly of First
Nations). For this reason, where possible, I refer to Johnson as a Mohawk-English woman
(representing her various national affiliations) or as a Kanien’kehá:ka woman (thereby showing
respect to the Kanien’kehá:ka people (the People of the Flint) for whom the term “Mohawk” is an
invented colonial national identifier). In place of the term “Iroquois,” I often identify Johnson as
“Haudenosaunee,” as this is the term that the Confederacy of Six Nations now uses to define
itself. I refer to Johnson as “Indigenous” throughout this dissertation, but do quote others who
refer to Johnson according to their own conventions. These varied references reflect, as Alan
Filewod notes, “different historical applications of language as an instrument of colonization and
resistance” (Filewod “Receiving Aboriginality” 363).
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121).3 In this sense, the stamp was not only a historical homage to a Canadian celebrity,
but also an acknowledgement of a new kind of national ‘person’: the “Canadian Indian.”
How could Pauline Johnson be resurrected in the context of the ambitious
commemorative scope set forth by the postal department? The stamp required a design
that could simultaneously reconstruct the past and highlight the present, all the while
positioning Johnson as a synecdoche for her entire “race.”
Numerous representational variations of Johnson were produced in the
development phase before the final release of the stamp. Johnson’s history and image is
depicted most diversely on the cachets of First Day Covers (commonly referred to as
FDCs). These “covers” are envelopes issued on the first day of a stamp’s release. They
feature ‘cachets’ (designs on the envelope) that are commissioned by various companies
and sold to individual buyers as collector’s items (in 1961, the going rate for a cachet and
stamp was close to 30c). What is significant about the Pauline Johnson FDC’s is the
diversity of misrepresentation. Some of the covers contain glaring biographical errors.
The “Rosecraft” cover, for instance, suggests (under the image of Johnson in
performance dress) that she is a “full blooded Mohawk Indian and a noted Canadian
poetess” (see figure 1).

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Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag in E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake: Collected
Poems and Selected Prose assert Johnson’s token value when they suggest that “[a]lthough
sustained attention to Johnson subsided long before 1961, the coincidence of the centenary of her
birth with the extension of the federal franchise to status Indians snapped her back into national
view” (xxxv). They also maintain that “[p]romotion of Johnson was incorporated into an agenda
of bettering ‘race relations,’ in the discourse of the period” (xxxv) emphasizing her function as an
iconic symbol for a particular race.
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Figure 1- First Day Cover by “Rosecraft” Company.
An alternative FDC makes note of Johnson’s mixed heritage: it features two images of
Johnson and underscores the significance of her genealogy by adding a tagline that reads
“In Honour of the Dual Life of Mohawk Princess Tekahionwake.” Such inconsistencies
(if not downright inaccuracies) might be justified considering the debate about Johnson’s
“status,”4 but what is most perplexing is that this problem even extends to her name.
While the H&E cachet describes her as “E. Pauline Johnson, Indian Poetess”, the Ginn

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E. Pauline Johnson (1861–1913) grew up on the Six Nations Reserve near
Brantford and was a descendant of a significant Mohawk family. Her great-grandfather was
named Tekahionwake (Jacob Johnson), and her grandfather was Chief John Smoke Johnson
(Sakayengwaraton). Johnson was the daughter of what many note as an unusual interracial union
that would likely, at the time of her birth, have been “closely scrutinized” (Gerson and Strong-
Boag 25). She was the daughter of an English mother, Emily Howells, and Mohawk father,
Onwanonsyshon (also known as George Henry Martin Johnson), a Chief of the Mohawk of the
Six Nations and a famous interpreter. As a consequence of the unique interracial quality of
Johnson’s familial history, there has been much debate about the authenticity of E. Pauline
Johnson’s Native status. Her ‘true’ heritage is complicated by varying decrees of the day: the Six
Nations might have claimed that Johnson was not of their descent as bloodlines followed
matrilineal lines, while the Indian Act of 1876 contrarily asserted that despite Mohawk ideology,
by legislation she was of Native decent. See Gerson and Strong-Boag’s detailed analysis of “The
Johnson Family” in Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Life, Times, and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson.
Also, in her article “Performing Pauline Johnson”, Leighton provides a good explanation of
Native classifications in the Indian Act. Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald gave his own
explanation of inhabitants with hybrid origins by asserting that “if they are Indians they go with
the tribe; if they are half-breeds they are white” (cited in Enns 125). This conveys the desire, at
institutional levels, to ascribe definitive names to individuals (“white” or “red”) by using
language expressive of notions of imperial assimilation.
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cachet called her Pauline (Emily) Johnson. These diverse and competing presentations
illuminate the ‘work in progress’ that is E. Pauline Johnson.
The difficulty in ‘pinning down’ Johnson’s persona is clearly evident in the stamp
that is celebrated by these covers. Although the 1961 stamp represents one image of
Pauline Johnson, the process of its creation indicates the complexity and difficulty that
the designers encountered at the site of Johnson’s history. It is in the stamp essays
(designs for the stamp that were drafted but never released) that we see different
‘versions’ of Pauline Johnson that are significant for the purposes of this analysis. Indeed,
these competing memorial designs serve as a useful metaphor for understanding the
complexity of Johnson’s identity politics and performance body.
Two designers were responsible for the E. Pauline Johnson essays, now housed in
the National Archives of Canada: Helen Roberta Fitzgerald and Bernard James Reddie.
The better-known designer was Reddie. A commercial artist who began working for the
Canadian government in the graphic arts section at Canadian Forces Headquarters,
Reddie was also the staff artist for the Canadian Army Training Memorandum in 1942
(later the Canadian Army Journal). He produced artwork for military equipment,
designed two medals for the Canadian forces and was famous for the research he put into
his designs (Lamarre n.p.).
Johnson critics have largely overlooked these essays as sites worthy of analysis.
This is either because the historical record made them inaccessible (as I mentioned earlier,
some of these essays were incorrectly catalogued under the name ‘Johnston’ at the
National Archives of Canada) or because they seemed inessential to the contextualization
of the final design and even irrelevant to a larger understanding of Pauline Johnson.
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However, the essays that attempted to resurrect this Canadian figure culminated in a
layered design of multiple images that illustrate Johnson’s continual play between past
and present, "Indian" and settler, history and memory, and above all, reality and
imagination. These nuances continue to play an important part in the analysis of
Johnson’s theatrical history.
In order to fully understand the stamp’s function and its wider importance, a
closer study of these essays and their relationship to the final design is useful. The
process of the stamp’s creation suggests that the achievement of an appropriate final
image was challenging. Arguably, in developing the essays, both designers were
continually testing the suitability of Johnson’s image for the stamp. It appears that they
contended with significant methodological questions about the approach to Pauline
Johnson’s biography, literature, and most significantly, performance. In the multiple
reconfigurations of the essays, Pauline Johnson “dances giddily on the knife’s edge
between presence and absence” (Carter 6). What were the politics implicit in the process
between the first drafts and the final design of the stamp? How and through what process
was Pauline Johnson commemoratively reclaimed in 1961? Why were perceptions of her
tested in so many ways? What were the responses to the final “accepted” image? The
‘story’ of the stamp’s creation can tell us much about the process of interpreting, evoking,
and circulating E. Pauline Johnson’s ‘body’ through the hermeneutic circle in which all
reconstructive strategies (including this dissertation) operate.
Essaying Pauline Johnson
Helen Roberta Fitzgerald’s essays highlight a fascination with Johnson’s stage
work and are expressive of contemporary popular sentiment regarding Johnson’s status.
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Writing at the time of the stamp’s release in 1961, Norman Shrive contends that “much of
the popular interest in Miss Johnson is […] stimulated by the essentially non-literary
aspects of her career- her Indian heritage, her dress, her skill as a stage performer, and her
personality” (emphasis mine, Shrive 31). For Robertson Davies and other critics,
Johnson’s career of elocution appears to have undermined the literary legitimacy of her
poetry. In spite of their dismissive reaction, it is undeniable that Johnson’s performances
originally facilitated her artistic success and perpetuated the public’s interest in her life.5
It is likely that Fitzgerald was tuned into this overriding interest in Johnson’s stardom,
and used it as a key component in her designs for the commemorative stamp. The
dominant emphasis in Figures 2, 3 and 4 is on Johnson’s contribution to Canada as a
performance celebrity, rather than as a literary heroine. In these images, Fitzgerald
focuses on the most iconic aspects of Johnson’s performance: her costume, her
preference for profile, and her stage name (Tekahionwake).
Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4

5
Veronica Strong-Boag and Gerson suggest that Johnson’s performance contributed to the
popularity of her poetry within her lifetime. They assert that “[i]n print, the effect of a poem such
as ‘A Cry From an Indian Wife’ was confined to those who noticed it in the newspapers in 1885
and 1892….[b]ut in performance this confrontational dramatic monologue…was repeated
hundreds of times to thousands of Canadians and others who may have had limited access to
Johnson’s writing” (Strong-Boag and Gerson 114). They also maintain that after 1892,
"Johnson’s literary work was almost always received and assessed in relation to her performance"
(117).
8
9
Images from National Archives of Canada.

Pauline Johnson Archive Photo by Sasha Kovacs Photo by Sasha Kovacs
Figure 8
Museum of Vancouver
Three notable aspects of these essays attest to Fitzgerald’s knowledge and initial
investment in the accurate portrayal of Pauline Johnson’s costume. In these design proofs,
Johnson appears with a feather in her hair, and a bear claw choker around her neck. Such
elements of her live-performance costume are confirmed by various sources. Walter
9
10
McRaye, Johnson’s stage partner and manager from 1901 to 1909, gave a written
description of Johnson’s appearance: “Around [Johnson’s] neck was a beautifully graded
cinnamon bear-claw necklace, and on her wrists bracelets of wampum beads. Draped
around her shoulders was… [a] red broadcloth blanket…; in her hair was an eagle feather
(McRaye in Shrive 31). His account is substantiated by the portraiture of Johnson that
circulated during her touring years (Figure 5). Florence Ida Enns suggests that the image
of Figure 4 was based on one of Johnson’s most famous publicity shots. Here, we see the
bear claw necklace around her neck (see Enns 195).6 Other images of Johnson, especially
those from her touring days with McRaye, depict her with a feather in her hair (see
Figure 6), thereby justifying Fitzgerald’s choice to use a feather, tied with a bow, in
Johnson’s hair. That same bear claw necklace and feather are now housed in the Museum
of Vancouver along with other parts of Pauline Johnson’s performance costume.
By drawing on the advertising images that Johnson used as publicity for much of
her performance tour,7 Fitzgerald explicitly reused some of the visual strategies that
Johnson employed in her own self-representation. This is clearly illustrated in the
performance-focused essays in which Johnson is featured in profile, with her gaze to the
right. The use of a profile view was anything but accidental: it aligned with Johnson’s
own preference for the composition of her face in images (see Figures 5 and 8). The

6 This image is also discussed in Martha L. Viehmann’s article “Speaking Chinook: Adaptation,
Indigeneity, and Pauline Johnson’s British Columbia Stories.” Viehmann notes its provenance in
clearer terms than Enns, suggesting that it is from an advertisement in The Times, London, July
17, 1906 (courtesy of Chiefswood National Historic Site, Six Nations of the Grand River). The
text beside the photograph reads, “Miss Pauline Johnson, whose native name is Tekahionwake, is
descended from the chiefs of the Iroquois race of American Indians, and comes before the
London public as a reciter of the stories and legends of her race. She dresses in native costume,
and she has herself written her pieces in clever and effective verse” (Viehmann 258).
7 Florence Ida Enns suggests that Johnson developed a series of “in performance” portraits that
were used in her publicity from 1893-1903 (see Enns 211).
10
11
profile shot was “favored by Johnson-Tekahionwake because it highlighted the only
characteristic that declared her Mohawk blood-her nose” (Collett “Fair Trade” 161). The
distinctive appearance of Johnson’s nose is exaggerated by varying degrees, suggesting
that this aspect of the essay’s design was given much attention.
Finally, Fitzgerald’s decision to include the name Tekahionwake marks the most
explicit faithfulness to representations of Johnson’s performance persona. Pauline
Johnson adopted Tekahionwake, the name of her great-grandfather and grandfather, on
her 1894 trip to London, and it appears on the title page of The White Wampum. Strong-
Boag and Gerson note that “after 1894, Johnson’s publications and publicity usually
identified her with both names as ‘E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake’ ” (Strong-Boag
and Gerson 116). They posit that the name Tekahionwake was tied to a performance
persona, as opposed to a private persona. The fact “that Tekahionwake was adopted
largely to enhance Johnson’s professional status is evident in her personal
correspondence, which she usually signed as ‘E. Pauline Johnson’ ” (Strong Boag and
Gerson 117). Johnson’s use of this name is prominently featured in her performance
publicity (see Figure 5). Fitzgerald relied on primary sources of Johnson’s own
representation in order to reconstruct her performance identity in the essays, creating
versions for the stamp’s design that corresponded to some of Johnson’s own aesthetic
concerns (as far as we know them) for her public representation.
Bernard James Reddie, the other designer who created essays for the stamp, also
offered differing approaches to the representation of Johnson (see Figures 8, 9, and 10).
Although one of his essays resembles Fitzgerald’s by presenting her in “Indian dress”
11
12
with a bear claw necklace around her neck, in other essays he chose to focus, instead, on
the depiction of Johnson’s biographical and bibliographic history.

National Archives of Canada8
In the Figure 9 essay, Reddie depicts a simple open book inscribed with the titles
of three of Johnson’s publications: Legends of Vancouver, a book of stories that has
“rarely been out of print since it was first published in 1911” (Quirk 1); Flint and Feather,
“one of the most frequently issued volumes of Canadian poetry” (Gerson and Strong-
Boag xxiv); and finally The Moccasin Maker, a collection of short stories about the early
life of Johnson’s mother and of Johnson’s childhood at Chiefswood (originally published
in Mother’s Magazine and subsequently collected after Johnson’s death in 1913 and
released in a first edition by the Methodist Book & Publishing House) (Quirk 94). While
the listing of these publications emphasizes Johnson’s canon of poetic work that has
“been memorized by generations of Canadian schoolchildren” (Quirk 1), it fails to
account for her contemporary value and significance. We can assume that this essay was
not developed beyond its one iteration as, at the time of the stamp’s creation, literary
critics had already started to disparage Johnson’s written work. Norman Shrive asserts

8 Many of these images are also reproduced on
http://postalhistorycorner.blogspot.ca/2010/09/1961-‐e.html

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that A.J.M. Smith, the editor of The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (published the year
prior to Johnson’s centennial in 1960), was quite open about the grounds for his
exclusion of Johnson’s poetry from this canonical text when he argued that “[Johnson’s]
best known pieces are decorous imitations of… [Tennyson and Swinburne]. They have a
graceful and easy-flowing cadence, which presents admirably vague impressions of
pellucid waters and shadowy depths, but they are as empty of content as any devotee of
pure poetry could wish…” (Smith in Shrive 26). Shrive goes on to dismiss the status once
given Johnson as the “true voice of the North American Indian” and attributes it to
positively biased, even un-informed criticism (in Shrive 26). In the same vein, Carole
Gerson’s article “‘The Most Canadian of all Canadian Poets’: Pauline Johnson and the
Construction of a National Literature” cites a similar perception of Johnson’s work. She
characterizes the new critical aversion to Johnson’s literature as characteristic of
Canadian “literary modernism”: Earle Birney’s “dismiss[al] [of] Johnson as not ‘at all
important in Canadian literature’ ” (Gerson 90) is cited alongside critics like Desmond
Pacey, R.E. Watters and even Mordecai Richler. The most damning dismissal of
Johnson’s literary merit comes from the gatekeeper of Canadian literature himself,
Robertson Davies, who although later using Johnson’s personage as a character in his
stage play Brothers in the Black Art, considered her work to be “elocutionist-fodder”
(Davies cited in Gerson 90).9

9
In Davies’ play, Johnson appears as a character in a “printing shop” (205). To develop this
character Davies “drew […] on [his] father’s experiences as an apprentice to the printing trade,
and how he [Davies’ father] used to have visits from Pauline Johnson, whose poetry was
published in the paper on which he worked” (sic 205). See Davis, Madison J. Ed. Conversations
with Robertson Davies. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.
13
14
Perhaps with this in mind, Reddie’s other drafts drew more heavily on a fascination with,
as Shrive puts it, Johnson’s “personality” (Shrive 31).10 These essays reflected Reddie’s
interest in depicting the story of her life. This is evident in the choice to include the date
of Johnson’s birth on the stamp (see Figures 10 and 11). In the essay of Figure 11, Reddie
drew from both the Figure 9 and 10 essays, leaving Johnson’s date of birth (in the left
corner) as the singular inscription within the book that metaphorically represented the
beginning of Johnson’s ‘story.’ This is presented opposite to the depiction of Siwash
Rock on the right hand side of the design, thereby alluding to Johnson’s final resting
place in Stanley Park, Vancouver (Figure 12 shows a more contemporary photographic
rendering of the rock).
Figure 12- Photo of Siwash Rock by Sasha Kovacs.
The realistic depiction of Siwash Rock highlights a significant aspect of
Johnson’s death that is mentioned in various biographies. This rock, an important

10
Reddie was famous for the research he would do before designing his stamps. Thomas S.
Lamarre, a philatelic historian writing about Reddie’s design process states that “[a]ccording to
Reddie, the real work of stamp design was in research” (Lamarre, n.p.). It is not altogether
implausible that Reddie would have, then, been familiar with the sentiments regarding Johnson’s
value as a voice for national literature.
14
15
landmark in Stanley Park, is near the Pauline Johnson memorial that was erected in
1913.11 Johnson’s burial in Stanley Park was, according to biographer Charlotte Gray,
“highly unorthodox” as the park was “officially a federal military reserve that has been
leased to the City of Vancouver for recreational purposes” (392). Gray attributes the
decision to inter Johnson in Stanley Park to the political influence of Elizabeth Rogers,
wife of a wealthy millionaire who was a member of the Parks Commission, and to her
affiliation with the Duke of Connaught, who promised to expedite her request for the
necessary permission. To this day, Johnson is the only individual legally interred within
the park. Reddie referenced this unusual biographical detail, by placing the viewer and
Johnson’s memorial in almost the same perspective “overlook[ing]” Siwash Rock from
Ferguson Point (Gray 392)12.
These essays express Reddie’s engagement with the prevailing depiction of
Johnson, the “legend,” that circulated in the early 1960’s. Pauline Johnson biographer
Van Steen states:
One is led to suspect that the praise so often bestowed was evoked not so
much by her literary work as by her vibrant personality and her considerable
charm. In addition, there was the romance of her birth, with its Mohawk
Indian background, the gay freedom of her way of life, and the tragedy of her
premature death- all of which combined to weave an aura of splendour
around her person and her work. (Van Steen 1)

11
Johnson’s memorial was meant to overlook Siwash Rock, described in one of her poems as
significant to the Vancouver landscape. In her book Legends of Vancouver she states “Amongst
all the wonders, the natural beauties that encircle Vancouver, the marvels of mountains shaped
into crouching lions and brooding beavers, the yawning canyons, the stupendous forest firs and
cedars, Siwash Rock stands as distinct, as individual as if dropped from another planet” (See
“Siwash Rock” in Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver, 11).
12 While Gray asserts that this memorial “overlooks” Siwash Rock, I found, after visiting Stanley
Park in 2013, that the famous stone is no longer in view from the vantage point of Johnson’s
memorial.
15
16
The rationale behind Reddie’s choices is supported by Van Steen’s characterization of
Johnson’s status, and reflected his increasing interest in biographical depiction. In
attempting to reveal the story of Johnson’s life, Reddie did more than just depict the
‘legend’ of Pauline Johnson; he contributed to a legacy of Johnson’s reconstruction.
Shelley Hulan confirms that Johnson “has been the subject of several studies, most of
them biographical” (n.p.), and suggests that in these works, “[b]iographies often serve as
bellwethers for the interests of the times when they are written” (n.p.). Again, this aspect
of biography in which the function of the past helps shape the present, admirably
coincides with the original commemorative logic for the Johnson stamp.
Accepted Design: Circulating a False Personality
Given the various representational options for the stamp (options that exhibit a
desire to accurately represent either Johnson’s biography or her stage persona), it is
surprising that the essay shown as Figure 13 became the one that the postal department
preferred.
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17
Figure 13- Essay by Bernard James Reddie Figure 14- Final “Accepted” Design
National Archives of Canada. Bibliothèque et Archives Canada.
After some alterations to the nose, and a softening of the chin, the final stamp (figure 14)
was released on March 10th, 1961 with the accompanying press release:
This new postage stamp honors the centennial of the birth of Miss E. Pauline
Johnson, Indian poetess. The stamp shows a profile of the late poetess,
wearing a high ruffled collar of Victorian apparel superimposed on a
background of forests, plains and mountains. In the background, a full-length
likeness of Miss Johnson in tribal costume is shown to emphasize her two
personalities of Indian princess and Victorian lady. In the foreground lower
left corner, "1861", the year of her birth, appears on the pages of an open
book representing her contribution to Canadian literature. In announcing this
stamp, the Postmaster General said that in commemorating Pauline Johnson,
we pay tribute to all Canadian Indians for their contributions to our Canadian
way of life. (in Covex)
With the introduction of her image on a Canadian postage stamp, E. Pauline Johnson now
re-entered the world stage. This would make Johnson the first woman, after the Queen,
to be enshrined as an icon in Canadian stamp design.
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18
Criticism of the stamp came quickly. In 1961, many critics suggested that the
stamp’s inaccuracy made it a failure as the stamp’s relationship to Johnson’s ‘real’
history was scrutinized. An article in The Calgary Herald questioned the postal
department’s research methods: “The Canadian postal department has apparently been
misinformed” as “according to encyclopedias, 1961 is only the 99th anniversary of
[Johnson’s] birth” (“New Stamp”). In fact, it was The Calgary Herald that was deceived
(Johnson was indeed born in March of 186113), but what is significant here is that this
kind of critical examination of the stamp’s historical veracity is sustained even in more
recent analyses of Reddie’s design. Because of its departure from both photographic and
biographical authenticity, the stamp remains a target for criticism. Carole Gerson and
Veronica Strong-Boag (2002) argue that “neither image [in the stamp] presents a
recognizable likeness of Johnson: none of her photographs depicts her in either a high
ruffled Victorian collar or in Native dress in the pose on the stamp, with both arms raised
to the heavens. Moreover, the background of snow-capped mountains links her only with
the West coast, ignoring her original affiliation with the Six Nations of southern Ontario”
(xxxvi). What both The Calgary Herald and Gerson and Strong-Boag demand is a
faithful representation of Johnson: one that intersects with the primary sources of her
history in more ethical ways—one that represents the ‘reality’ of Pauline Johnson more
‘correctly’. They each have different ideas of what that reality is, but either way, they
contrast this cultural memory against a history they know (or, in the case of The Calgary

13 The
confusion over Johnson’s date of birth is evident even in biographies of Johnson’s life.
Van Steen asserts that Johnson was born “March 10, 1862” but “belongs to the ‘Group of ‘61’
which includes Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, Bliss Carman, William
Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, and Frederick George Scott” (ix). Strong-Boag and
Gerson contend that Johnson was born in 1861 (16). Biographies by both Betty Keller and
Charlotte Gray concur with this date of birth (Keller 147; Gray 46).
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19
Herald, imagine they know) well. Consequently, Reddie’s design is dismissed as a false
image that reflects an ignorance of Johnson’s history.
Gerson and Strong-Boag go on to suggest that the stamp is not only inaccurate,
but that it represents a “trivialization” of Johnson; that it “underscores the general failure
to recognize Johnson’s contribution to the national imaginary” (Strong-Boag and Gerson
11). In their view, the image “fail[s]” based on a criterion that values realistic
representation and that for this design “so little attention was paid to history that the artist
[Reddie] neglected even to study available portraits of Johnson for his images” (Gerson
and Strong-Boag xxxv). Of course, these criticisms are valid, but it is worth asking
whether the alleged inaccuracies in the final stamp were deliberate re-imaginings, in light
of the fact that Johnson portraits were available and arguably consulted during the
composition of the essay designs. How are the motifs that are established in the essays
transformed or altered in the final stamp? What factors determined and influenced those
alterations?
I suggest that the three elements of the stamp that are criticized as “inaccurate” by
Gerson and Strong-Boag are perhaps intentional inaccuracies that are not the result of
careless research. Indeed, I propose that careful attention was paid to the implications of
representation--that the inaccuracies are deliberate and quite important especially because
they are the result of Reddie’s careful negotiations of both Pauline Johnson’s historical
context and the socio-political context of Reddie’s own time.
According to Benedict Anderson, many critics (specifically Ernest Gellner) are
“so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretenses that [they]
assimilate[] ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’ rather than to ‘imagining’ and
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‘creation’ ” (49). Anderson addresses the value of national myth-making for nation
formation and asserts that communities are not to be distinguished by their
“falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (49). Like Anderson, I
propose that the ‘false’ aspects of the postage stamp can now be reconsidered as
components in an imaginative process, especially as this stamp is tied explicitly to a
project of nationalism. If “that which we remember is, more often than not, that which we
would like to have been; or that which we hope to be” (Ellison in Roach 33), then those
images of Johnson are worth revisiting.
What if we consider these ‘inaccuracies’ of composition not as “failures”, but
rather as meaningful devices that alter the stamp’s function? In order to deepen our
comprehension of E. Pauline Johnson’s role in the ‘drama’ of the 1961 stamp
composition, and by association, the project of nation formation and national mythology,
it is necessary to take a closer look at the way in which the final design depicted
Johnson’s “personalities,” especially if they are imaginative departures from ‘real’ and
‘correct’ portraits. It is precisely this departure from Johnson’s reality, and our historical
ways of knowing her, that reveals how Johnson represented more than just her ‘real’ self.
When we address the process of memory-making (from draft stage to final design) and
account for its substitutions and transformation, the contentious relationships between
history and cultural memory are enacted and then circulated; in the process an official
national vision is articulated.
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21
From Falsity to Imagination
What imaginative constructs are apparent within the final design selected for the
1961 Pauline Johnson commemorative stamp? Gerson and Strong-Boag contend that one
of the reasons the graphic image of the final design is a “misrepresent[ation]” (xxxv) is
that it fails to acknowledge Johnson’s home nation (Six Nations) in the scenic imagery.
Indeed, in the essays, as in the stamp, Reddie seems to ignore any reference to the Six
Nations. But attributing this to Reddie’s ignorance is more difficult, given his
demonstrable consideration of places that were important to Johnson. It is known that
Johnson was fascinated with Siwash Rock, after being introduced to its legend by Chief
Joe Capilano (Gray). As noted earlier, Reddie’s depiction of Siwash Rock in his essays
demonstrates an accurate knowledge of aspects of Johnson’s life. The charge that he paid
“little attention” to “history” in his graphic process is thereby harder to defend. What is
more significant is that initially he seems to have paid attention to Johnson’s history, but
then subsequently ignored it. It begs the question: why is a geographical marker that
references Johnson’s real history, suddenly transformed, in the final stamp design, into a
broad mountainous landscape?
In the absence of directives to Reddie from the postal department or explanations
by Reddie himself regarding his artistic intentions, I can only speculate on the reasons for
Reddie’s decisions. Considering that the interment of Johnson’s ashes in Stanley Park
was so unlikely (she herself had not requested burial there) and was only enacted after
special request, the exclusion of this reference to the park’s landmark site (Siwash Rock)
is not altogether surprising. Perhaps the postal department, as an arm of the federal
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22
government, was reluctant to highlight this historical concession in light of land claim
rhetoric.
A closer contextual analysis might account for the omission of reference to
Johnson’s birthplace. While Gerson and Strong-Boag call this an oversight (the result of a
lack of historical understanding, they say, on Reddie’s part), I suggest that the politics of
government/First Nations relations in the early 1960’s played a role. Perhaps Reddie
avoided references to the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, the place where Johnson
really came from, because this was the same place where in March of 1959 (only 2 years
prior to the creation of the Pauline Johnson stamp) officials from the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police were sent to “attack” more than one thousand people who had engaged in
a peaceful “takeover [of] the old Council House in Oshweken” and had “held their
ground” for one week. During this “rebellion”, the supporters or warriors of the
Confederacy “disavow[ed] the authority of the elected council [and] the provincial police”
(Catapano 336). Catapano states that “[t]he take-over of the Council House by the
‘warriors’ was a hallmark of the open confrontation with the Canadian government that
began in the ‘60s, an era of activism that still characterizes the relationship of Six Nations
with the Canadian government today” (337). In light of the forces at play at the Six
Nations and the potentially explosive politics surrounding issues of sovereignty and self-
government, it is likely that Reddie deliberately chose to omit any overt reference to
Johnson’s birthplace. Perhaps he concluded that, given these dynamics, inclusion of a
Six Nations landmark was not appropriate for a stamp that was intended to celebrate an
intercultural fantasy and the extension of the franchise to “Canadian Indians.” Within
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23
this context, the stamp’s exclusion of a visual sign indicating Johnson’s place of birth
was perhaps a carefully designed compromise, rather than a misrepresentation.
The Real Pauline Johnson
Though one can speculate about the reasons that led Reddie to omit several
aspects of Johnson’s ‘real’ life, it is more difficult to defend the major charge levied
against the final design: Reddie’s failure to accurately portray Johnson’s “personalities.”
Where is Pauline Johnson in the final design? The background image of the woman with
braided hair is, as Gerson and Strong-Boag rightly suggest, a fabrication. From where did
this choice emerge? Although the images in this design do not correspond to earlier drafts,
some resemblance to the essays is evident. The facial profile featured in the foreground is
reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s focus on Johnson’s portraiture (Figures 2, 3, and 4). While
Fitzgerald’s essays presented Johnson’s performance persona and the name
Tekahionwake, that nomenclature is completely absent in Reddie’s final design. This
omission suggests that the image of the woman in the background represents a kind of
history that haunts the assimilated “E. Pauline Johnson.” Previous Fitzgerald essays
demonstrated some degree of fidelity to Johnson’s performance persona and portraiture,
but the Indigenous “personality” in Reddie’s stamp is presented only as imaginary
feminine scenery. The image of the “Indian Maiden” is no longer guided by a
relationship to her performance (except through the press release’s suggestion that this
frontally presented figure is in “costume”) and stands in marked contrast to Fitzgerald’s
(more defined) attempts to capture Johnson’s performance “personality.”
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24
The other side of Johnson’s “personality” (described in the press release as a
“Victorian lady”) is presented here in Johnson’s preferred performance “profile.” In the
essays featuring Johnson’s performance persona and portraiture, the gaze of the subject is
to the right. However, in the final design the gaze turns to
the left, offering the left profile of the “Victorian lady” in
the image’s foreground. Reddie had already experimented
with the left facing profile in earlier “personality” essays
(see Figures 10, 11). This choice of a left facing profile in
the final design is significant because it set up an implicit
connection to the most important imperial icon in postage
Figure 15 design: Sir Rowland Hill’s famous Penny Black design,
first circulated in 1840 (the first stamp released in Britain),
featuring the head of the monarch, Queen Victoria (see Scott and figure 15). While
Fitzgerald’s initial profile depictions were respectful of Johnson’s portrait preference,
Reddie’s final design superimposes an imperial reference on what was essentially an
“Imaginary Indian”14, thereby aligning the two images. The Canadian postage stamp now
effectively becomes a simulacrum of the neoclassical image of Queen Victoria that had

14 Daniel
Francis, in his publication The Imaginary Indian, suggests that the “Indian” is an
imaginary Indigeneity that white audiences have constructed. Though Francis does not analyze
the Pauline Johnson stamp, in his chapter on “Celebrity Indians and Plastic Shamans”, he does
address the politics of Johnson’s recognition that came with “one of the most successful careers
in Canadian performance history” (111). He posits that audience expectations imposed upon
Johnson began to inform the kinds of theatrical representations that she enacted. Francis
introduces a generative comparison of Johnson to other performers of Indigeneity such as Grey
Owl and Buffalo Child Long Lance (123-143). Though this dissertation goes on to complicate
some of these comparisons, Francis’ work undoubtedly proved generative in my research and
thinking on Johnson.
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25
been created only twenty years before Pauline Johnson’s birth—an iconic symbol of
imperialism that was the “model” (Scott) for many Victorian postage and colonial stamps.
As a result of these changes, the final design’s composition echoes elements of
earlier ethnographic photocompositions, particular ethnographic contrasts. These are
discussed in Daniel Francis’ Copying People as well as in Florence Ida Enns’ Masters
thesis project on Pauline Johnson and photographic depiction. Enns discusses the ‘savage
to civilized’ portraits (such as the “Thomas Moore portrait” created 65 years earlier in
Saskatchewan) that she considers emblematic of cultural genocide. The duality of
Reddie’s images infers a Curtisian15 effort to capture a tradition before it vanishes, on one
side, while on the other side it offers a vision of assimilation.16

15 Anne Maxwell discusses photographer Edward C. Curtis’ attempts to photographically capture
the “Vanishing Indian”: “Between 1907 and 1930 Curtis produced his monumental twenty-
volume The North American Indian containing more than two thousand photographs of tribes
living west of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, along with detailed descriptions of their
traditional costumes. This work was an attempt to arouse popular interest in Native American
cultures as a means of rescuing them from oblivion” (Maxwell 110). Maxwell goes on to suggest
that Curtis was “one of the few photographers of the late colonial period who joined
anthropological interests to artistic endeavors and so gave genocide an acceptable face” (110).
16 The inclusion of these images (both the stamp and this Moore portrait) introduces the carefully
negotiated matrix of cultural genocide. Dr. Jill Carter’s recent interview with costume designer
Erika A. Iserhoff sensitively articulates the damaging impact of such images: “Iserhoff spoke
poignantly here about the inevitable grief that comes up when production research leads her into
the museum, to an anthropologist’s illicit violation of the private or of the sacred captured forever
in a photograph, or to a Curtis print. She returned often to the tensions that surround this work of
consulting the historical markers of our absence (actual or imminent) to serve a cultural project
that asserts and celebrates Aboriginal presence despite a centuries-old onslaught of genocidal
practice and policy” (See Carter “Negotiating Tensions” 6).
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26
Figure 16 Figure 17
The similarities between Johnson’s commemorative stamp and the Thomas
Moore portrait are striking. In the Moore portrait, “the cultivated Indian of 1896 required
the expunging of customary accoutrements of Native cultures” and included “the cutting
of Moore’s hair, the exchange of Native dress for a European suit, even the substitution
of a conventional studio background for furs.” The 1961 Johnson stamp works with
similar ‘before and after’ structures but Reddie only loosely abided by ethnographic
formalities, instead favoring the use of superimposition, as opposed to a side by side
format. As mentioned earlier, the introduction of the left facing profile expresses an
increasing assimilative bias. There is a subtle suggestion, in the essays, that Johnson
matured and progressed from “savage” to “civilized,” making her worthy of gracing a
Canadian postage stamp.
In short, the stamp is expressive of a significant erasure of the Indigenous body by
substituting an image with strong imperial overtones for the ‘real’ Pauline Johnson.
However, the superimposition of two distinct racial images is faithful or correct, in the
sense that it corresponds to an iconic aspect of Johnson’s ‘real’ stage performances—the
cultural transformation achieved, at intermission, by her change into another performance
costume. The stamp’s dual vision of Pauline Johnson, and its compositional placement of
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27
the “Victorian Maiden” “side” of her “personality” in the foreground seems (intentionally
or not) to infer a relationship to this costume change. A review in The Winnipeg Free
Press of Johnson’s performance in December 1897 speaks to the affective force of this
strategy: “for the first part of the programme she appeared in picturesque Indian costume,”
while “in the second part of the programme, [she] appeared in a rich and beautiful dress
made in fashionable civilized style,” leaving “the impression upon the audience” that
Johnson “must surely be at least almost white” (in Johnston 145). Biographies feature this
costume change as an important aspect of Johnson’s performance life. Betty Keller
contends that Johnson had an “‘Indian’ half of her performance” during which she wore
her “bear claw jewelry and her buckskin dress with its two different sleeves” (Keller 40).
While this costuming device may have been a factor in the stamp’s design, it is Johnson’s
performance history that is both most present, in that it frames the final design’s
composition of these two personalities, and most absent, in that it is largely reconstituted
without relation to Johnson’s actual portraiture.
What remains in question is whether the alleged failure of Reddie’s image resides
in the inauthenticity of his artistic rendering, or whether it resides in his depiction of
Johnson’s performance history which contained its own inauthenticities. Did his
interpretive and compositional choices, perhaps drawn (even unintentionally) from
Johnson’s own performance conventions, set the commemorative stamp up for criticisms
of inauthentic representation? Through the prism of modern interpretation, it is Johnson’s
performances that are the most troubling parts of her career. Some critics, such as Martha
Viehmann maintain that Johnson’s costume change is perceived by many as an
assimilationist feature of her performance and therefore a “disappointment” because it
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failed to push back against the “prevailing hegemony” of white European values (261).
Johnson’s “strong race opinions” on the “real Indian girl” in her prose writings are quite
clear, but her presentation of the “the ‘wild’ Indian […] replaced by the cultivated
European in chignon and corset” (Strong-Boag and Gerson 113) does not fulfill the
expectations that critics have for her theatrical representations – expectations that are
derived from their interpretations of her prose writing. As Anne Collet notes: “Johnson-
Tekahionwake’s portrayal (both in word and costume) of the ‘red Indian’ lacked the
authenticity she demanded of Canadian novelists” (“Fair Trade” 167).
Failure
Johnson’s prose work has a surprisingly modern sense of contemporary activism
that allows the reader to imagine the kind of “Indian Girl” Johnson, herself, would create
in performance. In “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction”
Johnson imagines a new kind of “Indian girl” in fiction that would have “peculiar
characteristics” and “individual personality” (Johnson in Gerson and Strong-Boag, E.
Pauline Johnson, 177). This work reads like a treatise on the representation of Indigenous
character in Canadian literature-- a recipe book for fiction that speaks back to other
authors of her period. In particular, Johnson draws attention to conventions of naming
characters, attacking the trend she most despises—the “surnameless creation” (179):
Yes, there is only one of her and her name is ‘Winona.’ Once or twice she is
borne [sic] another appellation, but it always has a ‘Winona’ sound about it.
Even Charles Mair, in that masterpiece of Canadian-Indian romances,
‘Tecumseh,’ could not resist ‘Winona.’ We meet her as a Shawnee, as a
Sioux, as a Huron, and then, her tribe unnamed, in the vicinity of Brockville.
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She is never dignified by being permitted to own a surname, although,
extraordinary to note, her father is always a chief, and had he ever existed,
would doubtless have been as conservative as his contemporaries about the
usual significance that his people attach to family name and lineage. (178-
179)
The concern expressed here is about the erasure of distinctiveness in the dominant
discourse. Johnson determines that these “creations” are unnatural: “let her be natural,
even if the author is not competent to give her tribal characteristics” (183). Strikingly, her
suggestion that “distinct” representation will enable the creation of “natural” characters
leads her to the language of realism and theatricality: “The story-writer who can […]
portray a ‘real live’ Indian girl will do something in Canadian literature that has never
been done, but once” (Johnson in Gerson and Strong-Boag 178).
Here, Johnson’s use of the words “live” and “portray” reveals her theatrical
experience. Her mention of the exception to the ruling mode of representation (“but
once”) is a reference to Charles Mair’s Tecumseh, a “closet” drama depicting the
Shawnee leader Tecumseh’s contributions to the war of 1812. According to Johnson,
Mair created “the one ‘book’ Indian girl that has Indian life, Indian character, Indian
beauty” (182), in his depiction of Tecumseh’s niece, Iena. However, Johnson goes on to
criticize Mair’s decision to kill off the drama’s heroine, Iena. She argues that he
employed the stereotypical depiction of the Indian Maiden’s fate, the “inevitable doom of
death”. Despite these deficiencies, Johnson ultimately claims that Mair had an “Indian
loving pen” (182). Mair’s work is positioned as the ideal representation of Indigeneity in
contrast to the fictional works of Helen Hunt Jackson, Captain Richardson, G.Mercer
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Adam, A. Ethelwyn Wetherald, Bret Harte, and Jessie M. Freeland. Johnson attributes the
success of Mair’s drama to the “long study and life with the people whom he has written
of so carefully, so truthfully” (181). Furthermore, the dramatic format (it is, after all, not
a “ ‘book’ ” but a play, albeit to be read)17 contributed to the creation of what Johnson
perceived as “truthful” characterization, more akin to ‘real’ life.
Johnson’s standards of truthful “portrayal” of the “Indian girl” are only partially
met in her own performance work. In spite of her use of one name (Tekahionwake) for
her performance persona, analyses of her performance costume by critics and biographers
such as Strong-Boag and Gerson, Enns, Johnston, Lyon, and Keller reveal a dichotomy
between the ‘real’ characters Johnson wanted others to create, and the ‘real’ girl she
herself presented onstage. Several studies attempt to resolve how Johnson, while calling
for “distinctiveness”, could compromise the veracity of her own performance by
presenting the ‘false’ icons of Indigeneity that she otherwise deplored. Although her
performances were largely responsible for her stardom and fame, in retrospect they are
problematical—offering puzzling and bizarre representations that pit the politics of an
archive against Johnson’s repertoire.18
Justifications of Johnson’s choices revolve around the notion of “economies of
representation” (Collet; Milz). Within this framework, Johnson’s performances are
characterized as sharing in the experience of many Aboriginal theatre workers today who

17 SeeAlan Filewod’s article "National Battles: Canadian Monumental Drama and the Investiture
of History” for more on Tecumseh’s relationship to theatrical ambitions, despite its ‘closeted’
status.
18
Taylor conceptualizes the relationship between the “archive”, which she considers to consist of
“supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones)” and “the so-called
ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports,
ritual)” (emphasis in original Taylor 19).

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“struggle to address and resist being packaged as a spectacle for voyeuristic consumption
while concurrently trying to attract audiences in to hear [their] own stories” (Carter 6).
This interpretation positions Johnson as performing “debas[ed]” stereotypes, against her
will and “class”, simply to finance her poetic career (Unwin). In other words, she had to
make sacrifices in order to survive within a theatrical economy wherein certain
“expectations” of the “Indian” had to be met (Viehmann 268).
More recently, critics have turned to alternative rationales to resolve the
contradictions between Johnson’s written work and her performances. In 2012, Emily
Landau suggested, in the Canadian general interest magazine The Walrus, that Johnson
“enthralled” audiences with a “stereotype-smashing spin” (Landau 65) on her Mohawk-
English heritage. Landau writes that Johnson was “Canada’s first postmodern celebrity”
(65) and likens Johnson’s representation of the ‘Pan Indian’ to Miss Chief Eagle
Testickle- “an oiled up, glossy-haired, gyrating Indian warrior princess and the alter ego
of Toronto visual and performance artist Kent Monkman who, like Johnson, is biracial”
(Landau 71). Building on this comparison, she assigns the status of “oracle” to Johnson
by suggesting that Johnson’s performances represent a historical antecedent to those of
today’s artists, who use a performance strategy of re-appropriation (or mimicry). In this
way, Landau implies that Johnson was employing a postmodern and feminist creative
approach whose effectiveness is validated by contemporary theorists like Luce Irigarary;
by “playing with mimesis, assuming the expected role deliberately” artists can “convert a
form of subordination into affirmation, and thus [] begin to thwart it” (Irigarary in
Carlson 189). Even if Landau could provide documentation to substantiate the claim that
Johnson was intentionally using this appropriative strategy (but she does not), it is
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difficult to believe that such a present-day performance tactic would have been
understood by audiences at the turn of the century. Landau’s optimistic hypothesis is so
highly anachronistic that it fails to hold up under scrutiny. Performance scholar Marvin
Carlson states that even today, these “masquerade performances always run the danger
that Derrida cited in any deconstructive operation, which seeks to turn established
structures back on themselves—that this process may also especially for a conventional
audience, simply reinscribe or reinforce those structures” (Carlson 176). Regardless of
whether Johnson presented stereotypes and “anticipat[ed]” the work of “several modern
First Nations artists” (Rebecca Belmore, Brian Jungen), as Landau suggests, or whether
she performed them because of a circulating economy that determined the type of
representations she had to play in order to survive, all these analyses attempt to
rationalize the disconnect between Johnson’s performance and her prose prescription for
the portrayal of a “real Indian girl.”
To put it briefly: either she was performing because she had to, or she was doing it
as a send up. Either way, criticism of Johnson seems to share a judgement that Johnson
was performing a fantasy that was implicitly demeaning and shameful, rather than the
ideal reality she espoused in her prose work. Johnson’s creative choices, like Reddie’s
creative choices, are deemed false in that they depart either from the historical record, or
from constructs of cultural memory. This persistence to reach an understanding of
Johnson’s repertoire by pitting it against ‘real history’(whatever that means) positions
Johnson’s “adaptations to the expectations of settler cultures” as fraudulent. What does
this do for the Six Nations of the Grand River where she is “acknowledge[d] […] as an
important forebear” (Viehmann 260)? What does it do for Beth Brant who asserts that
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“Pauline Johnson began a movement that proved unstoppable in its momentum-the
movement of First Nations women to write down [their] stories” (in Strong Boag and
Gerson 134)? What does it mean to the prolific scholar, educator, writer, and dramatist
Daniel David Moses who asserts that Johnson “showed [him] it was possible for a person
of Native ancestry to be a writer” (Moses in Martin)? Johnson’s impact on the Six
Nations and on the Native theatre community is not just symbolic19; she has an active
influence on the production of cultural and creative work. For this reason alone, the
suggestion that she was not being ‘truthful’ enough has significant consequences for
those who think of her as an important precursor who strengthens their own creative
practice.
In summary, there is a striking similarity between the interpretations of Reddie’s
stamp and the interpretations of Johnson’s performances: Reddie’s accepted design is
seen as a failure because of its inaccuracy and is therefore dismissed as a trivialization of
Johnson’s history; in the same way, Johnson’s performances are dismissed as being
trivial because they fail to represent the authentic “Indigenous Woman” that Johnson
herself extolled. Was Reddie’s subtle evocation of an imperial heritage a
misrepresentation, or was it a faithful depiction of a disappointing part of Johnson’s
performance career that seemed responsive to imperial expectations? In other words: is
the stamp a disappointment because it fails to account for Johnson’s reality, or is it a

19 As
a keynote speaker at the “A Cultural Approach to Human Security” conference on Oct 8-
10th 2010 at the University of Toronto, Tomson Highway, one of the “first Native [Cree]
playwrights to break through into the theatrical ‘mainstream’ and win as much celebrity as
Canadian theatre affords” (Filewod “Receiving” 364) spoke of Pauline Johnson’s influence on his
work, and his writing. This speaks again to Johnson’s legacy, that has informed one of Canada’s
most prominent, but equally complex, First Nations theatre artists.
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failure because it accounts, all too well, for the reality of Johnson’s performance
history—one that we would rather not remember?
If Johnson’s performances were marred by a degree of cultural fraudulence, then
the depiction employed in Reddie’s final stamp design must equally be characterized as
inauthentic. In spite of this critical deficit, Reddie’s work can help us locate what it
means to reimagine E. Pauline Johnson and to make her performances present. Perhaps
the criticism of Reddie’s image is so vitriolic precisely because it depicts a complex site
of Johnson’s life: her performance. Interestingly, an implicit anti-theatrical prejudice
already underpins various analyses of Pauline Johnson’s performance work because of its
creative departure from authenticity. Margaret Atwood asserts that Johnson is a poet of
considerable “sophistication”, “despite her habit of dressing up in costumes and chanting
in public” (emphasis mine Atwood in Martin n.p.). Johnson’s habitual descent into
“dress[]-up,” to use Atwood’s terms, is deemed unsatisfactory because her artistic
choices onstage, her testing of image and presentation within her performance contexts
fail to display a fidelity to the ‘real’ Pauline Johnson. Like the stamp, her performances
are often regarded as misrepresentations, representing the ‘error’ of her history: the site of
contention that needs be reframed in order to legitimize Johnson’s status as a significant
literary and performative force.
A Philatelic Approach to Performance History?
Reddie’s stamp essays and final design can be interpreted as “imaginations” (as I
have done here in Anderson’s terms). However, the cultural erasure implicit in the
stamp’s design must not be ignored. This analysis aims to locate the mistakes, omissions,
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and changes as a starting point for considering the contexts in which Pauline Johnson’s
(and the “Canadian Indian”) is envisioned. By employing a philatelic approach that
integrates production imperfection or “failure”, an analysis of Pauline Johnson’s artistic
work can be enriched. An analysis of the essays allows for a more nuanced negotiation of
Reddie’s artistic process, just as an examination of the process of Johnson’s
performance—with all its mutability and flux— allows for a deeper understanding of her
performance work. Perhaps in this way, we can move beyond the label of ‘falsity’
attached to both stamp and performance and engage more fully with the complexity and
sophistication of Johnson’s performance history.
Interpretations that discredit Johnson’s performances on the grounds that they are
inauthentic can only be sustained in concert with one “accepted” or “fixed” version of
that performance. A philatelic methodology allows one to think about her performance
history as a process of essays; a testing and retesting of her self-presentation. The
‘variations’ of Johnson’s costume changes offers clues to her performance strategy.
Nellie McClung, a contemporary of Johnson, who saw her perform, remarked on the
change from a Victorian ballgown into an “Indian Dress” (McClung). This significant
sequential costuming technique is a point that is usually relegated to footnote status in
biographical accounts. Instead, by identifying, foregrounding and valuing this ‘variation’
(like any good philatelist would do), the mutability of Johnson’s performance is
illuminated. If one can look beyond the “accepted” judgements of Johnson’s performance,
just as one might look beyond conventional judgements of the stamp, it may be possible
to free Johnson’s performance history from the uninformed and damaging criticisms
widely levied against it.
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This dissertation offers an alternative approach to the analysis of Johnson’s
creative performance practice. I propose to reframe Johnson’s performances, at their
source, as imaginations rather than as “fakery” (Viehmann 269). As such, the goal of this
dissertation is not to resolve or “unpack” Johnson’s performances or her personal history;
such biographical approaches abound and are representative of frameworks that seek to
continually “understand.”20 As prominent Delaware First Nations poet, playwright and
educator Daniel David Moses articulates: “[t]here is a debilitating effect of this impulse
from outside that people think they can discover everything, and know everything, and
maybe own everything” (Moses in Appleford n.p.). Taking heed of Moses’ words, I am
not endeavoring to discern who “the real Pauline Johnson” (Sexsmith)21 is, or was. Nor
do I intend to expose the woman ‘behind the mask’ or ‘behind the curtain’ by looking at
the intentionality of her troubling performances. Instead, I propose to reinvest her
performances with a nuanced analysis that accounts for their own “trials”, their own
essaying, and to examine the influence of that process on the Canadian cultural
imagination’s vicarious or embodied engagement with the ‘character’ E. Pauline Johnson.
How did Johnson create these imaginations of her ‘self’? How did she struggle to
perform a stable version of ‘E. Pauline Johnson’? What forces influenced the
determination of that character within the larger and evolving process of nation formation
and national mythology?

20 Throughout my studies, these approaches have been employed, practiced, and suggested. One
of the first conferences I attended stressed this methodology, even within the conference title:
“Unpacking the Female Indigenous Body: Performance and Symposium” was held April 22nd-
25th 2010 at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
21 In a more recent review of Charlotte Gray’s Flint and Feather, Pamela Sexsmith, writing in
Windspeaker titles her review “Who was the real Pauline Johnson?” and attempts to determine
Johnson’s personality: “Was she a poet, an actress, an English lady, a Mohawk princess, a
mysterious enchantress, a fun-loving Bohemian or a lyrical orator?” (see Sexsmith).
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These questions will be addressed in the following four chapters of this
dissertation. The first two chapters focus on Johnson’s theatrical output in 1892. During
that year, Pauline Johnson developed and refined the performative skill set that she would
use throughout her career. Significant adaptations and enhancements to her performance
repertoire emerged in roughly three time frames: January, February to June, and
September to December.
The first two time periods are addressed in chapter one, “Framing the Beginning
of E. Pauline Johnson’s Theatre History,” and focus on the evolution of Johnson’s
theatrical strategies. After discussing the theatrical influence of the Johnson family on her
work (particularly the influence of her father and brother’s amateur theatricals), I develop
an analysis of Johnson’s most famous performance at the Young Men’s Liberal Club in
January of 1892. Next, I trace the adjustments that Johnson made for her next set of
performances from February to June, while explaining how her choice of performance
repertoire intersected with some of the aesthetic goals for Indigenous representation that
she outlined in her prose work.
In chapter two, the focus remains on the year 1892, but with more specific
attention paid to Johnson’s increasing theatricality from September to December.
September 1892 is a particularly important moment in Johnson’s theatre history. During
this month, she explored a “new idea” for integrating costuming into her performances.
This moved her performance beyond the style of elocution. Johnson called the creation of
her costume “the most difficult thing in the world” (cited in Strong-Boag and Gerson
110). Critical analyses of this costume consistently postulate that its theatricality
undermines the perception of Johnson’s Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) nationality. The
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costume has frequently been defined as a collage (Gerson) or bricolage (Collett) that
compromises the development of Johnson’s performance (Goldie 61 in Lyon). In this
chapter, I present various photographs of Johnson’s costumes and address how the
composition of her “Indian” costume intersected with codes of Victorian dress. I also
reassess the function of the materials included in her costume by contextualizing them
within a study of the repertoire that Johnson used in performance—a repertoire that
appears to have driven her approach to costuming. This chapter pushes back against the
critical obsession with the authenticity of Johnson’s costume by exploring how Johnson
navigated settler expectations for “correct” dress. I propose that Johnson, herself, was
altering the terms of various dress codes while playing into and with them. I am able to
draw on my own engagement with the costume and its constituent parts at the Museum of
Vancouver, as well as on newspaper clippings and images that track the costume’s
transformation over time. In addition, I discuss how Johnson’s use of material objects
and fashions in performance fulfilled her desire for the distinctiveness that she mentions
in her prose work.
I conclude this chapter with an examination of Johnson’s collaboration with the
ventriloquist, impersonator, and pianist Owen Smily. By the end of 1892, Johnson was
performing theatrical adaptations of her fictional short stories. The characters Charlie
McDonald and Christine McDonald in Johnson’s “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” appear in
Smily and Johnson performances in Hamilton during late 1892. Various promotional
materials indicate that these adaptations of Johnson’s short stories lasted about fifteen
minutes. Though no extant script survives of this adaptation, what is important is that the
performance of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” came before the publication of the short story
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in 1893. This means that Johnson’s literary output must be assessed in relationship to her
performance. Overall, my analysis positions 1892 as the critical year that shaped Johnson
into the confident and mature stage performer that she would henceforth present to the
world.
Chapter three moves this analysis beyond the borders of the land we now call
Canada, and considers how the characters that Johnson constructed in performance were
changed, according to the location of the performances. This section moves away from
the chronological approach that guides the first parts of this dissertation. By the start of
1892, Johnson was celebrated as a “Canadian Indian,” but how did she market this
persona to American and English audiences? I start with a micro-historical assessment of
Johnson’s performance at the American Canoe Association meeting near Kingston,
Ontario. I follow that with a discussion of how Johnson developed a persona for
American audiences while capitalizing on the marketplace’s desires for relics. This
analysis considers the modifications Johnson made to her costume and props during her
touring years in the United States. It also grapples with the various ways in which
Johnson billed her performances, and how she used shifting Indigenous identifications,
again depending on the location of her presentations. What becomes clear is that Johnson
developed three very different performances that advanced different sets of politics.
In my final chapter, I argue that, by 1900, Johnson was engaged in complex
theatrical strategies that balanced ethnic caricature with what Susan Glenn terms the
“comedy of personality” (Glenn 75). I position Johnson’s performance of dialect pieces
and short sketches as operating within the tradition of “personality acting.” I focus
primarily on the performance repertoire that required vocal intonation, accent work,
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variation, and flexibility. These texts—archives of performance—reflect the theatricality
and versatility of Johnson’s repertoire. I end with a discussion of other dramatic texts,
hitherto noted as untraceable, that she performed for her distinguished audiences.
Though originally from the Six Nations near Brantford (Oshweken) Ontario,
Johnson has been reframed as a “metaphor” (Hulan) for a whole other nation: Canada.
Her story represents not only a fantasy of interculturalism, but also a vision of
nationalism. Key to that story, is the complex performance history that took her across
Canada, as well as to the United States of America and Great Britain.
This dissertation marks yet another essay—another instance where Johnson will
have to endure a reconstitution—and with that comes responsibility. I proceed in the hope
that a new framework, illuminating the process of Johnson’s performance generation, can
reposition Johnson’s performing body as more than a “disappointing” or shameful part of
her history; that her performing body offers an ever-changing scenario that makes various
‘actors,’ including Pauline Johnson herself, continually put on, test, remake, contribute,
and constitute a complex performance history that has become irrevocably attached to the
Canadian imaginary.
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CHAPTER ONE:
Framing the Beginning of E. Pauline Johnson’s Theatre History

Early 1892
Identifying the “beginning”: January 1892
Knowing of her promising talent as a writer, an opportunity came to test her

elocutionary powers at a Canadian Authors Evening away back in 1892 […] In
strict truth, the evening was dragging a little and interest lessening when ‘the Indian
poet-princess’ was introduced…She glided rather than walked to the platform, her
dark eyes flashing nervously and her sinewy form, the essence of gracefulness,
representing the acme of physical rhythm and motion…Thrilling was the effect,
dramatic the appeal of this dark-hued girl who seemed to personify her race…
Tekahionwake leaped into fame that night twenty-five years ago, as a poet reciter,
in declaiming a few verses.22
Frank Yeigh’s description of Pauline Johnson’s enthralling performance at the
Young Men’s Liberal Club on January 16th 1892 in the Art School Gallery in Toronto
casts this performance as a pivotal starting point of her career. Other contemporary
critics and biographers also tend to frame this event as “the beginning of the astonishing
career of Tekahionwake, also known as E. Pauline Johnson” (emphasis mine, Dearlove).
Indeed, Johnson’s January 1892 performance may be characterized as the introductory
event to the ‘story’ of E. Pauline Johnson’s entire performance career. Walter McRaye
(Johnson’s friend and long-time stage partner) suggests in his biography that upon
receiving the invitation from Yeigh to perform for this occasion, Johnson’s only concern
was her lack of appropriate attire (McRaye 35). Biographer Charlotte Gray, author of
Flint and Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson reinforces a narrative that
positions Johnson as inexperienced when she describes Johnson’s somewhat ingenuous

22
Frank Yeigh in the Everywoman’s Journal (1918) in Strong-Boag and Gerson (102).

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reaction to the invitation: “‘I have nothing to wear!’ she said to her sister Eva” (140).
Similarly, biographer Betty Keller imputes a nervous inexperience to Johnson in detailing
Johnson’s participation at the Author’s Evening: “while she waited backstage, [Johnson]
was trembling so much with stage fright that she could feel the bead fringe on her skirt
rattling against her knees” (Keller 3).
Biographical interpretations of Johnson’s inexperience stand in contrast to
descriptions of how audiences reacted to Johnson’s recital work. Biographers stress that
Johnson’s performance of “A Cry from an Indian Wife” captivated audiences. Betty
Keller describes her “passionate” delivery (Keller 3) and Walter McRaye details how
Johnson was “the only [of all the poets present] to be encored and recalled” (McRaye 36).
Such biographical details regarding audience reception suggest that her performances
were more polished and experienced than is commonly asserted. Keller ends her
description of this event by noting how, after this debut performance, Johnson signs a
letter to Yeigh as “Your Star” (Keller 11). Consequently, these biographies place Johnson
as a leading character within a (now) familiar “star is born” (York) narrative. Academic
critic, Lorraine York, has considered how this “narrative of sudden success” is
“pervasive” in “[a]lmost all […] biograph[ies] [that] survey Johnson’s career” (York 9).
In her astute historiographical analysis of biographies by both Sheila Johnston and Keller,
York suggests that “[a]ll paths, it seems, lead to the stereotypical life-changing, star-
making performance” (York 9-10). Such framing of Johnson’s entrée into the
professional platform circuit not only strips Johnson of agency but also, as York notes,
“obscures the actual facts of Johnson’s earlier literary activities” (York). Additionally, it
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conceals evidence of Johnson’s prior experience as a performer, and training as an
entertainer, well before her presentation in January 1892.
Contemporary reviews of Johnson’s other 1892 performances inform readers that
she already had a rich history of successful performance behind her—that she was not
inexperienced at all. One contemporary reviewer explicitly reminds readers that Johnson
had “some years ago” successfully performed the character of Blanche in the production
of Ours at the Hamilton Opera House. According to this critic, she was then the “feature
of the performance” and “exhibited signs of innate talent” (“Poems Read By the Author”).
Even Evelyn Johnson (Pauline’s sister, also identified as Eva) notes that, at an early age,
Johnson was trained in amateur theatre societies like the Garrick Club in Hamilton
(Johnson Memoirs 46). These instances of amateur performance history and training
suggest that Johnson’s success in 1892 was not accidental but rather the outcome of
earlier experience and preparation.
In addition, the cultural activities in which the Johnson family engaged may have
significantly contributed to Pauline Johnson’s theatrical aptitude. Although Johnson’s
family is often portrayed in biographies as unsupportive of her career as a performer23,

23
Generally, biographies characterize both Pauline’s sister and mother as “concerned” about
Johnson’s decision to perform. Betty Keller states that Johnson’s mother had an “anxiety that a
career on the recital platform [would] not be entirely respectable” (Keller 10). Her sister Evelyn
(also identified as Eva) is described as even more strongly opposed. Marcus Van Steen writes,
“[a]mong those who disapproved strongly of Pauline’s chosen way of life was her sister Evelyn”
(20). Charlotte Gray asserts that Evelyn took issue with Johnson performing. At the end of her
book, Gray cites Lionel Makovski as saying that “‘Eva seemed to feel that Pauline’s life as a
‘trouper’ was something not to be mentioned’” (Gray 395-96). Betty Keller maintains that
“Pauline’s sister strongly disapprove[d] of the proposed recital tour” and that Evelyn was “firmly
opposed to Pauline making a career of [performance] in case it reflect[ed] badly on the family”
(11). Most biographers use this oppositional narrative within their work to illustrate the anti-
theatrical prejudice that existed at the turn of the century, but some, like Keller, use this reaction
to Pauline’s stage work to imply that Evelyn’s bias against performance was a matter of spite.
Keller asserts that “underlying [Evelyn’s] opposition [to performance] [was] her resentment that
her mother obviously preferr[ed] her youngest sister” (Keller 11).
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photographic images of the family located in the Chiefswood collection at the Woodland
Cultural Centre indicate that they were absorbed with ideas of ‘staging,’ particularly
though their photographic pursuits. Florence Ida Enns, in her master’s thesis on
Johnson’s representation in photography notes that “the photographic portrait played an
important role in the Johnson home … not just by its interpersonal use between members
of the family, but by the way images of friends and notable acquaintances were collected
and exhibited in their private spaces” (10-11). Though photography and performance are
“artistic forms [that] have often been defined in oppositional terms” (Levin “The
Performative Force” 328), it is hard to ignore subtle echoes of her father’s and brother’s
interest in costuming, posing, and staging in aspects of Johnson’s own performances.

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Figure 18. Chiefswood Photo Collection. Figure 19. Chiefswood Photo Album
ND. Verso reads “G.H.M. Johnson. From Collection- 2002.01.09. Front of Card. Verso
S. Parks Photograph Gallery. Brantford, reads “Bonaparte the 1st. Chiefswood. June
Ontario” 10th 1882.”

While any of the above mentioned biographical constructs are certainly legitimate
starting points for an examination of Pauline Johnson’s oeuvre, it is clear that 1892 was a
seminal year in Johnson’s life. As mentioned earlier, it is most frequently characterized
as the “beginning” of her career. I too, will return to that 1892 “beginning,” mindful of
the precursor influences that intersected with and shaped Johnson’s performance
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strategies during that year. My overall aim is to consider how Johnson’s performance
practice evolved from 1892 onwards. I will endeavor to examine Johnson’s history
through the lens of what Rebecca Schneider defines as a “cross or intra-temporal
negotiation, even (perhaps) interaction or inter(in)animation of one time with another
time” (Schneider 31). I will argue that several significant elements contributing to the
complexities of Johnson’s stage career emerge in 1892; elements that not only reveal the
influence of traditions on Johnson’s performance, but that also re-emerge in the years to
follow. In short, my analysis of Johnson’s performance history uses this generally agreed
upon “beginning,” but aims to go beyond conventional analyses of that period by
accounting for the complications that Johnson encountered in her first year of
performance. As I outline below, her performances move across time, intersecting with
traditions, while pointing simultaneously to the future. A closer analysis of 1892 will help
elucidate those temporal connections between Johnson’s performances—their pasts,
presents, and futures.
Revisiting the “Beginning”: An Evening with Canadian Authors, January 1892
At 8 p.m., Saturday January 16, 1892, a large crowd lined up to enter the Art
Gallery of the Ontario Society of Artists (173 King Street West). They were there for the
Young Men’s Liberal Club Canadian Literature Evening. The club had already been in
existence for eight years, with a primary agenda to “bring together a lot of young men for
the discussion of political questions” (A.C. Hamilton in Clippingdale 34). Frank Yeigh,
newly elected president of the Club, introduced a theatrical format in order to promote
political “discussion” among its members. Rather than using a prominent politician to
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speak, he invited many of Canada’s most famous litterateurs and musical artists. How
would these artists fit in with the Club’s agenda? In justifying his choice of format for
the event, Yeigh contended that the “securing and maintaining of good government” went
hand in hand with “the study of the people and resources of Canada and the
encouragement of the spirit of Canadian nationality” (“An Evening with Canadian
Authors Poetry and Prose Writers The Young Men’s Liberal Club’s Success”). This shift
in the Club’s programming increased the appeal of the meeting and made it a wildly
popular attraction to which, as The Globe reported (perhaps over enthusiastically),
“hundreds failed to gain admission” because of the overwhelming demand for seats (“An
Evening with Canadian Poets”).
The programme for the evening’s event was divided into two halves, each
featuring different “people” and “resources” for the large audience to “study.” The first
half (“Part First”) included an address by Frank Yeigh, “chairman” of this evening’s
event, who used the opportunity to “deplore the Canadian habit of neglecting our authors
and leaving it to the Americans to discover them and appropriate them” (“With Canadian
Authors”). His address was followed by a piano solo and then by five readings
interspersed with three “songs.” First, Reverend D.J. Macdonnell gave a reading of “The
Mystic Singer” by A.M. Machar.24 Next, Mr. W.W. Campbell performed “How Death
Came to Mortgaged Concession” and following that, selected portraits of Canadian
“people” were presented through a performance that included “A Canadian Boat Song”25

24 Read by a minister, the poem’s evangelical relationship to nationalism is made clear. It ends by
considering how “Faith through the music clear and strong/ Breathes hope and joy and calm”
(Machar 121-122).
25 This selection presumably refers to the Thomas Moore Canadian Boat Song that created “a
‘mythical image’ of the French-Canadian voyageurs as ‘pious, devout, singing’ and somewhat
primitive denizens of the hinterland” (Bentley 361).
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(referring to exploits of the voyageurs), and “In the Valley of the St. Eustache.”26 The
next reading, which focused on the historical contributions of the British to Canada, was
“Gentleman Dick O’ The Greys.” Read by the author himself, Mr. Hereward Cockin, this
selection offered the YMLC audience a tale of a British Garrison officer, “Dick,” who
defects from the British army during the time of the Crimean War (1854-56). The first
half of the programme concluded with a reading by Mr. W. D. Lighthall entitled “The
Young Seigneur of Nation Making” and by Mrs. D.E. Cameron’s performance of Emma
Fraser Blackstock’s “[Tesso?] Art my Queen.” All of these performances focused on
dual British and French contributions to the vision and formation of Canada as a nation.
This vision was actually promoted by the poet laureate of the time, who shared his
sentiments in a letter that was included in a review of this “Canadian Night” event: “like
our nationality, our literature will be the glorious daughter of the two noble races who to-
day people Canada” (“An Evening with Canadian Authors Poetry and Prose Writers The
Young Men’s Liberal Club’s Success.”).

26 This
selection was performed by the author, Mrs. S. Frances Harrison. Though it is impossible
to know if Mrs. Harrison adapted the length of the selection for her recital, what is clear is that it
offers a rich story of a town’s relationship to the “outside” or “other.” This selection had been
published earlier in December 1888 in The American Magazine. See Harrison. The story tells of
the stratagems of an Italian beggar-boy named Achille who wanders into the hamlet of St.
Eustache (off the banks of the St. Lawrence) and is taken in by a French-Canadian widow named
Madame Marie-Francoise-Josephe-Reine Hertel-Duplessis Jonquiere Le Verrier. Soon after
winning the trust of the widow Verrier, the young Italian boy steals off with all her money,
retreating from the village and embarrassing (and bankrupting) Verrier. The piece evokes
resonances of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, but its “Canadian” flavour is evident through its use
of ‘habitant’ dialect. Significantly, the story is one of belonging and adoption. It re-frames the
French-Canadian culture as “native” to Canada, while emphasizing the “Tal-yan boy’s” lack of
dedication to the community by which he is adopted. In this metaphorical story, French Canada
as “native” is presented in contrast to the ‘other’ non-native orientation of the Italian boy’s ties to
his homeland.
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The second half (“Part Second”) of the evening’s programme offered twelve
performances consisting of songs, sketches, and readings. After the intermission, the
Young Liberal Glee Club performed the song “God Protect our Dominion.”27 Next, E.
Pauline Johnson performed a “reading” of “A Cry from an Indian Wife.” There is
evidence of at least two versions of this poem, with different endings. While there is
some disagreement about which version Johnson actually recited, it is clear that her
inclusion in the programme and her performance as an “Indian Wife” complicated the
“dual” vision of Canadian nationhood that had already been underscored in the first half
of the programme. Her gripping poem presents the shifting thoughts of the title character,
struggling to send her husband to battle at Cut Knife Creek during the Northwest
Rebellion:
My Forest Brave, My Redskin love—farewell;
We may not meet to-morrow—who can tell
What mighty ills befall our little band,
Or what you’ll suffer from the white man’s
hand?
Here is your knife. I thought ‘twas sheathed
for aye.
No roaming bison calls for it to-day.
No hide of prairie cattle will it maim—
The plains are bare it seeks a nobler game;
Twill drink the life-blood of a soldier host.

27
There is some suggestion that the Glee Club performance may have been cut from the
programme and that Johnson was the introductory performer of the second part of the evening.
See “Canadian Literature.”
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Go—rise and strike no matter what the
Cost.
Yet stay. Revolt not at the Union Jack.
Not take revenge upon the stripling pack
Of white-faced warriors, marching west to
Quell
Our fallen tribe that rises to rebel. (Johnson qtd in “CANADIAN LITERATURE:
An Evening with Canadian Authors Poetry and Prose Writers. The Young Men’s Liberal
Club’s Success”)
The turmoil of ambivalent emotions in Johnson’s poetic monologue arises from the
tension created by the alternating urge to action and the plea to say. The poem’s “Indian”
wife struggles to offer advice to the husband that she must send off to battle. Later in the
poem she again asks him to “go, and strike for liberty and life” (29) but then, as in the
opening passage, cannot commit to this decision and soon asks him to “Yet stay” (41).
This ambivalent tension continues as the speaker considers an appropriate response
to conquest and the realities of war. She decries the sense of entitlement exhibited by
conquering settlers and underscores the right of Indigenous sovereignty by asserting that,
They but forget we Indians owned the land
From ocean unto ocean; that they stand
Upon a soil that centuries agone
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Was our sole kingdom, and our right alone28 (Johnson qtd. in “CANADIAN
LITERATURE. An Evening with Canadian Authors Poetry and Prose Writers. The
Young Men’s Liberal Club’s Success)
However, the speaker’s antagonism towards this European appropriation of
Indigenous birthright fails to sustain itself fully in that it is immediately followed by a
plea for empathy for the other side. The sophisticated rhetorical use of repeated
exhortations (“think of …”) was designed to draw listeners (particularly those in the
largely white, upper class audience) into a wider empathetic sphere in which they would
be encouraged to identify not only with white victims of war but also with the Indigenous
victims of war:
Think of the mothers o’er the inland seas;
Think of the pale-faced maiden on her knees;
One pleads her God to guard some sweet-faced
child
That marches on towards the Northwest wild.
The other prays to shield her youth from harm,
To strengthen his young proud uplifted arm […]. (Johnson qtd. in “CANADIAN
Young Men’s Liberal Club’s Success)
However, the narrator ultimately acknowledges a disappointing lack of reciprocal
empathy in the dismissal of Indigenous suffering by “mothers o’er the inland sea” and by
“pale-faced maidens”:
She never thinks of my wild, aching breast

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Nor dreams of your dark face and eagle crest
Endangered by a thousand rifle balls. (Johnson qtd in “CANADIAN
Young Men’s Liberal Club’s Success”)
The recognition of this indifference eventually impels the speaker to assume a
more decisive stance. In a rather forceful climax, the halting ambivalence of the speaker
is now at an end:
O! Coward self- I hesitate no more;
Go forth and win the glories of the war.
O! heart o’erfraught—O! nation lying low,
God and fair Canada have willed it so. (“CANADIAN LITEATURE. An Evening
with Canadian Authors Poetry and Prose Writers. The Young Men’s Liberal Club’s
Success.”)
As the poem moves towards its conclusion, the speaker turns away from addressing her
husband (and her “heart”). Instead, in her final line, she shifts her focus to Canada itself
-- the very subject of the Author’s evening. 29

29
The selections of “Cry from an Indian Wife” that I include here are transcribed according to the
typography set out in the review titled “CANADIAN LITERATURE. An Evening with Canadian
Authors Poetry and Prose Writers The Young Men’s Liberal Club’s Success.” This clipping
offers a lengthy reportage of the YMLC event. The clipping was saved and collected by Frank
Yeigh, the organizer of the YMLC performance. It sits on page 153 of his scrapbook, held in the
Archives of Ontario at York University. This final line is different from final line in the poem’s
original publication in June 1885 in The Week (and Gerson and Strong-Boag’s use of that version
in their collection). In its 1885 printing, the poem concludes with: “Perhaps the white man’s God
has willed it so” (In Gerson and Strong-Boag 15). Though it is possible that this alteration is the
result of the unknown publication’s error, it is plausible that Johnson made this change
specifically for the Liberal Club’s “Canadian” performance. This new version contains a double
purpose: Johnson ascribes a racial identity to the country being celebrated at this author’s evening.
(“fair Canada”) while also exploring equity, reason, and reciprocation in Canadian society.
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Johnson’s recitation was an immense success. The audience greeted her
performance with a demand for an encore.30 For it, she probably performed a canoeing
song, entitled “Re-Voyage” (perhaps echoing the appeal of the earlier presentation of the
“Canadian Boat Song”).31 The structure of this poem is similar to “A Cry from an Indian
Wife” in that, like a dramatic soliloquy, it addresses an absent figure. And yet, this poem
possesses an evocative, haunting appeal that differs significantly in tone from her first
selection:
Have you no longing to re-live the dreaming
Adrift in my canoe?
To watch my paddle blade all wet and gleaming
Cleaving the waters through?
To lie wind-blown and wave-caressed, until

30
Biographers are unclear on what this selection might have been. Sheila Johnston provides no
details of Johnson’s encore number (even though she mentions the encore as the most significant
aspect of this performance), and Charlotte Gray vaguely describes this as Johnson’s “second
unscheduled work” (Gray 145). Only Betty Keller and Daniel Francis confidently claim that
Johnson first performed the poem “Cry from an Indian Wife” and then “for her encore […]
recite[ed] ‘As Red Men Die’, a poem she based on a legend told by her grandfather, Chief John
Smoke Johnson, who was perhaps the most important influence on her life” (Keller 5; Francis
125). Surviving reviews from that evening provide more insight into the piece that Johnson
actually performed for her encore. These reviews appear to contradict Keller and Francis.
Although Keller, and others, incorrectly characterize the repertoire used for Johnson’s
performance, their error is actually quite useful in illuminating a central issue at play in the
reconstruction of Johnson’s performance history. It is significant that many biographers have
conflated Johnson’s performances (each of them distinct and changing) into a vision of one
performance and thus the nuances in her repertoire and approach have largely been overlooked.
31
Two reviews at the time indicate that Johnson used the “wildwood poem, ‘My Bark Canoe’”
(“With Canadian Authors”; see also “An Evening with Canadian Authors”) as her encore
selection. Within Johnson’s poetic oeuvre, no records appear of a poem under this name. One can
safely assume that these reviewers are referring to her canoeing poem “Re-Voyage.” A critic
from Saturday Night identifies the selection by that title and notes that it been printed in the
magazine weeks before her YMLC performance (see Touchstone). That poem, in which the
narrator passionately addresses a former summer love, echoes the rhythm and cadence of a canoe
stroke and in this respect it fits the attribution of “canoe song” as assigned by a reviewer from The
Globe (“An Evening with Canadian Poets”).
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Your restless pulse grows still. (in Gerson and Strong-Boag 76)
With its shorter length (a six stanza poem with six lines to each section), “Re-Voyage”
was a suitable choice for an encore since the “Canadian Night” was already running over
time and was unable to accommodate too many lengthy unscheduled numbers.32 Johnson,
like any good improviser, was perhaps aware of these restrictions and made a choice that
served the evening schedule well.
Accounts of Johnson’s performance at the Liberal Club’s event raise two
important questions. First, why did Johnson choose “A Cry from an Indian Wife” for a
Young Men’s Liberal Club meeting that aimed to celebrate a vision of a new “Canada”
made up of “two races”? Second, why did this Liberal audience respond so
enthusiastically to Johnson’s claim of Indigenous birthright over Canadian “lands” that
had been conquered? It is noteworthy that, at the time of its first publication in 1885, the
poem specifically related to the Northwest Rebellion that had taken place in the same
year, but by 1892, it would no longer have been primarily associated with that event.
Intriguingly, Johnson chose to highlight her Indigenous identity before an audience that
conversely embraced a sense of Euro-Canadian identity. Clearly, something appears to
have changed for Johnson in this January 16, 1892 performance. Perhaps she performed
her poem at this significant engagement because she already anticipated the appeal of her
“Indian” character. If this is the case, such as awareness marks a departure from the
relationship to her ethnicity that characterizes her early publication history. As Gerson
and Strong-Boag point out, Johnson shied away from developing “Indian” characters
early in her career: “Of eleven poems that appeared in The Week from 1885 to 1889, just

32
A critic from the Evangelical Churchman indicated that “owing to the length of some of the
selections, several numbers had to be omitted, to the regret of the audience” (see “Canadian
Literature”).
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two, ‘Cry from an Indian Wife’ and ‘A Request,’ suggest the ethnicity of their author”
(Strong-Boag and Gerson 101). They affirm that throughout her early publication work,
Johnson only signed her work as ‘E. Pauline Johnson’ and “initially drew very lightly on
her Native background” (101). While the enthusiastic response to Johnson’s performance
by the Young Liberals speaks to the artistic and performative merits of the piece, it also
hints at Johnson’s sophisticated manipulation of her own and of her audience’s identity
politics.
E. Pauline Johnson--- identity politics and perceptions:
In order to contextualize the performative function of Johnson’s “Indian” persona
at the Liberal Club’s “Canadian” event, it would be valuable to consider how Johnson
herself negotiated the complex politics of nationhood and identity at the turn of the
century. Born in 1861, prior to Confederation, Johnson’s legal racial identity was
determined by an Indian policy that was continually in flux and undergoing amendment
during her lifetime. In 1869, the Enfranchisement Act was intended to “free” Indigenous
peoples from “their state of wardship under the Federal Government” with the goal of
“gradual assimilation” (Lawrence 414). The 1869 Act established a codified system that
“emphasized blood quantum” in order to differentiate between the categories of “full
blooded ‘Indians’” and “mixed-blood”. This metric of ethnic codification would lay the
foundation for the Indian Act of 1876 that was enacted across Canada and which
consolidated all previous Indian legislation (Lawrence). One key aspect of the 1869 Act
was an amendment that aimed to “den[y] status to Native women marrying white men”
(see Gerson and Strong-Boag 21). By 1876, The Act specifically “provided that any
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Indian woman marrying any other than an Indian or a non-treaty Indian shall cease to be
an Indian in any respect within the meaning of this Act” (“An Act to amend and
consolidate the laws respecting Indians”, Chapter 18). The conferring of Native status
through a paternal bloodline alone was enshrined in federal legislation and meant that
Johnson could claim “Indian” status through her father’s Mohawk “blood”, in spite of the
fact that her mother was white.
However, legislation that granted Johnson legitimacy as an “Indian” subject, did
not ensure unquestioned acceptance of her status. The fact that Johnson fell somewhere
between strict attributions of ethnic identity was related to her parentage. In its time, the
union of Johnson’s parents was “considered extraordinary” (Strong-Boag and Gerson 25),
placing her in an almost unique position vis-a-vis the experiences and expectations of
women in both the aboriginal and white communities of the early 1880’s. As Sanders
remarks, a matrilineal Mohawk society would “not have counted [Johnson] among the
members of their nation” while European society considered Johnson to be Mohawk
(Sanders 2). The ambivalent response to the bi-racial mystique of Johnson shaped her
own expression and sense of relationship and belonging to her Mohawk nation as well as
to Canada.
This fluid ‘national’ identification manifests itself in Johnson’s professional
life and in Johnson’s repertoire for the January 1892 author’s evening. Just prior to 1892,
Johnson had submitted “A Cry from an Indian Wife” (a poem using the voice of an
Indigenous subject) to William D. Lighthall for his prominent publication Songs of the
Great Dominion. She wrote to Lighthall that this was her “‘best’ verse, that was ‘most
Canadian in tone and color’” (in Strong-Boag and Gerson 101). While emphasizing the
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“Canadian” quality of the work, she also stressed that “these poems would interest
Lighthall on account of her ‘nationality’” (Strong-Boag and Gerson 101). Despite
drawing particular attention to her Indigenous (Haudenosaunee) heritage, Lighthall chose
not to publish that poem under “The Indian” section in Songs’. Instead, Lighthall selected
Johnson’s poem “In the Shadows” and featured it in the “Sports and Free Life” section.
He also included her other poem “At the Ferry” in the collection but in the section
entitled “Places” (Strong-Boag and Gerson 101). While Lighthall (or another editor33)
denied Johnson the opportunity to claim her ‘nationality’ in print, no one prevented
Johnson from claiming it in performance. Clearly, her January 1892 performance was
already straddling the complexities of self-identification that were subtly informed by
legislative confirmation of her Indian status, the marginalization of her right to that
heritage within her own community and by an editorial refusal to acknowledge her as
“Indian”.
As I suggested earlier, Johnson’s choice of repertoire also hints at a conscious
manipulation of the values and perceptions of the audience at the Liberal Club while she
is simultaneously negotiating her ethnicity. In presenting a poem that alludes to the Battle
at Cut Knife Creek, Johnson appeals to the political sensibilities of the Liberal Party. By
the late nineteenth century, Liberals had defined their politics in opposition to
Conservative policies by staking a position regarding the Northwest Rebellion and, more
specifically, the controversial hanging of Louis Riel that had been sanctioned by the

33
Dr. Carole Gerson is currently completing an analysis that considers how Lighthall might have
had limited editorial power over Songs of the Great Dominion. By analyzing correspondence sent
between Lighthall and William Sharp (London (UK) publisher of Songs), Gerson suggests that
“William Sharp’s editorial interventions” in the editing process significantly “reduc[ed]
Lighthall’s encyclopaedic effort.” As such, it might have been Sharp, not Lighthall, who chose to
exclude Johnson from “The Indian” section of Songs of the Great Dominion (Gerson “Re:
Lighthall” Email Correspondence).
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MacDonald Conservatives.34 In 1886, one year after Riel’s death, parliamentarians
fiercely debated a motion that had been put forward by Liberal Edward Blake
condemning the use of capital punishment for Riel. Though any discussion of Riel would
“[f]or the Liberal party, as in the country at large [make] the fires of sectional and ethnic
discord burn brightly” (Clippingdale 41), Wilfred Laurier, then a Quebec Liberal MP,
sided with Blake on the issue, thereby gaining notoriety within the Liberal party for his
position. On March 16th 1886, Laurier delivered a speech that “pleaded eloquently for
justice to the Metis people” (39). Laurier was asked to speak again at a mass public
meeting organized by the Toronto Young Men’s Liberal Club on December 10, 1886 in
the Horticultural Pavilion (41-42). This gathering was expected to be a “disaster”, with
“fears among leading senior Liberals” that Laurier’s position on the Riel controversy
would split the party. However, after Laurier’s performance that evening, many Liberals
began to side with him on the issue, making it one of the Club’s most famous meetings
that helped to solidify the party at a time of political discord. For the Club, such events
had established a precedent of liberal tolerance and support for justice to which Johnson
was responding in her choice of poem and persona.
Even as the subject matter of Johnson’s “A Cry from an Indian Wife” appealed to
a Liberal audience on both a historical and performative level, it was also accepted by
this audience as a celebratory ode to Canada. Indeed, the very nature and tone of the
entire evening’s programme may have enhanced the reception of her performance on
several levels. The exploration of birthright, nationhood, affirmation and belonging, in
Johnson’s poem, was variously and contrapuntally revisited in both preceding and

34
Riel had attempted to gain a retrial by considering a plea of insanity for his defence. Sir John A.
Macdonald, who was “instrumental in upholding Riel’s sentence,” famously responded to Riel’s
attempts by saying “He shall die though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour” (see Belanger).
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subsequent selections. Johnson’s ‘tour de force’ was followed by a sketch presented by
Duncan Campbell Scott, a reading by Mrs. Harrison of two extracts from “Down the
River” and “Happy” and a song presented by A.M Garrie. Next, W.W. Campbell’s “The
Mother”35 was performed. This poem concerns the ghost of a dead mother, driven by the
“voice of [her] baby [that] seemed to call”, who comes back to life from the grave to
reclaim and take her child back with her to the grave. Its themes of death, belonging,
reclaiming, protection and the nurturing of ancestry complemented Johnson’s own poem.
The evening programme continued with a reading entitled “Regret,” presented by Miss
Helen Merrill, a song, and then two readings given by Mr. W.D. Lighthall and Mrs.
Phillips. The concluding selection of the “Canadian Authors Evening” was Miss
Machar’s presentation of her poem “Our Fatherland”. This selection too, deals with
regionalism, belonging, nation-building and a vision for Canada. Machar begins her
poem by asking “What is our young Canadian land?”. In its original publication in 1887,
Machar, writing under her pseudonym “Fidelis”, indicated that the poem should be read
“to the air of ‘WAS IST DAS DEUTSCHEN VATERLAND’” (1). Here, Machar was
referring to Ernst Moritz Arndt’s patriotic song that called for the unification of several
German nation states and regions under one Germany. Machar’s poem replicates Arndt’s
poem in form but creates a Canadian version by replacing references to German regions
(Prussia, Swabia, The Rhine) with appropriate Canadian locales (Quebec, Ontario,
Acadie). Just as Arndt suggests that the “fatherland” is “greater” than any one of these
regions (“Sein Vaterland muss größer sein!”), so too does Machar’s poem affirm,
through a repeated line, that the “Canadian fatherland” reaches “[f]rom sea to sea from
strand to strand” (Machar 17).

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Machar’s locus of patrimony, already apparent in the adoption of “A Mari usque
ad Mare (“From Sea to Sea”)36 as the motto of Canada, also appears in Johnson’s “A Cry
from an Indian Wife.” Yet, while Johnson reminds her audience that “they but forget we
Indians owned these lands/ From ocean unto ocean” (ln 21-22 in Gerson and Strong-
Boag 14-15), Machar conversely defines that space between the “oceans” and the “seas”
as the Canadian fatherland. The evocation of belonging and heritage woven through the
performances that followed Johnson’s performance both supported and challenged, in
point and counterpoint, the proclamation of Johnson’s “Indian Wife” that “by right, by
birth, we Indians own these lands” (ln 58 in Gerson and Strong-Boag 15). The sense of
displacement in the lament of the “Indian Wife” is presented alongside Campbell’s
grieving “Mother” who struggles to bring her child in close relationship to the earth, and
Machar’s “Father” whose progeny is all the diverse peoples of the Canadian nation. The
over-riding emphasis of the evening’s programme, then, supports the notion that “the
fatherland” belonged to (predominantly) French and English settlers of Canada. In effect,
the Liberal celebration of ‘diversity’ devolved into a validation of two specific settler
cultures (French and British) by claiming that their “earth”, their “ancestry”, their
“fathers,” were embedded in and constituted by the history of the “Canadian” land. In
effect, this proto-multicultural discourse of diversity37 directly challenged the birthright
of the Native inhabitant as the “own[er]” of “these lands”—the ‘original’ ancestor “by
right, by birth” (ln 58 in Gerson and Strong-Boag 15).

36
Derived from Psalm 72:8, the motto was made popular in 1872 by George Monro Grant who
crossed the country as secretary to Sandford Fleming and advocated the adoption of “from sea to
sea” as Canada’s motto after his journey. See Lamb.
37
For more on the use of diversity language in contexts of institutional racism see Ahmed, Sara.
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What are the further implications of Johnson’s inclusion in the “Canadian Authors”
event? Her performance, when analyzed in the context of the entire programme,
appeared to further the process that Terry Goldie refers to as “indigenization.” This is a
process “whereby arrivants in settler-invader colonies such as Canada attempt to
overcome the ‘separation of belonging’ that results from their late arrival in a space
already inhabited by Native peoples” (Johnson “Viking Graves…” 30). The dynamics
underlying the programme, therefore, conform almost perfectly to Goldie’s consideration
of “initiation and absorption.” Johnson emerges, first, to present an “Indigeneity that is
desired but out of reach” (Johnson “Viking Graves…” 31) but which is then “absorbed”
by the audience through the colonizing narratives that follow. Here, “the settler ‘goes
native’ in order to ‘become of the land’ at the very moment that the Native himself
conveniently disappears” (in Johnson “Viking Graves” 30; Goldie 16). In this case, that
‘disappearance’ literally occurs through the departure of Johnson from the stage, and
metaphorically through the “absorption” implicit in Campbell’s and Machar’s concluding
narratives.
In effect, Johnson’s “cry” for indigenous rights is subverted by the Liberal Club’s
acceptance of Canada’s settler inhabitants as ancestors of the land through the process of
initiation and absorption mentioned above. Curiously however, her presentation of the
“Indian[’s] right” to land ownership elicited a sympathetic response perhaps driven by an
underlying understanding of the sense of displacement that occurs in that process of
“indigenization.” A review of the performance by columnist Uncle Thomas that appeared
on January 18, 1892 in The Globe described the subtle dynamics at play:
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There was a touch of bitter sarcasm in the words that Miss Johnson put into the
mouth of the Indian wife, making her speak of the destruction of her people and the
spoliation of their lands, with the forgiving thought that perhaps the white man’s
God had willed it. There is a sharp reminder of how easily we relegate the golden
rule to the background, and forget all about the decalogue in our dealings with
inferior races. [… ]. And when Miss Johnson stood before the audience and said
‘the land is ours’ it was enough to cause a shrinkage of the conscience of the man
who grumbled about paying $20 to have his title searched. We look upon the Indian
and his lands as a railway company does upon a municipality—a legitimate and
unreasonably thankless object of plunder. (Thomas)
It is evident that Johnson’s performance appealed to Uncle Thomas as a cautionary tale
because he remarked on her “sarcastic” subtext and the response it engendered. Though
his racism is still explicit in his characterization of the “inferior race,” Johnson’s
performance was clearly capable of awakening the “conscience” of her listeners.
Similarly, in her memoir, Evelyn Johnson describes the response to her sister’s
performance at the YMLC. She writes that “one of the Canadian soldiers who ha[d]
fought in the North-West Rebellion came to [Pauline] and said ‘When I heard you recite
that poem I never felt so ashamed in my life at the part I had taken’” (in Johnson, Evelyn
“Memoirs” 46). In short, while Johnson’s performance illustrates that indigenization (as
per Terry Goldie) was happening, it also afforded the opportunity to express misgivings
about the process.
While some reviews of Johnson’s Liberal Club performance attest to her function
as an actor in the indigenization process, others indicate that her performance served to
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confirm a sense of settler supremacy. Seen from this viewpoint, Johnson functions merely
as a surrogate for her ‘lost’ nation:
Her poetry has a sweetness and force and finish, to which was added the interest
her ‘Cry from an Indian Wife’ received on account of her descent. As she read
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
It was like the voice of the nations who once possessed this country, who have
wasted away before our civilization, speaking through this cultured, gifted, soft-
voiced descendant. (emphasis mine, “CANADIAN LITERATURE. An Evening
with Canadian Authors. Poetry and Prose Writers. The Young Men’s Liberal
Club’s Success.”)
Here, Johnson only serves to reinforce settler supremacy—her “Indian Wife’s”
“possession [of the] country” is viewed in the past tense. In this review, Johnson is read
as a voice only from the past. This same framing of Johnson is also apparent in a review
from The Globe: “the race that has gone speaks with touching pathos through Miss
Johnson” (“Canadian Night”).
These reviews, framing Johnson as the surrogate for a nation and time that no
longer existed, represented a performance on their own; they enacted a reinterpretation of
Johnson’s performance within a typical nineteenth century perception of the “noble
savage”— a term that, as Philip Deloria argues, “both juxtaposes and conflates an urge to
idealize and desire Indians and a need to despise and dispossess them” (4). Philip Deloria
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contends that throughout history, different “aspect[s]” of this term have been emphasized
and manipulated to justify a chosen response. He suggests that “if one emphasizes the
noble aspect, as Rousseau did, pure and natural Indians serve to critique Western society.
[However] putting more weight on savagery justifies (and perhaps requires) a campaign
to eliminate barbarism” (4). How this applies to the case of Johnson is significant as she
was not, according to Rousseau’s terms, a “pure and natural Indian” (or, at least, certainly
not the “pure” Plains “Indian Wife” that she was enacting in her performances).
Nevertheless, reviewers routinely constructed her as such (perhaps legitimizing Johnson’s
“Western critique”): they emphasized Johnson’s “Indian” ancestry and rarely made
mention of her English descent. A review in The Evangelical Churchman illustrates this
tendency: “A number of the programme which gave much pleasure was ‘A Cry from an
Indian Wife’ by Miss E. Pauline Johnson—herself of Indian descent” (“Canadian
Literature”). In the same way, The English Canadian stated, “Her ‘Cry from an Indian
Wife’ had an added interest in the individuality of the author” (“An Evening with
Canadian Authors”). In Saturday Night, her “descent” is stressed: “Miss E. Pauline
Johnson is especially interesting, not only because of her writings, but because of her
personality as a member of the noble Mohawk tribe” (emphasis mine, Touchstone). This
framing of Johnson marked a shift from how she was billed prior to the YMLC event in
newspaper announcements (preview pieces) as being “from Brantford.” In essence,
Johnson’s January 1892 performance heralds a decisive change in perception. Reviewers
now begin to reconstruct her character as the “Indian” that they want her to be, rather
than negotiating her performance as such. As Christine Marshall suggests, “when
Johnson [] recited at the Young Men's Liberal Club, she was speaking for the Indian.
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Very quickly, the poet learned that her public saw her speaking as the Indian” (author’s
emphasis, Marshall 28).
This interpretive approach might be attributed to the cultural perspectives of the
reviewers—ones that, as I argue above, had them emphasize Johnson’s ‘naturalness’ in
order to justify her “critique” within familiar colonizing frameworks. Alternatively, it
might have had something to do with Johnson’s own performance techniques, her acting,
that marked her character presentation as more “natural” than the presentation style of her
colleagues. To say that Johnson was acting in this performance disrupts the critical
discourses that generally describe her approach to performance. In her Johnson biography,
for instance, Betty Keller clarifies the boundaries between “stage” and “platform”
performance by suggesting that Johnson only embarked upon a career as a “recitalist”
with the knowledge that it was distinct from “acting.” Here is how Keller describes the
approach that Yeigh took to convince Johnson to embark upon a career as a performer:
‘Recitalists,’ Yeigh is quick to point out, ‘are not in the same social class as actors.’
In fact, recitalists are in a profession running parallel to theatre and using the same
facilities, although they call their stage a ‘platform,’ and are often referred to as
‘platform performers’ to make it perfectly clear that they are not actors. They are
generally preachers or teachers or writers, and their lectures and readings are
intended to spread culture, not entertain. However, they sometimes show lantern
slides to illustrate their talks, an element of entertainment that encourages
attendance. ‘Your family couldn’t possibly object!’ Yeigh tells Pauline. (Keller 8)
Keller’s description posits that Johnson was anything but an “actress,” and that the
platform stage was a space distinct from the theatre proper. Avoiding its “pernicious”
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overtones,38 Johnson chose a career “on the platform,” perhaps worried, as Keller claims,
about the “disgrace” that could be attributed to her, or her family, if she embarked upon a
career as an actress. Keller suggests that Johnson proceeded with her career on the
understanding that “as a recitalist she [needed…] to behave with the ultimate in decorum
if she [were] not to lose her respectability” (Keller 8).
And yet, Johnson’s approach to her YMLC performance of the ”Indian Wife”
character suggests that she was bringing a distinct theatrical practice to the Liberal
platform stage. Significantly, Johnson had memorized the words of her “Indian Wife.”
While Duncan Campbell Scott, who followed her encore, is described as having “read”
his work (“With Canadian Authors”), reviews consistently describe Johnson as having
“recited.” The Globe’s review describes how “Miss E. Pauline Johnson’s recital of ‘A
Cry from an Indian Wife’ [was] given with such earnestness of expression and intensity
of feeling, consonant with the strength of the poem itself, [that it] won for her a stream of
applause” (“An Evening with Canadian Poets”). Another review in The Week mentions
the “peculiar interest attached” to Johnson’s “recitations” (“A Canadian Literary
Evening”). A critic named Touchtone, in Saturday Night, suggests that she “received an
ovation when she recited ‘A Wail from An Indian Wife’” (Touchtone). This review
incorrectly cites the title of Johnson’s selection, but is illuminating in that it suggests that
Johnson possessed an unusual degree of rhetorical force.

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Admittedly, Keller has some reason to reconstruct this scene in this way. By 1892, a great deal
of antitheatrical prejudice existed in Canada. In 1888, four years before Johnson’s performance,
The Globe reprinted Marion Harland’s talk on “Girls and the Theatre” that warned of the “evil of
excessive theatre going,” and noted “when the theatre bec[ame] pernicious in its influence upon
young girls” (“Girls and The Theatre” Globe March 10 1888). Harland compared attendance at
the theatre to one of the seven deadly sins, claiming that “excessive theatre going is as
detrimental to the mind and taste as […] gluttony in the consumption of confectionary” (Harland).

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Johnson’s decision to memorize lines imparted a theatricality to the performance
that was buttressed by the dramatic quality of the poem she decided to “recite.” In doing
so, she appealed to the desire for spectacle at these platform events. Touchstone offered
an interesting perspective on the cultural forces that contributed to the event’s appeal
(thereby complicating the clear boundaries that Keller sets between “theatre” and
“platform” ). According to Touchstone, Frank Yeigh organized this “inaugural event” at a
time when the “general public” had a deep “curiosity” to see “creative geniuses […] read
their own work” as “the desire to ‘see a man’ [was] so strong that people pa[id] high
prices for the sake of seeing […] whoever possesse[d] a famous name and happen[ed] to
mount the public platform.” Touchstone’s description is important in that it identifies the
1892 event at the YMLC as a “platform” recital. This distinction hints at his
understanding of the relationship between theatricality and the platform. He contends that
the audience came not just to ‘hear’ the word read, but to ‘see’ the ‘spectacle’ of
Johnson’s performance.39
Touchstone’s words imply that the Liberal Club platform functioned as a kind of
“antitheatrical theatre.” I borrow this term from Charlotte Canning who discusses the
relationship between circuit Chautauqua performances in the United States at the turn of
the century and spectacle/theatricality. Canning uses this term to describe the
“inconsisten[cy]” (Harrison in Canning 304) of these platform performances which, as
shown by the YMLC meeting programme, featured “hybridized [] forms” such as
“dramatic readings of poetry” (Canning 305). Her discussion of the theatrical aspects of

39
Touchstone is the pseudonym used by Hector Willoughby Charlesworth, a leading theatre critic
who, by 1897, “call[ed] for public subsidies in the [Canadian] theatre” as a corrective to the
overwhelming influence of “American melodrama” (see Filewod “Named in Passing” 111).

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these forms of performance attempts to identify the “insoluble paradox” of the
simultaneous “desire for […] theatrical experience without the label of ‘theatre’” or an
environment wherein “[a]udiences wanted dramatic, even theatrical, entertainment but
they did not appear to want theatre” (Canning 304). She explains how “despite this
antitheatrical prejudice [that existed in rural Protestant American culture], theatre
eventually became a celebrated part of the Chautauquas” (304). Using Canning’s premise,
I propose that Johnson’s acting of the “Indian Wife” in the sphere of early Canadian
“antitheatrical theatre,” created, for several reasons, a new “Indian” character that was
derived from an interest in Johnson’s “personality.” This character is not the one that
Johnson performed on January 16th 1892, but one that was played back to her and
imposed upon her by critical re-interpretation of her performance. Although attracted by
the “sight” of Johnson’s “acting,” critical reception of her performance did not recognize
her performance as such.
The blurring of boundaries between personality and character had some
consequences for Johnson’s performative development. It was her acting of a particular
“Indian wife” which created the semiotic confusion that contributed to the creation of a
broad “Indian Character”—a critical re-interpretation of Johnson’s “naturally” “Indian”
personality. It was in this first performance that a “star [was] born,” and perhaps more
significantly, a character was conceived by two forces: Johnson’s own approach to
performance and an audience reception that reframed that acting within codes of
nineteenth century responses to the Indigenous body. It is that reframing of the
performance by critics that Johnson would struggle to embody, defy, personalize, and
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revive throughout the rest of her first year on platforms (“antitheatrical theatres”) across
the country.
Scripting a “Canadian Indian”: February to June 1892
Although Johnson’s January performance as the “Indian” character drove the initial
re-interpretation and reframing of the “Indian” character, by February 1892, her stage
persona would once again undergo a transformation. As a result of her successful YMLC
debut, Johnson was soon scheduled for another event on February 19th 1892 at
Association Hall, in Toronto. Frank Yeigh, who organized the event, functioned as her
manager. After an organ solo was performed by Mr. W.S. Jones, Yeigh took to the stage
with “no warning” (“Miss Pauline Johnson’s Recital at Association Hall”) in order to
introduce Johnson. Details of this introduction appear in another contemporary account:
in introducing Miss Johnson to the audience, [Frank Yeigh] referred to her
ancestors, who were one of the fifty noble families who brought about the Iroquois
Confedracy [sic] in the fifteenth century, a union which formed a free
commonwealth almost as old as that of Switzerland. He also briefly mentioned the
important part her grandfather and her father, the late Chief Johnson, played in the
War of 1812, and the advancement of the Six Nations respectively. Miss Johnson,
in occupying the field of Indian history, life and legend as a writer wrote as one of
their number and not as an onlooker, as Cable in delineating the Creoles and
Acadians, or Bret Harte in immortalizing the native forty-niner, or Charles Egbert
Craddock in picturing the poor whites of the Tennessee mountains. As a Canadian
Indian poet, he concluded, she has won on her merits the success she has thus far
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attained and he predicted for her a most successful future, a wish which the
audience heartily applauded. (“Miss Johnson in Toronto”)
Significantly, Yeigh chose to label Johnson as a “Canadian Indian.” Her affiliation with
the Six Nations that had participated in securing British rule (and thereby the ‘future’ of
Canada) gave her this legitimacy for that character, in his estimation. Another review
makes clear that Johnson was considered a safe Indian as her “Mohawk descent” aligned
her with the Six Nations who were “the bravest and more warlike, besides[being] the
most loyal to the British Crown of the Indian tribes of America” (emphasis mine, “Music
and the Drama: The University Glee Club at the Pavilion Last Night.”). Perhaps this
recognizable alignment of loyalties to the Crown allowed other publications like the
English Canadian, to envision Johnson as “our Indian poet” (“E. Pauline Johnson”).
Johnson was not just any “Indian poetess” or “Indian wife”—Yeigh made clear that for
this performance she would function, first and foremost, as a “Canadian Indian.” How did
Johnson herself, in the wake of her 1892 performance, respond to this kind of
characterization. An analysis of the texts that she used for her February performance at
the Association Hall suggests that she embraced the interest that audiences had on
“account of her ancestry” while challenging them to see her as a “real live Indian girl.”
Her scheduled repertoire for this performance consisted of five of her own poems
“all dealing with stories of Indian life” (“Three Entertainments”): “The Avenger”, “As
Red Men Die”, “The Pilot of the Plains”, “The Song My Paddle Sings” and “Cry from an
Indian Wife” (Program). Some of these selections describe the relationship between
Indigenous nations. “The Avenger,” for instance, considers the practices of “Indian
justice,” taking as its subject matter the relationship between Cree and Mohawk enemies:
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The Cherokee
Meets with his Mohawk foe; the enmity
Inherited through ages fires the palm
Of each red hand, they face—
A meaning calm
With venom gorged—then on the night is flung
The deadliest yell that e’er left Indian tongue—
Like wild-cats raged, concurrently they spring,
With tomahawks athirst and glittering;
They close—they struggle—then they leap apart,
Hate as a hell burns madness in each heart.
Some strategy—a crafty, rival strife,
Then parts the darkness to a gleaming knife;
A treacherous manoeuvre—
On the shore
The Mohawk lifeless lies. The feud is o’er. (Johnson “The Avenger” 9-24 in
Gerson and Strong-Boag 87).
In addition to performing this piece that vividly describes “war whoop[s] pierc[ing]
through the fateful night” (30) and the “Indian law” that “demands/ The dead must be
avenged” (33-34), Johnson also gave a rendition of “As Red Men Die.” The latter shifts
the focus to the relationship between the Mohawk and the Huron nations but contains
similar imagery. Here, too, “death songs ring” as the central character, a Mohawk chief,
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“boasts” of his supremacy. The “Mohawk brave” captured by the Huron is faced with a
terrible “choice”:
‘Wilt though
Walk o’er the bed of fire that waits thee now—
Walk with uncovered feet upon the coals,
Until thou reach the ghostly Land of Souls,
And, with thy Mohawk death-song please our ear?
Or wilt thou with the women rest thee here?’ (emphasis in original, Johnson, “As
Red Men Die” 15-23 in Gerson and Strong-Boag 68)
With undiminished courage, the captive, “like a god”, demands that the fire be prepared.
He takes solace in knowing his “death will be avenged with hideous hate” (31)—that
“[t]heir [the Hurons’] scalps will deck the belts of Iroquois” (36). Finally, the poem
closes with the Mohawk chief “dancing a war dance to defy his foes” as he makes his
way “up the long trail of fire”:
The eagle plume that crests his haughty head
Will never droop until his heart be dead.
Slower and slower yet his footstep swings,
Wilder and wilder still his death-song rings,
Fiercer and fiercer through the forest bounds
His voice that leaps to Happier Hunting Grounds
One savage yell—
Then loyal to his race,
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He bends to death—but never to disgrace. (emphasis in original, “As Red Men
Die” 51-59 in Gerson and Strong-Boag 69)
In these selections, Johnson presents a detailed and violent portrait of the relationships
between nations.
As in her January YMLC debut, Johnson strove to distinguish herself by
memorizing the selections that she intended to perform at the Association Hall. However,
a very telling theatrical moment occurred during her recital. For this performance, going
‘off-book’ proved to be more difficult; Johnson forgot some of her repertoire and only
partially performed her selection “The Song My Paddle Sings.” According to one
reviewer, “Miss Johnson had forgotten the last verses and she paused in the piece and
asked the audience to consider the number as changed, reciting instead, ‘Held by the
Enemy.’ ” This on-stage mistake only seemed to increase the appeal of her performance.
Indeed, in spite of this mis-step, Johnson “was received with rounds of applause”
(“Music and the Drama: The University Glee Club at the Pavilion Last Night.”),40
regaining her footing in her other pieces and in her encore. One reviewer for The Empire
summed up the audience response, stating that “[o]wing to the insatiable idiots in the
audience that regard it as a religious duty to encore everything till the proceedings
assume a funereal gaiety,” Johnson‘s performance of other works included (as far as can
be ascertained) “Pilot of the Plains” and “Beyond the Blue” (“Miss Pauline Johnson’s
Recital at Association Hall”).

40
Perhaps it is this “theatrical problem,” as theorist Nicholas Rideout terms it, that imparted a
theatricality that was thrilling for her audience. As Rideout suggests, “Theatre’s failure, when
theatre fails, is not anomalous, but somehow, perhaps, constitutive” (3). By memorizing and then
failing at it in presentation Johnson created a memorable moment for the audience—in that it
offered a “theatrical encounter”—in yet another “antitheatrical theatre.”
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One scheduled selection, anticipated by the audience, was “The Pilot of the
Plains.” This poem featured the tragic story of Yakonwita, an “Indian bride” waiting on
the “western Plains” for her “Pale-face” lover to return and wed her. Yakonwita
maintains faith in her lover’s return despite her community’s distrust of the union:
‘False,’ they said, ‘thy Pale-face lover, from the land of waking
morn;
Rise and wed thy Redskin wooer, nobler warrior ne’er was born;
Cease thy watching, cease thy dreaming,
Show the white thine Indian scorn.’
Thus they taunted her, declaring, ‘He remembers naught of
thee:
Likely some white maid he wooeth, far beyond the inland sea.’
But she answered ever kindly,
‘He will come again to me,’ (Johnson “The Pilot of the Plains” 1-10 in
Gerson and Strong-Boag 79)
However, a defiant Yakonwita continues to “scan the rolling prairies,” to “watch the
distant plains” and to “listen” for her lover’s “coming.” Finally, her lover returns in the
dead of winter:
Then a night with nor’land tempest, nor’land snows a-swirling
fast,
Out upon the pathless prairie came the Pale-face through the
blast,
Calling, calling, ‘Yakonwita,
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I am coming, love, at last.’ (19-24).
Even Yakonwita’s community relents, letting go of their distrust of the “Pale-face” and
sharing Yakonwita’s suffering:
‘Listen!’ and they sate [sic] all silent, while the tempest louder grew,
And a spirit-voice called faintly, ‘I am dying, love, for you.’
Then they wailed, ‘O! Yakonwita.
He was Pale, but he was true.’ (48-51)
While some of Johnson’s selections for the performance dealt with inter-tribal
relationships, this poem, with its elegiac overtones, used the theme of an inter-racial
relationship--a theme she would re-visit in later performances. Finally, she presented
“Beyond the Blue”, a poem with a folksy flavour about a man and his dog. This
concluding piece differed yet again in tone and voice from her previous recitations and
showcased Johnson as a versatile performer capable of presenting a diverse repertoire. It
is clear that she was using different voices and different dialects—that the appeal of her
performance was facilitated by more than just her personality. This allowed her to be
celebrated as a speaker, poet, and performing artist.
Indeed, reviews of Johnson’s Association Hall performance stress her aptitude as
a performer. Johnson, described as “charmingly attired” with a “rose at her breast”
(“Miss Pauline Johnson’s Recital at Association Hall”), comes to be regarded as a
“finished elocutionist, one who throws fire enough into her compositions to make them
glow more than Sir Edwin Arnold’s readings of his poems” (“Miss Pauline Johnson’s
Recital at Association Hall”). There is also evidence that Johnson begins to use
“movements” and “gestures” in this performance. (“Miss Pauline Johnson’s Recital at
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Association Hall”). In one review (“I presume that I may speak”), her skillful approach to
performance is considered to be of a superior quality:
[…] [t]here was some interesting dramatic study in her recitations, too. In the first
place, she has a something [sic] that is seldom heard nowadays, a clear, distinct and
correct enunciation and a voice that carries well, and this does a great deal for
anybody. The most interesting source of study in her work brings up the question
which Coquelin, Irving and Salvini have wrangled over, to wit; whether an actor
should feel the emotion he portrays? For those interested in the subject, Miss
Johnson is a first-class object lesson. (“I presume that I may speak”)
This review explicitly praises Johnson’s ability to “admirably” express “scorn, contempt
and sarcasm” in her recitation of “The Avenger” (“I presume that I may speak”). With a
“face surprisingly mobile [and] a good presence,” Johnson was “well equipped for the
expression of emotions” and “really felt and knew how to portray the emotions which her
lines described” (“I presume that I may speak”).
Owing to the success of this repertoire, Johnson continued to perform these
selections between February and June 1892 with only minor changes. She added “The
Sea Queen” for a March 1892 performance at the Christ Church Cathedral in Hamilton.
Later that month, she replaced “The Song My Paddle Sings” with her new selection,
“Temptation.” During the first week of June 1892, Johnson was scheduled to perform in
Paris, Ontario. There, she recited “Beyond the Blue”, “A Cry from an Indian Wife”, “The
Song my Paddle Sings”, “The Death Cry” and “The Pilot of the Plains” (“Paris Matters”).
This would become the repertoire that introduced audiences in Toronto, Hamilton,
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Bowmanville, Paris, Richmond Hill and other locations to the performer that was being
constructed by Pauline Johnson.
“A Real Live Indian Girl”: portrayal in performance
Until June 1892, Johnson’s repertoire stayed fairly consistent, with no significant
departures from her Association Hall performance in February. Perhaps, this was due to
its continued popularity. Two questions emerge: Why did these poems so appeal to
Johnson and why were they perceived as successful contributions to a Canadian
mythology? Johnson has left no diaries to shed light on her intentions regarding the
presentation of these works. However, her prose writing on the subject of character
development and portrayal offers a glimpse into her frame of mind during these early
performances. In May 1892, while Johnson was engaged in performances across Ontario,
her publication of “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” was
released. This work addressed issues of racism, heritage, and authenticity of Indigenous
portrayal. Although her essay examines portrayals in fiction, it might also be read as a
kind of manifesto – a treatise on performance. Johnson advises “story-writers” to “create
a new kind of Indian girl, or better still, [to] portray a ‘real live’ Indian girl” (“A Strong
Race Opinion” in Gerson and Strong-Boag 178). Johnson wrote this treatise while she
herself was actively engaged as a performance artist devoted to character portrayal.
Significantly, the characters that Johnson chose to enact—the “scripts” she embodied on
stage between January and June 1892—corresponded to the prescribed portrayals that she
proposed in “A Strong Race Opinion.” Her reflections regarding “Indian” character can
help us to understand more fully her repertoire choices. Her observations illuminate the
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complexity of the ‘scripts’ she used in performance—the ways in which her selected
poems and her presentation of their characters aimed to destabilize conventional and
hegemonic approaches to the representation of Indigenous characters in the Canadian
imagination of her time.
Concerned about the impoverished nature of generic portrayals, Johnson points out
that “tribal distinction […] among North American aborigines” (178 in Gerson and
Strong-Boag) is seldom negotiated by authors in their creation of fictional characters:
The Indian girl we meet in cold type […] is rarely distressed by having to belong
to any tribe or to reflect any tribal characteristics. She is merely a wholesome sort
of mixture of any band existing between the Mic Macs of Gaspe and the Kwaw-
Kewlths of British Columbia, yet strange to say, that notwithstanding the
numerous tribes, with their aggregate numbers reaching more than 122,000 souls
in Canada alone, our Canadian authors can cull from this huge revenue of
character, but one Indian girl, and stranger still that this lonely little heroine never
had a prototype in breathing flesh-and-blood existence! (in Gerson and Strong-
Boag 178)
Johnson’s selections like “The Avenger” and “As Red Men Die” take on greater
relevance in light of the “tribal distinctions” to which she refers. Through her
performance of these characters, she chose to enact the “flesh-and-blood” existence of
particular nations, presenting them as “distinct, unique, and natural.”
In addition, Johnson addresses how “Indian girls” were named in fictional
portrayal. She inveighs against the use of generic naming practices—particularly the
penchant for “Indian” characters like “Winona”:
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Yes, there is only one of her, and her name is “Winona.” Once or twice she has
borne another appellation, but it always has a ‘Winona’ sound about it. Even
Charles Mair, in that masterpiece of Canadian-Indian romances, ‘Tecumseh,’ could
not resist ‘Winona.’ We meet her as a Shawnee, as a Sioux, as a Huron, and then,
her tribe unnamed, in the vicinity of Brockville. (179)
In Johnson’s “The Pilot of the Plains,” she subverts this stereotypical practice. Here,
Johnson avoids the device of a nameless “Indian Wife”. Instead, she chooses to define
the character through a specific name “Yakonwita”, which is repeatedly used by her
“Pale-face” lover and by her community. In this poem, it is the “Pale-face” who remains
nameless.
Similarly, Johnson notes that the hardest fortune that the Indian girl of fiction
meets with is the inevitable doom that shadows her love affairs” (in Gerson and Strong-
Boag 179). According to Johnson, the “Indian girl” is consistently presented by the
“storywriter” as being “in love with the young white hero” who “never marries her!”
(179). In “The Pilot of the Plains”, Johnson again overturns this stereotypical pattern.
Though love succumbs to “inevitable doom” in this poem -- a trend that Johnson treats as
“deplorabl[e]” in her essay —the “Pale-face” lover is the one fated to be consumed by
love for Yakonwita. It is he, not she, who “crie[s] anew”: “Yakonwita, Yakonwita,/ I am
dying, love, for you” (80). His is the “self-sacrificing” love that remains true and that
offers the tragic end to this portrayal.
The close alignment between Johnson’s prescriptions in her essay and her
approach to character portrayal through her performance illustrates her aim to create
something “real, natural and distinct”, not only in her writing (“cold type”) but also in
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“flesh and blood”. Her scripts conformed to her notions of a “real” “Indian girl.” Through
platform portrayals of characters with specific names (that were emblematic of national
distinctiveness), Johnson presented “Indian” girls as more than “fawn-eyed, unnatural,
unmaidenly idiots” or “imaginary make-shifts to help out romances” (Johnson in Gerson
and Strong-Boag 182). In this, she attempted to “do something” that, in her view, “had
never been done” before—to “portray a ‘real live’ Indian girl” historically absent from
page and stage.
Although Johnson’s artistic voice has a primarily female orientation, it is important to
note that she extended this sense of “real, natural and distinct” to both female and male
“Indian” characters. The more nuanced, complex characters, brought to life in her
writing and performance, offered a richer tapestry of Canadian diversity and, in this sense,
contributed to a broader Canadian mythology. At the same time, Johnson’s work
contains an underlying assertion of identity that was at the heart of a broader notion of
Indigenous self-determination.
I use the terminology “self determination” to invoke one of the political goals of
Indigenous literary nationalism as described by theorist Sam McKegney (McKegney in
Fagan et al., 29). However, I do not classify Johnson’s fierce advocacy as Indigenous
nationalism. Johnson’s reflections on “tribal distinction” (Johnson in Gerson and Strong-
Boag 178), Indigenous “national character” (Johnson in Gerson and Strong-Boag 182),
and even Indigenous national “love” (in Gerson and Strong-Boag 183) could be defined
through the theoretical movement which gained traction following Robert Warrior’s 1994
publication of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions.
Indeed, I argue early on this chapter that Johnson’s performance history, when
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recontextualized, might maintain a commitment to the kind of “tribally-centered criticism”
(Martin in Fagan et al., 22) that is characteristic of Indigenous literary nationalism. There
is, of course, an argument to be made for Johnson as an Indigenous literary nationalist. In
her essay “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” Johnson
“considers the specific contexts and aesthetics of Native literary production” (Sinclair 20)
with force and determination. Her interest in the construction of Indigenous nationhood is
stated in the very first paragraph: “Every race in the world enjoys its own peculiar
characteristics, but it scarcely follows that every individual of a nation must possess these
prescribed singularities, or otherwise forfeit in the eyes of the world their nationality” (in
Gerson and Strong-Boag 177). Johnson sarcastically criticizes writers that create
Indigenous “national” characters “without having ever come in contact with it” (Johnson
in Gerson and Strong-Boag 183). That “sarcasm” finds manifestation in her performance
of selections like “The Avenger” (“I presume that I may speak”). Her essays and her
performances express some “commitment to understanding Indigenous literary
expressions in part through their relevant Indigenous intellectual, cultural, political,
cosmological, and historical contexts” (Heath Justice in Fagan 25). However, although
Johnson’s politics can be seen to promote the approaches, frameworks, and political
allegiances of Indigenous literary nationalism, her work sometimes resists its teachings.
In one of the final paragraphs of her essay “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in
Modern Fiction” Johnson seems to suggest that the antidote to incorrect or unnatural
representations of Indigenous characters may lay in an authors’ more complete study of
ethnographies. She models this approach in her performance too.
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Just as her essays put forward a forceful assertion of identity that makes defining
them with a specific movement’s terminology difficult, so too does Johnson’s early
performance choices resist simple systems of classification. 41 While Johnson’s self-
determination might have been subtle and may have, perhaps, been only dimly

Johnson’s expressions of nationalism further complicate defining her work through the
41
terminology of Indigenous literary nationalism. In Johnson’s essay “The Iroquois Women of

Canada,” she demonstrates even more that her “nationalism” is less “the nationalism of
Indigenous people” and more the “nationalism of nation states.” The scholars working with
Indigenous literary nationalism “have been careful to differentiate” between their nationalism and
a Western conception (Martin in Fagan et al., 22). For scholars like Daniel Heath Justice,
Indigenous nationalism has an “ability” to “extend recognition to other sovereignties without that
recognition implying a necessary need to consume, displace, or become absorbed by those
nations” (qtd in Fagan et al., 22). Johnson’s writing perhaps does not meet these expectations as
her notion of the nation “cannot escape the troubling connections to the excesses of nation-states”
(Martin 22). For instance, her commitment to the emphasizing the “undeniable fact” that the
“Iroquois stand far in advance of any Indian tribe in America” (Johnson in Gerson and Strong-
Boag 203) resists the conception of Indigenous nationhood—one that reflects “a common social
interdependence within the community, a tribal web of kinship rights and responsibilities that link
the People, the land, and the cosmos together in an ongoing and dynamic system of mutually
affecting relationships” (in Fagan et al., 20). Rather, the nationalism in her essay “hovers within
reach of militarism or at least of militancy” (Martin in Fagan et al., 23) when she notes the
Iroquois confederacy as the “superior” and “advance[d]” race on account of the nation’s
“physical strength, intelligence, mental acquirement, morality, and bloodthirstiness[…]” (in
Gerson and Strong-Boag 203). She affirms the validity of her claims by citing Francis Parkman,
whom she calls “that ablest and most delightful historian of the age, that accurate and truthful
chronicler of North American Indian tribes” (203). This is the same man who before setting on
his expedition to the prairie-wilderness noted, “Trust not an Indian. Let your rifle be ever in your
hand” (in Maddox 138). Johnson’s writing, by the turn of the century, evidences that “the term
nationalism may conjure an energy that is useful to Indigenous literatures, critics, and
communities, but this zeal—as history demonstrates—can obscure as much as it inspires” (Martin
in Fagan et al., 24). It is for this reason that I do not classify Johnson’s activism as Indigenous
literary nationalism, but still give credit to Johnson for her expressions of Indigenous self-
determination. It is worth noting that the scholars dedicated to the Indigenous literary nationalism
movement themselves certainly count Johnson as a precursor. Deanne Reder (Cree Metis) notes
that at the time of her graduate studies in the 1980’s she “had never studied an Indigenous author”
in her years of public school education except for Pauline Johnson (in Fagan et al., 32). Margery
Fee notes how Johnson anticipated concerns about mainstream Canadian culture’s “appropriation
of voice”: how the politics of her essays published in the late nineteenth century relate to late
twentieth-century “battles” taking place in the Indigenous arts community that aimed to expose
“mainstream writers who wrote from the position of minority cultural insiders” as “exploitative
imposters who were using foreign subject matter without considering the cultural or political
impact on the communities from which they took it (Fee “The Trickster Moment” 77).
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understood by her (mainly white42) audiences, its expression was more explicit and
readily accessible in poems such as “A Cry from an Indian Wife” and “The Avenger.”
These complex dynamics between Johnson’s performance and her prose clear marked
Pauline Johnson as an increasingly sophisticated artist.

42
When I refer to “white” culture, I do so referencing more than an ethnicity, but what Alan
Filewod productively refers to as a “cultural formation that cannot escape the ethnic binarism
resulting from the historical experience of racism. ‘White’ therefore defines the social formation
that constructs and suppresses aboriginality” (Filewod “Receiving Aboriginality 365).
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CHAPTER TWO:
Developing a Costume; Or, the “Most Difficult Thing in The World.” September to
December 1892
Interpreting Johnson’s Early Costumes
As Johnson began to hone her ideas of identity and authentic portrayal for public
scrutiny, her performance repertoire also became an increasingly complex site of personal
empowerment. However, as the synecdoche of her race, Johnson was confronted with
some challenges as she tried to remain true to the very principles that she espoused in her
essay, “A Strong Race Opinion.” In September 1892, three months after its publication,
and having completed her first performance “season” across Ontario, Johnson wrote to
her friend William Lighthall about a new “feature” for her performances:
This season I am going to make a feature of costuming for recitals- always an
interesting topic with ladies, but I am beset with difficulties on all hands. For my
Indian poems, I am trying to get an Indian dress to recite in, and it is the most
difficult thing in the world. Now I know you know what is feminine, so you can tell
me if the ‘Indian Stores’ in Montreal are real Indian stores, or is their stuff
manufactured? I want a pair of moccasins, worked either in colored moose hair,
porcupine quills, or very heavily with fine colored beads, have you ever seen any
such there?[…] [i]f you see anything in Montreal that would assist me in getting up
a costume, be it, beads, quills, sashes, shoes, brooches or indeed anything at all, I
will be more than obliged to know of it. (emphasis in original, Johnson’s letter to
Lighthall cited in Strong-Boag and Gerson 110)
Almost all biographies of Johnson’s life and work highlight the moment when she
confesses to Lighthall the “difficulty” she was having in constructing her “Indian
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costume.”43 Her desire to “get[] up a costume” that was “real,” by inquiring about the
“store” from which she could obtain it, speaks to her alienation from authentic sources
and calls into question Johnson’s right to label what she acquired and created as “real.”
As a result, Johnson’s approach to costuming has been defined as contradicting her stance
on fictional portrayal—an implicit evasion of the prescriptions of the “real live Indian girl”
that she extolls in her prose writing. In assembling a “collage” (Strong-Boag and Gerson
110) of materials for her “dress,” Johnson seems to vacate the pursuit of “tribal
distinction” that she discussed in her essay. The fact that Johnson’s costume was
“syncretistic to the point of being fanciful” has been viewed by critics as representative
(even constitutive) of the “semiotic confusion” of Johnson’s work (Lyon). Even Terry
Goldie cites it as an indicator that Johnson’s performance was “ideologically
undeveloped” (Goldie 61 in Lyon).
These interpretations, that have evaluated Johnson’s performance history solely
through the lens of her costume, display a discernible bias that culminates in a negative
judgment: Johnson’s performance is a failure on account of her costume’s
“inauthenticity.”44 Lyon, who is representative of this kind of criticism, nevertheless
attempts to excuse Johnson’s approach. He attempts to account for the costume as an
anomaly by suggesting that “Johnson had to work within the long established role of the
Indian Princess, whether or not she perceived that it was inadequate” (Lyon). Other
critics have certainly echoed this perspective. Anne Collett argues that Johnson designed

43 Johnson’s
“difficulty” poses a critical problem to modern interpreters of Johnson’s
performance. Why would Johnson, who so fervently and passionately noted the necessity of
“tribal distinction” in the creation of “natural” characters, “ma[ke] no effort to replicate the actual
clothing of any specific native group” (Gerson and Strong-Boag “Paddling” 110) and create, in
her performance, according to modern interpretations, a “bricolage of personal and public
iconography of ‘the Red Indian’” (Collett 161-162)?
44
See Milz, Sabine note 7.
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this costume to appeal to the “erotic exotic” imagination of her audiences (Collett “Fair
Trade” 161). If economic necessity drove Johnson to pander to her audience’s
expectations then her performance costume may be excusable on grounds of artistic
compromise.
Such interpretations are dependent on and sustained by differing ahistorical
understandings of the costume. Charlotte Gray suggests that Johnson bought her costume
from the Hudson’s Bay Company, and that, unsatisfied with its “drab” appearance, she
altered it with the help of her sister. That alteration, according to Gray, included adding
rabbit pelts to the left shoulder, decorating the front with silver trade brooches inherited
from her grandmother, and tying her father’s hunting knife and Huron scalp to the waist
(Gray 157-158). Meanwhile, Carole Gerson, drawing on Evelyn Johnson’s memoir,
suggests that Johnson’s costume was “loosely based on an image of Longfellow’s heroine
Minnehaha” (“Pauline Johnson and Celebrity” 221). The Vancouver Museum, that
houses the costume, also claims that Johnson “made the dress”, drawing on Catlin’s
depiction of “Minnihaha [sic]” (Garner, J.S and M.S. Cvick). Interesting, the Museum
offers its own re-constitution of Johnson’s theatrical costume.
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These varying reconstructions of the costume do not appear to fully account for its
ongoing revision, development, modification, and substitution.45
At this point, it is necessary to examine in greater detail, why Johnson chose to
introduce costuming into her performance, what the “Indian” costume would consist of,
and how it was received. A month after Johnson wrote to Lighthall, soliciting his help for
the construction of her costume, her “Indian dress” was mentioned as an added attraction
for her upcoming performance at St. John’s Hall, in Ottawa. On October 18,1892, the
Ottawa Journal announced that Johnson’s performance, under the patronage of the
Governor-General and Lady Stanley of Preston, would feature an “Indian dress”:
Ottawa readers will be interested in reading the Toronto World’s notice of the
Indian chief’s daughter who is coming to Ottawa and will appear before a
capitolian audience on the 2nd of November at St. John’s Hall. The World says:
“This talented Canadian poetess (Miss Pauline Johnson is the English name she
bears) commenced her fall and winter recitations of her own compositions last
week. She appeared in many of the western towns. At the urgent request of a
number of her friends, she will appear in costume, including a very striking and
handsome Indian dress, the materials for which were gathered from the Six Nations,

45
Different biographers have attempted to define Johnson’s costume, and they each do so in
various ways. There are discrepancies regarding what constituted the costume. According to
Walter McRaye, Johnson wore two scalps at her waist for her costume, not one, as Charlotte Gray
suggests. In her article, Performing Pauline Johnson, Mary Leighton also suggests that there was
only one scalp, inherited from Johnson’s great grandfather. McRaye describes wampum beads on
her wrists. Gray doesn’t mention them at all. The artifact of the costume, at the Vancouver
Museum, is re-constituted from the dress, two scalps, and a large red blanket. Despite the
contradictions, these varying descriptions are accurate in their own right. However, when
considering her costume, each biographer seems to be referring to a different moment in
Johnson’s performance history. What is important is to undo the critical deficit that defines
Johnson’s costume as only one thing—as one image. In fact, it is many images, developed within
a complex performance history.
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the Blackfeet, Crees and other Indians. She will give her Indian selections in this
dress, which will add greatly to the effect.” (“She will Wear the Garb of an Indian
Chief’s Daughter”)
This announcement hints at the Victorian fascination with pictorial depiction and the
dramatic “effect” of costuming. Johnson’s decision to perform in costume operates within
this context. Cynthia Cooper, in her study of Canadian fashion in the late nineteenth
century, examines the “passion for costumed entertainments” (Cooper 41). Cooper
explains how costuming was gaining traction as an important Victorian social activity
through the proliferation of “Fancy Dress Balls.” In Ottawa, this practice was particularly
popular. As Cooper states, “[f]our highly acclaimed balls in the last quarter of the century,
presided over by Governor Generals and their wives, were the pinnacle of society
entertainment in Canada” (Cooper 41). It is little wonder then that Johnson was perhaps
readily persuaded by her “friends” to dress up for a platform presentation to a
distinguished audience of members of high society and dignitaries that included the
Governor General and his wife.
Such cultural contexts also help to explain Johnson’s use of rather hyperbolic
language in her letter to Lighthall. If she was indeed having great “difficulty” in the
assemblage of a costume, perhaps it was because dressing “correctly” was not just
challenging, but indeed, “the most difficult thing in the world.” Adherence to the code of
fancy dress was a matter of extreme social importance, and its successful achievement
relied on an appreciation of correct representation. This codified convention asserted that
the “best” or most successful dresses “faithfully respect[] the natural and true” (in Cooper
43). Costumes that were deemed to be correct had to be “appropriate” for characters
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being portrayed. Prominent fancy dress experts, like Ardern Holt, even published
manuals to clarify the protocols involved. These compendiums, treasured by high society,
“careful[ly] circumscrib[ed] […] the fantasy experience” of fancy dress in Victorian
culture (Cooper 42). One, published by Holt in 1887, included a listing for the suitable
portrayal of “American Indian Queen North,” describing this costume as follows:
INDIAN DRESSES should come veritably from the country, and are of great
variety. North American Indian Queen for fancy dress wears a brown satin cuirass
bodice and skirt, or black cloth embroidered with red, yellow and white, bordered
with cut leather fringe; sandals; a diadem of coloured eagles’ and vultures’ feathers;
bird’s wings in front, and a great many beads for jewellery. (Holt 199)
Holt’s insistence that “Indian dresses should come veritably from the country” reflects
Johnson’s emphasis, in her letter to Lighthall, on the need for “real” materials. It affirms
her request for “moccasins” that are “worked […] very heavily with fine coloured beads”
and her choice of a two-piece outfit (a brown “cuirass bodice and skirt”), ornamented
with fringed hems. It was within the codified parameters of fancy dress that Johnson’s
costume assemblage was framed. The metric of ‘correct’ fancy dress played as much a
role as the (approximation of) authenticity that Johnson endeavored to achieve. This
would become the rubrique under which she would eventually market her costume. In
fact, at a much later date, Johnson, herself, would use the term “correct” to describe her
costume.
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1
2
90
In 1900, her letter to Wilfred Laurier contains the following letterhead: “In dramatic
recitals of her own works in correct costume” (see Johnson, Pauline “Letter to Wilfrid…”
and figure 20 below).
Figure 20.
Johnson’s letterhead
in 1900. The left
side, under an image
of her in profile (and
in costume) reads:
“in dramatic recitals
of her own works in
correct costume.”
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Johnson’s repertoire for her performance on November 2, 1892 at St. John’s Hall
in Ottawa included both old and new selections: “The Old Lumberman’s Christmas”, “A
Red Girl’s Reasoning”, “Redwing”, “The Pilot of the Plains”, “Cry from an Indian Wife”,
“As Red Men Die” and “The Song My Paddle Sings.” It is important to note that in this
first costumed performance at St. John’s Hall, Johnson debuted three costumes--not only
her “Indian dress” but also two other costume dress-ensembles that were created for
specific characters. She opened her performance with recitations of “An Old
Lumberman’s Christmas” while wearing a Victorian dress. She stayed in this same
costume for her rendition of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning”, and then changed into her
“Indian buckskin suit with dangling fandangos and an effective display of fringe” to
recite “Redwing” 46 and several other selections.
So what exactly did Johnson’s “Indian” costume consist of for this part of her
performance? A preview in The Evening Journal mentions significant details:
[Johnson] very kindly showed the reporter her Indian dress, which is made of
doeskin patterned after the dress supposed to have been worn by Minnehaha in the
long ago. The front of it bears a number of silver brooches of many shapes which
were given her by an old Indian pagan woman, aged 90, who lived on the reserve
and had worn them on her costume and who in turn received them from her mother.
Thus these ornaments have been worn for over one hundred years. The back of the
skirt is adorned by a “fire bag” manufactured by the Blackfeet Indians. She has
various samples of Wampum, some of which are very rare and of great value, the

46
To date, I have not been able to find a poem under the title “Redwing.” However, the Ottawa
Journal describes the content of this recitation. The review states that Johnson “recited a touching
story of how Redwing, an Indian boy, went to Cut Knife Hill under his Chief and was killed by a
pale face bomb to the sorrow of his poor old mother” (see “The Indian Maiden at St. John’s
Hall”).
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art of making the beads of which they are composed of being lost. One is an
Iroquois Wampum and the Indians of that particular branch of Indians can trace by
the Wampum the history of every treaty entered into between the Six Nations and
the British Government. The red blanket which she will wear around her shoulders
to-night is the identical one on which Prince Arthur stood when he was made a
chief of the Six Nations when he visited Canada in 1870. (“The Mohawk Poetess”).
Here, Johnson’s “Indian” costume is described as being made up of a diverse set of
materials. According to Johnson herself, the key features of the costume consisted of
varied accessories added to the dress, that she sourced from different geographic
locations. It is this geographically unspecific sourcing that opens Johnson to criticisms of
inauthenticity. Conversely, it is equally possible to consider Johnson’s sourcing of
material as indicative of her desire to appropriately or “correctly” depict various
characters and that her costume’s inclusion of accessories — specific relics of historical
and traditional significance — served to authorize her performance as “real” and to
legitimize her right to present her characters.
It is clear that Johnson’s costume may have both corresponded to and challenged
Holt’s prescription of the “correct” “Indian” costume. However, according to modern
critical standards, Holt’s metric of ‘correctness’ and the way in which the costume was
acquired and composed positions it as an inauthentic construct. However, any meaningful
examination of Johnson’s costuming choices needs to take into account the
accoutrements that she used to invoke both history and traditions. The connection
between Johnson’s costume and her personal history illustrates her ongoing concern and
dedication to a particularly coded understanding of “real” representation. The red blanket
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and wampum, that Johnson emphasized as important aspects of her costume, were objects
of material culture that invoked a history of Haudenosaunee and British political
diplomacy and negotiation. Significantly, these objects were intimately linked to
Johnson’s family. The red blanket that Johnson placed “around her shoulders” was
allegedly the same one that HRH Prince Arthur of Connaught had once stepped on in
order to become a Chief (“The Mohawk Poetess”). Here, Johnson was referencing the
Duke of Connaught’s visit to Johnson’s home (at the Grand River) in 1869, when he was
made “Kavakoudge” and given a seat on the Six Nations Council. In 1911, Johnson
would recall this ceremony in her book, Legends of Vancouver:
Onwanonsyshon [Johnson’s father] rode up, and, flinging his scarlet blanket on the
grass, dismounted, and asked the prince to stand on it. Then stepped forward an
ancient chief, father of Onwanonsyshon, and Speaker of the Council [Johnson’s
grandfather]. He was old in inherited and personal loyalty to the British crown. He
had fought under Sir Isaac Brock at Queenston Heights in 1812, while yet a mere
boy, and upon him was laid the honor of making his Queen’s son a chief. Taking
Arthur by the hand this venerable warrior walked slowly to and fro across the
blanket, chanting as he went the strange, wild formula of induction. From time to
time he was interrupted by loud expressions of approval and assent from the vast
throng of encircling braves, but apart from this no sound was heard but the low,
weird monotone of a ritual older than the white man’s foot-prints in North America.
[…] The chant ended, these two young chiefs received the Prince into the Mohawk
tribe, conferring upon him the name of “Kavakoudge,” which means “the sun
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flying from East to West under the guidance of the Great Spirit.” (Johnson “A
Royal Mohawk Chief”)
More than twenty years after the Duke of Connaught’s visit to the Six Nations, Johnson
was to performed in Ottawa for an audience made up of colonial dignitaries. She chose to
costume herself in the very artifact (the blanket) that had once facilitated the literal
‘indigenization’ of a young colonial official—a Prince. Her performance costume thereby
evokes this earlier history and the implied opportunity for any settler not only to “play
Indian” but also to become “Indian.” For Johnson, the earlier ceremonial use of the red
blanket by her father and grandfather made this a “real” object of symbolic importance
that helped cement the ‘correctness’ and ‘appropriateness’ of her performance.
Furthermore, the red blanket referenced relationships between the Haudenosaunee
and English that reached even further back in time, and brought to mind a visual
iconography that may well have been significant to settler audiences. By draping herself
in a red blanket, Johnson aligns herself with important images of Mohawk/English
leaders. In 1710, John Verelst painted portraits of “Four Indian Kings.” These four
portraits were commissioned by Queen Anne to celebrate the visit of Haudenosaunee
Confederacy officials (then the “Five Nations”) to London in order to forge diplomatic
partnerships. The portraits, displayed at court, featured (according to the artist): Sa Ga
Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas; Ho Nee Yeath Taw No Row, King of the
Generethgarich Nations; Etow Oh Koam, King of the River Nation; and Tee Yee Neen
Ho Ga Row, Emperor of the Six Nations.
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Figure 21-24. Portraits

by John Verelst (c.
1675–1734). Oil on
canvas, 1710. Library
and Archives Canada.
Reproductions of images
located at the Woodland
Cultural Centre Museum
(Six Nations of the
Grand River, Ontario).
The “Kings” are portrayed wearing red blankets draped over their shoulders. Therefore, it
is clear that Johnson’s use of a blanket, in her 1892 performance, was a strategic
costuming choice that implicitly reiterated Haudenosaunee-British contact for the
audience that included (tellingly) a vice-regal representative.
Another noteworthy element of Johnson’s “Indian” costume echoes a specific
feature seen in the last of these four portraits. This likeness of Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row
(labeled as “Emperor of the Six Nations”) is distinct from the others. Tee Yee Neen Ho
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Ga Row was a diplomat, not a warrior. Verelst makes this distinction clear by depicting
him holding a wampum belt rather than a weapon. Johnson, too, chose to feature
“samples of wampum” (beads or belts) in her November, 1892 costume.47 Again, by
including the powerful symbol of wampum, Johnson was mining an Indigenous history
of negotiation. Historian Michelle Hamilton explains that wampum is “viewed” by the
Six Nations “as official records of their status as sovereign nations” (Hamilton 108).
Tehanetorens, an Indigenous historian also writing about these belts in 1977, notes:
Treaties meant nothing unless they were accompanied by wampum. Belts were
given and received at treaties as seals of friendship. No Iroquois individual or
nation would think of breaking a word or treaty if the treaty was made over a sacred
wampum belt. With every important treaty wampum belts were exchanged.
Sometimes as many as forty belts were exchanged at a single council. Likewise,
every law passed by the Iroquois council was recorded with a certain string or belt
of wampum. The treaty of law that went with the wampum was memorized by
certain trained individuals (Tehanetorens 4).
By performing with these specific emblems of negotiation (mnemonic aids for
agreements), Johnson was referencing treaties that were “introduced to the Iroquois by
Hiawatha at the time of the founding of the League of the Five Nations” and that aimed
to “bring and bind peace and take the place of blood” (Tehanetorens 3). In effect, she was
performing with “things” of Indigenous and personal importance that scripted the texture,

47 It
is unclear if Johnson was able to feature an actual wampum belt as part of her costume, or if
she merely used wampum beads. The Evening Journal’s comment about “the art of making the
beads of which they are composed of being lost” (“Mohawk Poetess”) indicates that Johnson’s
costume included these beads and that they were strung together in some way, but that Johnson
might not have, at that time, presented them in ‘belt’ form.
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quality, and actions of relationships.48 As I have already mentioned, the sense of
Indigenous self determination represented by these elements may not have been fully
understood by an audience that had a more superficial appreciation of Johnson's costume.
However, even if her audience was more preoccupied with the novelty of (what may have
seemed) a type of 'fancy dress', that in itself would not have negated Johnson's own
motives for choosing these elements.
How did Johnson obtain wampum, given that this material was so “rare”? Johnson’s
own life had often intersected with the “biography” of the red blanket and the wampum
that she featured in her performance. By 1892, Johnson would have been aware of the
significance of these belts. When she was ten years old, she had witnessed an important
event in her own home. On September 14th, 1871, the ethnologist, Horatio Hale, had
assembled several prominent members of the Six Nations of the Grand River to sit for a
photograph. The stylized composition (reminiscent of the portrait of the Fathers of
Confederation, thereby endowing the subjects with enhanced status as law and treaty
makers) showed the chiefs with a collection of nineteen wampum belts that were meant
to be “read” (National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and Feldman; Fenton).

48
See Bernstein; Kopytoff.
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1
2
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Figure 25. Library

and Archives
Canada. Iroquois
Chiefs from the
Six Nations
Reserve reading
Wampum belts.
MIKAN
no. 3193501

It is unlikely that Johnson’s 1892 performance included the wampum featured here49—
wampum that she had witnessed being read by her father (second from the left) and
grandfather (standing, third from the right) during her childhood. By 1892, John Buck,
featured in the centre of the image, was the “wampum keeper” (a role that he had held for
over 50 years) and he was wholly dedicated to preserving the legislative and sacred
significance of the belts. Johnson could only have gained access to the belts after his
death in 1893, as they went up for purchase.50 What is clear, is that these iconic relics,
which tied Johnson to her ancestral nation and to her family, would have played some

49
However, her later performances do show her using wampum belts that also appear in this
image. See Kovacs “Renegotiation the most difficult thing in the world.”
50
After Buck’s death, his heirs (John Jr. and Joshua) inherited the belts but their relationship to
them, their understanding of the objects’ cultural value and their negotiation of them as treaty
records would change. They “failed to return the Confederacy belts to the Council of Chiefs and
treated all of the wampum in the estate as personal property” (Fenton 403). As I will discuss in
my next chapter, there is evidence that, by 1893, Johnson obtained several of these belts and
featured them, in different ways, in her costume and performance.

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part in legitimizing her right to costume herself in this particular configuration or
imagination of the “Indian.”
Although the materials that Johnson included as key features of her costume did
not, then, conform exactly to Holt’s codification of “correct” “Indian dress”, they do
respond to concerns of “natural” representation within the protocols of ‘fancy dress.’ The
Everywoman’s Encyclopedia notes the importance of a personal connection between
character and individual in order to achieve success with ‘fancy dress’: “It is by
portraying a character to whom one bears some resemblance, or that one is especially
fitted by nature to assume that success ‘on the night’ is assured” (in Cooper 43).
Johnson reinforces her “resemblance” to various “Indian” characters through the objects
that she features, underscoring how she is especially “fitted by nature”, through her
history and “descent”, to portray the “Indian” characters that she plays on the platform.
In this way, she recasts her performances as correct, even if they are not authentic.
However, a consideration of her costume’s relationship to “natural” character is
complicated by her inclusion of other artifacts that were not sourced from the Six Nations,
and that did not offer the same cultural contexts or connections to Johnson’s personal
history. Such is the case with the “firebag” that Johnson tied on her belt, for her St.
John’s Hall performance. Even Johnson noted that this was a “Blackfoot” artifact. As
such, this “firebag” may not have ‘fit’ within the costume’s logic, but her portrayal of
non-Mohawk Indigenous characters would have been made more “real” 51 and more
“suitable” by its inclusion. As such, a versatile costume was an effective tool. After all,

51
“As Red Men Die” features many references to Huron “scalps”. Later, as she continues to
develop her costume (circa 1895; see Gerson and Strong-Boag xvii), Johnson would obtain a
scalp and attach it to her belt. Again, this perhaps speaks to Johnson’s continual desire to pursue
“faithful” representation. She is suiting the costume to the word, and the word to the costume.
Further changes and additions to her costume will be discussed in the chapter that follows.
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100
several of Johnson’s poems, performed at this and other recitals, featured lead characters
that were of Northwest origin (Yakonwita in “The Pilot of the Plains,” and the “Indian”
wife in “Cry from an Indian Wife”) or had lead characters sharing her own Mohawk
heritage (“As Red Men Die”, “The Avenger”). Consequently, the very nature of the
costume’s composition--the “collage” to which Gerson refers-- afforded Johnson the
space for the distinctiveness of these characters to emerge. The red blanket, wampum
and firebag all appear to be tacit acknowledgments of this Indigenous variation, perhaps
used by Johnson to legitimize her portrayals. As a performer especially interested in the
portrayal of female characters, her use of targeted accessories may have enhanced (at
least in her own mind) her portrayals of “Indian girls” from nations and regions other
than her own.52
Modern criticism contends that the “bricolage” of the costume is precisely what
obscures distinctiveness, but I believe this to be an inadequate evaluation of the
costume’s performative value. I do agree that the costume (initially and perhaps
permanently) was not a strictly authentic representation of the “real” Pauline Johnson. In
spite of this, I propose that it succeeded in its function as a theatrical tool and that it
served her need to make each of these distinct characters “real”, “live”, and “natural”
under the terms through which Johnson construed that “reality.” Perhaps it is this “reality,”
rendered in a context of theatricality, that not only served Johnson’s ideology but also
propelled the success of her performance. In short then, there is a binary dynamic at play
surrounding perceptions of the costume: Johnson’s own judgments of “real”, “correct”,

52
Johnson did take ownership over her national identification. For instance, in her essay “The
Iroquois Women of Canada” she has the authorship credit read “By One of Them.” See Gerson
and Strong-Boag 203.
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101
and “natural” versus the attribution of “inauthentic[]”, “fanciful” and “syncretistic” given
by modern critics.
The proposition that Johnson was using different costumes to facilitate her character
portrayals requires that we keep in mind the other two examples of Victorian dress that
Johnson used in her performance. The alternating use of Victorian, “Indian”, Victorian
dress-ensembles demands some consideration of the effect and manipulation of the
contrast between the two kinds of garb. As mentioned earlier, Johnson began her
November recital in “the every-day dress of a lady” wearing this Victorian costume for
the two opening selections. The dress featured “cream Henrietta cloth with an orange
girdle and [was] set off by a boa of white fluffy stuff” (“The Indian Maiden at St. John’s
Hall”). Next, Johnson donned her buckskin costume to perform the most clearly “Indian-
themed” selections. Finally, Johnson performed “The Song My Paddle Sings” in “a
picturesque white boating costume […]”(“The Indian Maiden at St. John’s Hall”).
Though there are no clear details about Johnson’s “boating costume” (sometimes referred
to as a “sailor costume”), one can infer that it may have looked something like the image
below. 53

53
Johnson had a number of portraits taken of her in various costumes early on in her career. This
image is undated, but the accoutrements featured in it (specifically, the paddle) would have been
suitable for her recitation of “The Song My Paddle Sings.”

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102
Figure 26. McMaster University Pauline Johnson Archive
By contrast then, Johnson’s “Indian costume” was a “dramatic treat” (“An Indian
Maiden Delights Large Audience”) that she featured between two other costumes. These
‘other’ costume dresses were not highlighted in previews and are rarely discussed in
more contemporary analyses of Johnson’s performance history. They were, however,
carefully described in reviews of her appearance at St. John’s Hall. Despite this evidence,
overwhelmingly, critics have mentioned that Johnson began her performance in “Indian
dress” and changed into a Victorian gown after intermission. One current critic, Rick
Monture, even proposes that Johnson’s choice and succession of costumes was meant to
“symbolize the process of Native assimilation into Canadian mainstream society” (123)
and suggests that “her performances could also have been interpreted as implying that all
Native people would simply be better off if they would adapt to Euro-Canadian ways like
the poet” (129).
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103
These observations need to be refuted on three fronts. First, Johnson was not
simply choosing to be “like a performer from a wild west show […who] began appearing
during the first part of her programme dressed in “Indian” costume [and then] during
intermission […] quickly changed into fashionable drawing room clothes” (Adams).54 In
fact, Johnson’s careful alternation of three different costumes subverts this formulaic
‘Wild West show’ sequence and points to her efforts to offer ‘suitable’ portrayals of her
characters. Secondly, Johnson now appears to be using alternating costumes to reinforce
her representation of a growing array of characters, using those costumes to reflect that
multiplicity. It is apparent that, within her first year of performance, she had managed to
build considerable diversity in both character and costuming. Thirdly, the embedding of
her “Indian” costume within a first and last use of Victorian dress may be perceived as a
metaphor for her own “Indian” identity that was embedded and vigorously asserted
within a larger context of British-Canadian audiences and society, rather than yielding
entirely to “the process of Native assimilation into Canadian mainstream society”
(Monture 123). Furthermore, the very duality of the costumes was reflective of Johnson’s
own dual racial heritage. She was no longer performing as just an “Indian” or as just a
white woman. Instead, she was already beginning to explore the subtle dynamics of
mixed race representation in her repertoire.
Therefore, it is clear that a careful examination of the evolution of Johnson’s
costuming and its relation to her ‘scripts’ allows a new picture of Johnson to emerge – a
picture that reflects multiplicity, sophistication, a process of trail and error, and the
influence of histories. Even during this first year of performance in 1892, Johnson was
assembling a ‘toolbox’ of scripts and costumes, thereby engaging in a practice more

54
See also Milz, Sabine (note 7 in particular).
103
104
sophisticated than the critical attribution of “pastiche”, “bricolage” or “collage” would
suggest.
Adapting from Story to Stage: December 1892
Toward the end of 1892, Johnson had come a long way from her debut at the Liberal
Club in Toronto. By now, she was treating the platform as a stage and headlining her
performances as “costume recitals” (“Amusements”). At this point, she also started to
collaborate and present her “costume recitals” with a stage partner, Owen Alexander
Smily. This would mark her full entry into the arena of the theatrical trade. 55
Figure 27 & Figure 28.

Images from the Canadian
Entertainment Bureau of
listings for Owen Smily
and Johnson-Smily
Entertainment. Johnson
and Smily were featured
together in the Bureau’s
1894-1895 offerings,
although their
collaboration began in
1892. See “Canadian
Entertainment Bureau.”

55
Johnson worked with Smily throughout the remainder of that year and continued thereafter. In
1894, they both came under the management of the Canadian Entertainment Bureau. They
remained stage partners until 1900.
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105
Smily was a young and accomplished ventriloquist, impersonator and pianist. According
to many critics, his contributions to Johnson’s early performances “lightened the
evenings” and “helped [Johnson] learn to disarm hostile or restless crowds with humor”
(Peterson 101). With Smily, critics suggest that Johnson “began to enjoy the repartee
with audiences” and develop some flexibility with her presentations (Peterson 101). It is
for this collaboration that she also began to adapt her repertoire for dramatic presentation.
Johnson and Smiley introduced their combined act at the Association Hall in
Hamilton, Ontario on December 20, 1892. A study of their programme reveals the
influence of their collaboration on her repertoire and performance. The Hamilton
Spectator noted details of the program that was billed as a “literary, musical, dramatic
recital”: first, Johnson introduced new lyrics to her repertoire like “Wave-won,” “Happy
Hunting Grounds” and “Shadow River” and performed them in between Smily’s
renditions of “Abner Brown,” “Sunny,” “Demon Ship” and “A Fish Yarn” (an adaptation
of “Three Men in a Boat”). Following this, Smily and Johnson gave solo performances,
with Johnson scheduled to perform “Cry from an Indian Wife,” “As Red Men Die,” and
“The Song My Paddle Sings.” After they completed their separate recitals, Johnson and
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106
Smily came together for the first time, toward the end of the program, to perform a fifteen
minute “dual rendition” of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning”:
Figure 29. Snapshot of

program for Johnson’s
performance, with Owen
Smily, of “A Red Girl’s
Reasoning” in
Hamilton’s Association
Hall. 20 December 1892.
See “RECITAL”
Although no script of this performance piece is available for study, it did have an
earlier provenance and a later re-working. Johnson had performed some version of it in
her November 2nd performance at St. John’s Hall in Ottawa. There, she had performed a
solo piece, entitled “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” for her high society audience. Johnson and
Smily must have reworked this piece in order to recast it into a duologue format for a
performance only a month later. A short story written by Johnson was also subsequently
published in February 1893 in The Dominion Illustrated56 under the same title. By teasing
out the theatrical elements in this 1893 published iteration of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,”
it is possible to shed some light on what “scene” might have been presented by Johnson
and Smily in their December 1892 performance.
“A Red Girl’s Reasoning” tells the story of Charlie McDonald (an official in the
Department of Agriculture) and his wife Christine McDonald (née Robinson, a woman of
“red and white parentage”). It opens at a Hudson’s Bay Post, where they were living, and

56
It also was published in the Evening Star (Toronto) as “A Sweet Wild Flower” on February 18,
1893. See Gerson and Strong-Boag 324.
106
107
goes on to describe the background of the couple’s marriage. Eventually, Charlie takes
Christine home to Ottawa and presents her to his family, including his brother Joe
McDonald. He also introduces her to high society at a ball given by the Lieutenant
Governor. There, Christine meets guests like Captain Logan and Mrs. Stuart, who
engage her in conversation. Johnson gives a compelling description of the kinds of
conversational pitfalls that Christine, a woman of mixed race heritage, was forced to
negotiate. While speaking to Christine, Captain Logan reveals a simultaneous ignorance
and yet patronizing fascination with the somewhat exotic ‘oddity’ that Christine
represents:
“[h]ow interesting—do tell us some more of your old home, Mrs. McDonald, you
so seldom speak of your life at the Post, and we fellows so often wish to hear of it
all,’ said Logan eagerly.
‘Why do you not ask me of it then?’
‘Well—er, I’m sure I don’t know; I’m fully interested in the Ind—in your people—
your mother’s people, I mean, but it always seems so personal, I suppose; and-a-a-’
‘Perhaps you are, like all other white people, afraid to mention my nationality to
me.’” (“A Red Girls Reasoning” 22)57
Captain Logan’s (somewhat offensive) awkwardness is soon followed by an even more
condescending interrogation by Mrs. Stuart. She asks Christine to offer some history of
her “self”. Then, she demands that Christine speak up about the details regarding the
union of her parents after Christine admits that there were “no missionaries” in the “part
of the country” where Christine’s parents had wed (22). Christine’s eventual admission

57
Here, I cite passages from the text as it appears in The Dominion Illustrated. The text also
appears in Gerson and Strong-Boag’s collection (see pages 188-202).
107
108
that her parents were married according to “Indian rites” alone causes a shocked frenzy
amongst the high society guests, with many responding by calling the situation
“shocking,” “outrageous” and “horrify[ing]” (23).
Although this is the dramatic climax of the short story, most of this was probably
not included in the Johnson-Smiley performance of the work. It appears likely that
Charlie and Christine were the only two characters retained for the “dual rendition” of the
story. According to a description offered in the show’s programme, the performance of
“A Red Girl’s Reasoning” picks up the plot line after this point and tells what happened
next.
The short story reveals that after Charlie and Christine return home from the ball,
Charlie, embarrassed by his wife’s admission and behavior, confronts her. Significantly,
it is this section of the short story, as printed in 1893, that is written mostly in dialogue
format.58 Though Charlie’s brother, Joe, appears in this part of the narrative, only a minor
alteration would have been required to make the text suitable for two characters. Here,
Christine and Charlie engage in a domestic quarrel, as Charlie rebukes his wife for her
behavior:
“ ‘Christie,’ he said harshly,
“do you know what you have done?”
“Yes,” –taking a step nearer to him—her
whole soul springing up into her eyes, ‘I have angered you,

58 “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” as performed by Johnson in November 1892, was evidently
different from the Johnson-Smiley presentation in December 1892. That said, the short story
version suggests its theatrical origin. In this instance, it is perhaps Johnson’s performance history
that creates—not discredits—the ideologies, perspectives, and approaches that appear in
Johnson’s writing.

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109
Charlie, and-“
“Angered me? You have disgraced
me, and, moreover, you have disgraced
yourself and both your parents.”
“Disgraced?”
“Yes, disgraced, you have literally de-
clared to the whole city that your father and mother were never married, and that
you are the child of –what shall we call it—love? Certainly not legality.” […]
“How could you do it, how could you do it, Christie, without shame either for
yourself or for me, let alone your parents?” (23)
To this accusation, Christine responds, in the short story, as follows:
“Shame? Why should I be ashamed of the rites of my people any more than you
should be ashamed of the customs of yours—of a marriage more sacred and holy
than half your white man’s mockeries?’ […] ‘Do you mean to tell me, Charlie—
you who have studied my race and their laws for years—do you mean to tell me
that, because there was no priest and no magistrate, my mother was not married?
Do you mean to say that all my forefathers, for hundreds of years back, have been
illegally born? If so, you blacken my ancestry beyond—beyond—beyond all
reason.” (23-24)
The scene continues with tight dialogue—Charlie asks Christine why she had never told
him of the “miserable scandal” and Christine responds by reaffirming that she had merely
defended “the beautiful custom of [her] people” (23). Her dramatic refutation functions
as the climax of the scene. In playing the role of Christine, Johnson was afforded the
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110
opportunity, through this monologue, to showcase the emotional expressiveness for
which she had become famous during her first year as a performer.
Figure 30.
Illustration from
printing of “A
Red Girl’s
Reasoning” in
the Dominion
Illustrated
Monthly. See
Johnson, “A
Red Girl’s
Reasoning.”
In the short story, this dramatic section reads quite theatrically in that the physical
positioning of the characters and their emotional responses are vividly described,
suggestive of cues and stage directions. Though it is unclear how Johnson and Smily
performed this story as a scene, what is striking is that the short story, as a published text,
seems to carry this evidence of its prior performative history. Hence, it is likely that the
duologue format of the performance was constitutive to, rather than derivative of,
Johnson’s written output. All of this may help to explain why the published story inserts
an illustration (as seen above) for this scene:
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111
She [Christine] walked towards him, then halted in the centre of the room.
“Charlie McDonald,” she said, and it was as if a stone had spoken. “Look up.” He
raised his head, startled by her tone. […] “There was such a time as that before
our marriage, for we are not married now. Stop,” she said, outstretching her
palms against him as he sprang to his feet, “I tell you we are not married. Why
should I recognize the rites of your nation when you do not acknowledge the rites
of mine? According to your own words, my parents should have gone through
your church ceremony as well as through an Indian contract, according to my
words, we should go through an Indian contract as well as through a church
marriage. If their union is illegal, so is ours. If you think my father is living in
dishonor with my mother, my people will think I am living in dishonor with
you—how do I know when another nation will come and conquer you as you
white men conquered us, and they will have another marriage rite to perform, and
they will tell another truth, that you are not my husband, that you are but
disgracing and dishonouring me—that are keeping me here, not as your wife, but
as your—your—squaw.”
The terrible word had never passed her lips before, and the blood stained
her face to her very temples; she snatched off her wedding ring and tossed it
across the room, saying scornfully, “That thing is as empty to me as the Indian
rites to you.” (emphasis in original, 24).
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112
Charlie responds by violently grabbing Christine’s arms until she cries out. Enraged, he
then leaves and after a long walk returns to the house with his “foolish anger dead and
buried” (25) only to find a note from his wife indicating that she has left, for good. Many
months later, Charlie finally finds Christine in an unnamed town in Ontario. However,
she stands her ground and remains resolute about dissolving their union, vowing that
“ ‘neither church, nor law, not even’—and the voice softened—‘nor even love can make
a slave of a red girl’” (27). 59
At the heart of this story, is the demand for dignity and respect, as Johnson
reflects on what it means, for a woman, to function as a “Canadian Indian” in a context
where “Indian rites” (24) are not respected. Christine is not necessarily looked down
upon because of her mixed racial heritage, although this may be part of the equation.
Here, it is the cultural clash that is highlighted, in which different values are not respected.
Christine demands an equal recognition and respect for the cultural rituals and values of
her maternal ancestry. She reserves the right to repudiate the validity of her husband’s
cultural values and rituals, just as he repudiates her own. What is particularly compelling
is that Johnson uses a female Indigenous protagonist to make a trenchant observation on
the racism underlying these differences, and that this is done in an effective and affecting
manner.

59
The ending of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” recalls a similar scene from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
(1879), another controversial late nineteenth century play. Christine, like the character Nora
Helmer, struggles with codes of marriage and will not return home, even after much pleading.
While Christine attacks the institution of marriage, she also satirizes “the White women of the
provincial settler community”—the very women for whom Johnson is performing (Collett “Red
and White” 364). Additionally, she highlights the hypocrisy of government officials (as
represented by Charlie McDonald) who “stud[y] Indian archeology and folklore” and have a
“predilection for Indianology” (189), but still exhibit an internalized racism that not even love can
conquer or assuage.

112
113
Even in the absence of reviews that might have described the audience’s reaction,
it is clear that this concluding performance of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” done in
collaboration with Smily, spoke to Johnson’s profound desire to portray a character to
which she bore the most “resemblance.” Johnson, like Christine, was of “red and white
parentage” (see figure 29). Like Christine, she had appeared before high society in
Ottawa. Like Christine, Johnson asserted her Indigenous identity, proud of her heritage.
Johnson was not just asserting this heritage by reciting, but acting and “playing”
that “real live Indian girl.” While operating within the codes and traditions of Victorian
performance, Johnson was, at the same time, thwarting expectations of generic “Indian”
portrayal. She was, by now, exposing audiences to a very different kind of “Indian”
character. This was no Winona, or even Yakonwita. This was a version of Pauline
Johnson, speaking to the past and present in an assertive and persuasive voice. Ultimately,
she demonstrated that she was capable of offering a confident and nuanced understanding
of the complex identity politics of her time. Her perfomative rendering of Christine
elevated her artistry to a higher level that would set the scene for the ensuing
performances of her career.
A Bridge to the Future
This history of Johnson’s first year of performance suggests that she was doing
more than one ‘thing’ on stages across Ontario. In just twelve months during 1892, E.
Pauline Johnson had created and presented multiple characters and approaches. Over time,
she developed a number of costumes to suitably reflect that multiplicity -- costumes that
served the “peculiar characteristics,” “individual personality” and “flesh and blood
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114
existence” of her characters (“A Strong Race Opinion”). Although Johnson began her
year as one kind of “Indian Wife” of a “race gone,” by the end of the year, she was
enacting a new kind of assertive “Indian wife” who was very much present and alive
During this year, Johnson was continually testing, negotiating, and challenging
her audience with new perspectives, characters, voices, and stories. The biography of
Johnson’s performances reveals a complex and changing history—one made up of many
other histories, texts, and objects that speak to intercultural contexts. In time, Johnson
would be held up as a celebrated “Canadian Indian” and be incorporated into the national
mythology. Her complex layering of characterization and performance earned her the
iconic status that was enshrined in the cartographic metaphor of the 1961 memorial stamp,
discussed in the introduction of this work.
Similarly, the many subtle facets of Johnson’s identity and performance are
captured in an intriguing composite portrait created in 1893, after her successful debut
year. The Globe, published a photogravure that featured Johnson in “a number of her
platform representations” (“MISS E. PAULINE JOHNSON”).
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115
Figure 31.
“MISS E.
PAULINE
JOHNSON.”
The Globe.
23
September18
93.

One might argue that the composite portrait, like the (later) memorial stamp, was an
attempt to capture the fluid and evolving nature of Johnson’s performance career.
Johnson could be many things to many people. This multiplicity and the on-going
negotiation of her performances contradicts the static, one-dimensional characterization
that is sometimes applied to her by critics. Indeed, the photogravure shifts this optic by
illustrating the inherent, but somewhat elusive complexity of this artist.
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CHAPTER THREE:
Shaping a “Canadian Girl” for Foreign and Domestic Audiences
1893-1911
A “Canadian Girl” is an “Indian” Actress
“Natives have never been great respecters of national borders. The very fact that Thomas
King, E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), Peter Jones (Anishinaabe), and George Copway
(Anishinaabe)—among others—can be, and have been, claimed at various times for
various purposes as part of the national literatures of both the United States and Canada
says that something more important and complex is occurring in Native literature,
something that merits special recognition as a separate discourse
-Jace Weaver That The People Might Live, 23.
Weaver’s astute observation raises important issues about concepts of home,
nationhood, borders, and belonging as they played out in turn of the century cultural
politics and as they frame our understanding of Indigenous-settler relations today. Our
negotiation of these terms is complicated by E. Pauline Johnson’s history and the
contexts in which she is placed. As discussed in the previous chapter, Johnson was firmly
established in the canon of Canadian literature by the end of 1892. But as her career
flourished and her success and popularity was amplified, Johnson’s emblematic
representation of specific national identifications underwent continual alteration from
1893 until the end of her performance career in 1911.
The “complexit[ies]” of nationality, to which Weaver refers, are already apparent
in Johnson’s early performance career. In May of 1893, Hector Charlesworth, a leading
Canadian theatre and literary critic, published his description of the “Canadian Girl” and
included Pauline Johnson as the prime example. According to Charlesworth, Canadian
girls were “not like” English or American girls in terms of physical characteristics and
self presentation: the “forms [of Canadian girls] are vigorous with a glow of health, and
elastic with the sap of life. The expressions of their faces show more keenness in

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perception and general alertness than are characteristic of the English girl, and more
health and magnetic glow than are possessed by the American girl” (188). Charlesworth
attempts to construct the distinctive identity of the Canadian girl in juxtaposition to her
American and English counterparts. Such an approach to the process of constructing
national identities is quite common. Historian John Barlett Brebner proposes that
Canadian identity has been shaped by its counterpoint relationship to England and The
United States of America; a process that occurs within the “North Atlantic Triangle.”
Similarly, Joseph Roach argues that “circum-Atlantic societies, confronted with
revolutionary circumstances for which few precedents existed, have invented themselves
by performing their pasts in the presence of others. They could not perform themselves,
however, unless they also performed what and who they thought they were not” (Roach
5). Both Brebner and Roach place this recognition of difference at the heart of the
development of national identication. Within this process, it is the performance of
distinctiveness that generates a singular sense of national cohesion.
Although Brebner does not address gender as a significant factor in defining
distinctive identities within the “North Atlantic Triangle’” Charlesworth’s article implies
that gender is a driving force in the construction of a national identity.
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Charlesworth strengthens this notion of difference by citing qualities distinctive to
Canadian girls --Canada’s “common symbolic denominator” (Kristeva in Berlant)60.
Some of these distinctive characteristics are quite surprising because they include
features of race and performance. For Charlesworth, the iconic “Canadian girl” is the
woman who writes and performs her poetry. In contrast to American and English girls,
she is usually a travelling actress. 61 The stage on which she operates is “the realm which
gives the opportunity for the most exquisite appeals to the imagination and finer instincts
of humanity” (192). Almost all of the girls cited by Charlesworth had histories on the
stage: actresses like Miss Clara Morris, Miss Julia Arthur, Miss Attallie Claire, Miss
Edith Kingdon, Miss Caroline Miskel and Miss Mary Keagan. This group corresponds to
his notion of the “Canadian Girl.” They are applauded on account of their participation
in the theatrical trade and their “contributions” to the Canadian spirit.

60
Lauren Berlant discusses the construction of a “National Symbolic.” She defines the
“ ‘National Symbolic’ as the order of discursive practices whose reign within a national space
produces, and also refers to, the ‘law’ in which the accident of birth within a
geographical/political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively-held history”
(Berlant 21). Within these parameters, the use of the “woman” or girl to develop a national myth
is not unique to the “Canadian” context, or to a historical period. Lauren Berlant to reminds us of
Julia Kristeva’s work: “addressing the placement of the woman in specifically national terms, the
woman becomes the nation’s common symbolic denominator, ‘designed as the cultural and
religious memory forged by the interweaving of history and geography’ ” (Kristeva in Berlant 28).
61
Most all the girls that Charlesworth highlights in this article have histories on the stage.
Charleswoth features a grouping of “girls” whose “contributions” to the Canadian spirit emerge
from their participation in the theatrical trade: actresses like Miss Clara Morris, Miss Julia Arthur,
Miss Attallie Claire, Miss Edith Kingdon, Miss Caroline Miskel and Miss Mary Keagan all are
mentioned in his article, and applauded on account of their correspondence to Charlesworth’s
description of the “Canadian Girl”.
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119
It is logical, therefore, that Charlesworth highlights Pauline Johnson as the “most
Canadian of all Canadian girls.” For Charlesworth, Pauline Johnson, already a known
performer by 1892 and a recognized “Canadian Indian,” typified the national symbolic.62
What is surprising, is that Charlesworth uses Johnson’s Indigenous history and affiliation
as essential to her identification as the best exemplar of the “Canadian Girl.” In his article,
he chose to include a portrait of Johnson in her buckskin performance costume. The
inclusion of this image is significant because it helps to reinforce Johnson’s “Indian”
persona. This was critical in establishing, at least for Charlesworth, her fitness as a
representative of the Canadian national symbolic.

62
First of all, it is important to highlight that, unlike Clara Morris and Julia Arthur who left
Canada to pursue careers in the United States, Johnson was performing by early 1893 on the
platform stage in Canada and for Canadian audiences. Perhaps Charlesworth, a Canadian theatre
critic himself who was concerned with the terror developing regarding the “annexation of our [the
Canadian] stage” (Sandwell) was thrilled by Johnson’s commitment to performing within denoted
Canadian borders. In addition, the previous chapter affirms the ways in which Charlesworth’s
description of the prototypical “Canadian Girl” relates to the female characters established, up to
the date of his “Canadian Girl” publication, in Pauline Johnson’s performance repertoire. As my
previous chapter evidences, Johnson performed, in her early years, in boating costume, with
paddle in hand, reciting the lines about her command over canoeing. This falls in line with the
character traits of the “Canadian girl” that Charlesworth outlines. Likewise, Johnson’s previous
presentation of Christine from “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” corresponds to Charlesworth’s further
consideration of the Canadian girl’s resistance to marriage’s expectation that a wife assume a
“subordinate position” or “state of submission” as is anticipated by the “English common law”
(189). By 1893, Johnson’s performance of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” perhaps represented not
only the fate of interracial relationships but also related illuminated Charlesworth’s developing
“fact that, as enquiry has shown, the marriage of Canadian women to Englishmen seldom fails to
result in a considerable measure of discontent and unhappiness” (189). Johnson’s repertoire and
the characters that she, the “Canadian Indian,” brings to the stage with them appear to decidedly
resemble this male critic’s definition of the “Canadian Girl” as well. Yet this is not the only
impetus for Charlesworth’s interest in Johnson as the emblem of the Canadian feminine.
Charlesworth features an image of Johnson in his article that foregrounds the way in which
Johnson’s ancestry, in Charlesworth’s estimation, makes her the penultimate “Canadian Girl.”

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Charlesworth concludes that Pauline Johnson’s “heritage of aboriginal characteristics
[…] makes her the most Canadian of Canadian girls” (emphasis mine, 190).63
Figure 32. Johnson’s portrait as featured in

Hector Charlesworth’s article “The
Canadian Girl.” See Canadian Magazine,
May 1893 issue, page 187.
While Charlesworth’s emphasis on Indigeneity seems puzzling, it helps to explain
how Johnson and her stage persona get drawn into the discourse of gender and identity
politics and Canadian nationalism. The use of Johnson’s aboriginal heritage in making
her an over-arching emblem of Canadian identity flies in the face of most understandings
of the construction of settler-society identities and nationalities, and their relationship to
First Peoples. As Indigenous scholar Bonita Lawrence observes, “the very existence of
settler societies is […] predicated on maintaining racial apartheid, on emphasizing racial
difference, white superiority, and ‘Native’ inferiority” (emphasis mine, Lawrence 8).
What motivated Charlesworth to fold Johnson into his concept of what it meant to

63
See also Morgan, Cecilia “ ‘A Sweet Canadian Girl’: English-Canadian Actresses’
Transatlantic and Transnational Careers Through the Lenses of Canadian Magazines, 1890’s-
1940’s” for a further discussion of other women who Charlesworth and B.K. Sandwell described
as “Canadian” in character.
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be ‘Canadian’; to offer Johnson’s “heritage” as constitutive of Canadian identity? Here,
Johnson’s literary celebrity played an important role. Charlesworth states that “her work
is so generally known as to require no quotation” (190). This means that familiarity with
Johnson’s work would have ensured an awareness of Johnson’s own self-identification as
a “half blood.” Charlesworth’s use of Johnson’s heritage as an essential and defining
componant of Canadian identity seems to be even more unusual (in Lawrence 9), given
that the Indian Act stipulated that “…no half-breed or head of a family (except the widow
of an Indian, or a half breed who has already been admitted into a treaty) shall…be
accounted an Indian, or entitled to be admitted into an Indian treaty.” Arguably,
Charlesworth is responding to an anxiety about American expansionism and annexation
by validating Canada’s relationship to a sense of Indigenous identification and history—a
relationship that, rather than being denied, is taken up to assert a sense of Canadian
nationalism. This paradigm allows for the negotiation of the “North Atlantic triangle” and
the national distinctions and mythologies that it puts into play.
This complex and confusing incorporation of Indigenous history in the “National
Symbolic” is considered an “open secret of Canadianness” (Francis). Margot Francis, in
her “mapping [of] how whiteness and Indigeneity are both occluded and conjured up in
visual emblems of Canadian social life,” uses Michael Taussig’s notion of the “public
secret” to examine how “form[s] of knowledge that [are] generally known […]for one
reason or another, cannot be articulated.” Francis suggests that “public secrets” are
sustained through a process of “active ‘not seeing.’ ” Indeed, Charlesworth’s
characterization of Johnson’s Mohawk status as symbolic of Canada might be regarded as
an example of what Francis defines as “banal emblems of national belonging that convey
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a knowledge that is both articulated and refused.” In legislative terms, the exclusionary
politics of Indigenous identification meant that there was an incomplete incorporation of
the “Canadian Indian” in the national identity, but Charlesworth does “not see[]” or even
acknowledge this inherent contradiction.
What Charlesworth’s article reveals is a unique and exceptional kind of viewing
of Johnson’s body, her history, and her performance. But how did Johnson negotiate this
spectatorship in her own performance, especially in her touring performances of Canada,
the United States and England? How did she respond to other national perspectives of
Indigeneity as she moved within the “North Atlantic Triangle”? It is worth noting that for
her performances in both the United States and England, Johnson performed mostly
under her Mohawk name (one that affirmed her Indigenous history and identification),
adapting her performances to the differing audience expectations of these locations.
Johnson’s changing repertoire and her inclusion and adaptation of new
performance conventions from 1893 onwards64 were shaped by the marketplace of the
stages on which she was performing. Strategies in costuming and billing used in her
American performances can be tracked through her performances in Massachusetts,
Michigan, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Johnson’s appearances at “Canoe

64
It is necessary to state that, in what follows, I do not and cannot offer a comprehensive study of
all of Johnson’s performances from 1893 onwards. Johnson’s touring schedule was extremely
busy. To give a sense of the scope: in the fall and winter of 1893, Johnson “gave no less than 125
recitals throughout Canada” (“Miss E. Pauline Johnson”). By April, she had arrived in Port Hope,
Cambellford after successful engagements in Petrolea, Watford, Chatham, and Embro.
Subsequently, Johnson was on the road again to tour further north: her scheduled engagements
necessitated stops in towns accessible by rail—Bracebridge, Huntsville, Sundridge, Buck’s Falls
and North Bay (“Music and the Drama: Tub Seidl Orchestral Concert”). As The Globe reports,
Johnson’s hectic schedule was the “best evidence of her success on the platform” (“Music and the
Drama: Tub Seidl Orchestral Concert”). This chapter would do no service (except perhaps a
biographical one) if it aimed to outline or describe all of the particularities in each of these
presentations. Instead, what follows is study of specific performances—their comparison within
set geographical boundaries, in order to contextualize Johnson’s role in the “North Atlantic
Triangle.”
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Associations,” “Indian Associations” and “Historical Associations” introduced her to a
bourgeoning circuit of American commodity and collector culture. The billing and
repertoire that Johnson used in her performances for American audiences was clearly
different from that which she used in Canada — the “home” she described as the “land
beloved by God” (Johnson “Canadian Born”). The cultural politics that drove these
differences also influenced her performances in England. For her appearances in London
in 1894 and 1906, Johnson constructed another unique persona, drawing yet again on
other traditions and performance histories for her garden party and salon entertainments.
In order to fully understand Johnson’s process of performative adaptation, it is
useful to curate Johnson’s movements and to historicize her performance history
according to the locations of her performances—charting the movements of a sketch, or
the alterations of a costume as it is moved through time and space. The suggestion by
Strong-Boag and Gerson that it was Johnson’s “fate to be turned into the artificially noble,
passionate, self sacrificing Indian Maiden” (146) may be valid, but it opens up an avenue
for a discussion of agency: Was Johnson just experimenting with differing theatrical
approaches and billing, or was she forced to alter her performance in response to
audience expectations—expectations generated through and within an industry of cultural
performance that, as Walter Benjamin states, “facilitates [the] elevat[ion] of people to the
level of commodities” (in Holledge and Tompkins 151)?65 Questions about Johnson’s
agency in the the alteration and adaptation of her performances are especially difficult to

65
These questions of agency continue to characterize studies of present-day intercultural
performers who distribute their performances across and within international markets. As Julie
Holledge and Joanne Tompkins argue in their study of intercultural performance artists of the
twentieth century, “[a]n ill-defined panoply or regulations and representational dilemmas shapes
the artistic product distributed in the entertainment market” (154). Pauline Johnson’s
performances from 1893-1911 certainly suggest that such an experience is not specific to only
late twentieth century performers.
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resolve in the absence of diary entries or personal reflections from Johnson herself, on the
function of those performances. In what instance does she shield her readership from her
performing identity? Examination of such issues, as Keith Thor Carlson suggests, “need
not imply criticism” (29). Carlson proposes that historical complexities or “critical points
of tension” be attended to in a respectful manner: “all people have things in their history
that are not regarded as positive by contemporary measures; the point is not to deny their
existence or explain them away, but rather to engage them respectfully” (Carlson 29).
This sensibility will inform the following analysis.
Performing, not Paddling, at the Canoe Club
It is perhaps fitting that a discussion of Johnson’s itinerant performances begins
with a consideration of her recital at a canoe club. In August of 1893, Johnson performed
at the American Canoe Association meeting on Wolfe Island, near Kingston, Ontario.
Her participation in this event marked her entry into a transnational circuit of sport,
spectacle, labor, and commodity exchange. A closer look at this event, shows how
Johnson began to adapt her performance to a new kind of audience.
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According to Jessica Dunkin, The American Canoe Association (ACA) was a
“transnational organization” established in 1880, to “ ‘unite all amateur canoeists for the
purpose of pleasure, health, or exploration.’ ” 66 During ACA meets, both theatrical and
para-theatrical performances were created and performed. The meet in which Johnson
participated, was particularly significant for its transnational collaboration and
relationships. The New York Times described the lengths that the Canadian members of
the American Canoe Association went to, in order to make the 1893 meeting a
spectacular event:
“imagine […] a camp of the American Canoe Association containing a telegraph
office, two pianos, a baggage wagon, a Custom House officer and Postmaster,
steamboats making seven trips a day, bait and boats to hire for fishing, a dancing
platform, a hotel and restaurant, a steamboat landing, a laundry agent, a daily news
service, and other things.” (“Around the Pine Camp Fire”).
The “Canadian luxury” offered at this ACA meet was derided as a departure from the
“old time” (read American) values of the ACA. Evidently, the Canadian members had
something to prove, and did so by planning an event that rivaled previous memorable
meets put on by the Association’s American members.

66
The Club’s politics are most evident in the organization of the spaces it chose to host the
meetings. Encampments for the ACA spread across and along the US/Canada border. A number
of meetings were appropriately stationed on islands in what was a ‘middle-place’ between the two
nations—the St. Lawrence River was host to a majority of the meetings (Wolfe Island (1893),
Mudlunta Island (1901), Sugar Island (1903-present), Hay Island (1899), Stave Island (1889,
1898), Grindstone Island (1884-1886, 1896-1897)). In addition to these spaces, other
encampments were located further north: in Muskoka (site of the 1900 meeting) and Stony Lake
(1883 meeting). The most southerly meetings occurred in areas such as Croton Point, Hudson
River (1894), Long Island (1890), and Cape Cod (1902). At these encampments, year after year,
“hundreds of enthusiasts from Canada and the United States came together to camp, compete, and
socialize” (128).
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While the production values and amenities of this meeting were criticized as
unnecessarily opulent, they offered dividends that appealed to Americans. As The Times
makes clear: “One feature of the camp developed by this luxury, however, is the unusual
number of young women in camp. They are mostly Canadians, and in justice it must be
said that they are the handsomest lot ever seen in an American Canoe Association camp”
(“Around the Pine”). In this sense, the Kingston ACA meeting differed from other
meetings that were “largely populated by white, middle-class men from the United States
and Canada” (Dunkin 132).67 At this meet, held in Canada, “girls” were not only
‘allowed’ but were encouraged to attend and participate in its events.
The distinctiveness of Canadian girls at the meet was confirmed by the reviewer
from The Times. He notes the differences between the Canadian and American girl in
detail: “[a]s a rule, the American girls are a little more stylishly dressed than the
Canadians, but the fair Canucks have a little more than their share of attention” (“Around
the Pine”). The Canadian Girl is described as so alluring that “[a]pparently some of the
Americans have not been able to flee from [them], for at supper time on Tuesday Robert
J. Wilkin of Brooklyn announced with very red face that he had taken out a marriage
license that day in Kingston” (“Around the Pine”).
According to The Times, the “Canadian Girl” was not just fascinating because of
her physical allure, but also because of her entertainment talents: “Canadian girls are
useful as well as beautiful, for when the various clubs give campfire entertainments the
features of the evening are songs and recitations by fair canucks” (“Around the Pine
Camp Fire”). In a description, almost reminiscent of Charlesworth’s article, Pauline

67
Though, as Dunkin makes clear, “women of the same social class and race were welcomed as
‘honorary members’ beginning in 1882” (Dunkin 132).
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Johnson, is identified as the Canadian girl who offered the “most unusual and noteworthy
feature of the campfire.” The Times describes Johnson’s performance in some detail:
this Indian girl, daughter of a Mohawk chief, stepped into the glare of the red lights,
dressed in ornamental garb of a Mohawk maiden. She tossed back her long black
hair, clinched her hands, and recited her own poem, wherein the Indian wife bids
her warrior husband go to war with the whites. It was all very stirring and tragic,
and the gentle American girls shivered with something more than the chill of the
night air (“Around the Pine Camp Fire”).
Given Johnson’s passion for canoeing, as well as a repertoire that consistently
included references to canoeing and the pleasures of sport, her decision not to perform
any selections about canoeing at this event is surprising. The Times review of the ACA
meet indicates that Johnson presented “A Cry from an Indian Wife.” Johnson’s earlier
performance of this selection at the YMLC in 1892 had elicited more historically
nuanced reactions to the poem’s activist appeals (as discussed in my last chapter). The
response at the ACA event was quite different. Here, the reviewer interprets the poem as
a description of “an Indian going to war with the whites,” and affirms that its
performance caused “shiver[s]” in the American girls.” This reception of Johnson’s
poem as an “Indian” war story is further reinforced by a review of her performance in the
Courtland Evening Standard when it suggests that she recited “poem[s] [that] breathe[d]
with the wild fire of departed braves and with the pathos of later days” (Untitled
Clipping).
Johnson did not use the ACA event as a venue to show off her “boating costume,”
nor did she employ her customary costume changes. Rather, for this event, she
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constructed herself as “the Indian girl” who “w[ore] an Indian costume”; The New York
Times reported that the costume was “an exact reproduction of that worn by Minnehaha,
decorated with silver brooches, heirlooms in her father’s family, the ermine tails of the
chief’s daughter, indian bead work and old wampum belts now not made” (“Around the
Pine”). For this performance then, Johnson focused on her “Indian” identity, eschewing
the boating costume and repertoire that was a key aspect of her performance repertoire
before 1893.
Johnson’s own reflections on the ACA meet offer clues about why she used only
this costume. After the ACA meeting, Johnson wrote two articles, both published in
Saturday Night during September 1893, wherein she reported on the camp’s activities. In
the first article, Johnson criticizes the conventions of dress adopted in the camp by “La
Canadienne”—the “Canadian Girl”, recommending instead that she “lay aside …
fashionable frills”:
although much has been written and boasted of La Canadienne and her outdoor
exploits she cannot at least at the A.C.A. hold a candle to little Lady America. We
see La Canadienne living under canvas it is true, but she dresses in silken blouses,
wears tall veils, carries la-de-dah walking canes and comparatively few of her
attempt to paddle forth without a gentleman, and oh! everlasting disgrace, some of
her cannot even steer a canoe! This won’t do, girls; we have a reputation for
healthy pastimes to sustain. Lay aside those fashionable frills and for the love of the
most blessed of endowments given by your Creator, health, don’t mimic the cripple
or quarrel with your better, most sensible self just because the little goddess fashion
is whimsical and at times despises the beauty of perfect form and health in the
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human body. (Johnson “Canoe and Canvas: The A.C.A. Meets in Canadian
Waters”)
Johnson’s now calls on the “Canadian Girl” to engage more fully with her “better”, more
authentic self – one that exhibits the “health and magnetic glow”, envisioned by
Charlesworth. Ironically, what Johnson herself chose to wear (or at least how she chose
to publicize her “Indian dress”) was anything but authentic. However, her exhortation to
dress for “healthy pastimes” may explain why she deliberately chose to abandon her silk
dress and boating costume (worn in her other performances up to this date). If this was an
attempt to assert a Canadian distinctiveness, it was certainly successful. Indeed, at the
meet held the following year, other campers, particularly girls, copied her performance
costume. An 1894 edition of the New York Sun observes that women in theACA camp,
were “dress[ing] in a variety of style, ranging from Indian costumes to bloomers”
(Dunkin 223).
Although it is difficult to ascertain how Johnson responded to this mimicry of her
own performance, it is clear that she was aware of the subtleties of national relations that
underpinned the activities offered at the ACA meeting. In her coverage of this event,
published in Saturday Night, in September 1893, Johnson describes the Canadian
“sportsman’[s] hobnobbing with his American cousins, who have brought
themselves and their watercraft to one of the most beautiful sites in the Thousand
Islands [Wolfe Island is one of these Islands], where, with canvas overhead and all
hostility crushed forever underfoot, man meets with man in almost as happy-
hearted and unconventional a fashion as the most ardent believer in the universal
brotherhood of the human kind could desire.” (Johnson “Princes of the Paddle”)
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Here, Johnson implicitly acknowledges the desire to dissolve borders – to establish the
commonality of American and Canadian experiences and identities in serving a fantasy of
universalism and interculturalism.
It was in the camp’s theatrical spaces that its politics of “universal brotherhood”
was promoted, in spite of differing racial and national identifications. Here, an important
binary dynamic comes into play. Charlesworth was attempting, through the incorporation
of Indigenous heritage, to locate a specific Canadian identity distinct from performances
of American nationality. In contrast, the American Canoe Association was consistently
drawing on the spectacle of Indigeneity to ground and fantasize its politics of
universalism. As Jessica Dunkin points out, “whereas the majority of [the ACA] camp
workers were rural whites, most of the entertainers were visible minorities” (144).
Before Johnson’s appearance in 1893, the Association hired minstrel acts such as
“A Coon Band” (1890). The impetus for these kinds of entertainments can be attributed
to Lafayette W. Seavey, a New Yorker known for his theatre work in scene painting.
After his first trip in 1884 to an ACA meeting, Seavey advocated for the addition of
“some amusement” to the event “such as tableaux, campfire programs, balls, minstrel
shows and the like” (Dunkin thesis 281). Soon, he was acting as the Association’s
“unofficial dramatist and director of amusements.” In the ACA meeting at Grindstone
Island (USA) in 1892 (only one year prior to Johnson’s performance), Seavey had
developed his most spectacular amusements, “talked of at every camp for ten years,” and
described here by Dunkin:
Following the last day of races, several hundred campers and visitors gathered on
Nob Hill for the performance, which opened with recitations, songs, and
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instrumental music. The highlight of the show was the arrival of a ‘band of Indians’
in birchbark canoe. This group presented a series of performances, including ‘an
Indian wedding, funeral, hunt, capture and scalping of a white man, burning a
captive at the stake and the war dance.’ The evening concluded with the singing of
“God Save the Queen,” presumably a homage to the Canadian hosts. (Dunkin 290)
This faux usage of racial heritage was a startling precedent for Johnson’s ACA
performance of an “Indian Wife” and helps to explain why certain customs of dress and
“playing Indian” were central to ACA ‘camp life’. By 1902, the American Canoe
Association even included a sewing group called “the Squaws” that developed, for the
Cape Cod meet of 1902, a flag that “featured a red bust of a stereotypical squaw in profile
on a white background, its gaze directed towards the inside of the flag and the letters
ACA positioned vertically in decorative script” (Dunkin 230).68
Interestingly, reviews of Johnson’s performance at the 1893 meeting undermine
the notion that Johnson, like Seavey’s “ ‘band of Indians’,” served only to “authenticate”
the event in the name of universalism. One review even goes so far as to emphasize
Johnson’s “white” parentage, thereby differentiating her from the ‘authentic’ Indian
performers who had participated in Seavey’s event the year before:

68 This
kind of history unearths an exceptional feature of Johnson’s coverage of the ACA event in
Saturday Night—though Johnson documents with journalistic detail the winners and losers (the
Canadians, in this case) of the ACA 1893 meet, she never discusses or even mentions her own
performance in her coverage of the event. In fact, the only piece of her own work that she cites
within her article is “ReVoyage” (two lines from this piece included at the end of her article).
And yet this poem, which seems infinitely appropriate to present at the event on account of its
thematic discussion of canoeing (and which she had also performed, on the platform in 1892) was
not her selection for her performance at the campfire for the ACA. Does this reveal anything
about Johnson’s own attitude towards her performance for the ACA. Would such an admission
have forfeited her journalistic or artistic integrity? Dunkin astutely asserts that sporting
Associations like the ACA used ethnic actors to “authenticate” an event (see Dunkin 145). If this
was the case, Johnson indeed might have not wanted to highlight her participation in the
“campfire” entertainments that occurred with the ACA.
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Miss Johnson is an Indian poet of wide reputation in Canada, and she has lately
taken up prose to tell the story of her red forefathers. Mrs. Johnson, although
English, is down on the census as an Indian, and she is rather proud of it. [She] is
very well educated and highly cultured. She handles a canoe like one of her red
brethren, but she is fond of leaning back on a cushion and letting some amiable
American paddle her canoe in the shade of overhanging trees onshore” (emphasis
mine, “Around the Pine Camp Fire”).
The New York Times reference to Johnson’s “Indian” status on the census, “although she
is English,” reveals an interest in the Canadian construction of national identity that was
distinctly foreign to an American audience. (Unlike American policy, the Indian Act of
Canada granted Indian status to white women who married status Indians (See Lawrence
8). Johnson’s parentage and national identification allowed her to straddle this racial
divide,69 positioning her as a player in the trans-national process whereby Indigeneity
served as a conduit to mediate relations between Americans and Canadians. Without yet
having crossed a border, Johnson’s 1893 performance puts disparate approaches to
Indigenous national identification into play, thereby reinforcing distinctive American and
Canadian conceptualizations.
Which “Canadian Girl” in America?
Johnson’s ACA performance evidently appealed to American audiences, as only
four months later, she began performing in the United States. No longer just the

69
Interestingly, the ACA gave Johnson status as a member in the American Canoe Association. It
with this unique cultural history (as well as her own canoeing prowess), that Johnson is Johnson
was awarded honorary membership in the association in 1893 (Dunkin 144). If she were
embraced as a member of their club, would she let them join hers?
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“Canadian girl” who only attracted audiences in Hamilton or Toronto, Johnson now
began to strategically adapt and transform her performance of Indigeneity. Slowly, she
developed a persona that capitalized on the American interest in “Indian” relics and
perspectives. A closer look at the billing, props, costumes and repertoire used in her tours
in the United States, shows that she was constructing a distinct persona or ‘character’
targeted at audiences in America—one that was markedly distinct from the persona she
played and embodied at ‘home’ in Canada or, later, in England.
On December 6 1893, Johnson performed in Massachusetts for the Salem
Women’s Indian Association in front of “one hundred invited guests.” The Massachusetts
Indian Association was an auxiliary of a larger American-wide reform movement that
functioned under the banner of the Women’s National Indian Association. This
organization was devoted to the express purpose of assimilation. Following her
appearances, The Globe noted that “the Boston dailies [were] full of praise for Miss
Pauline Johnson’s recital in that vicinity and neighboring cities” (“Indian Princess
Captures Boston”). 70 In these early performances, Johnson added certain features to her
costume. The Chicago Tribune reported that “[a]t a meeting in Boston the other day
under the auspices of the Massachusetts Indian Association Miss E. Pauline Johnson of
Canada read several original poems. Miss Johnson appeared in the costume of her tribe,

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Begun in 1879 in Philadelphia, the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA) focused
primarily on missionary work, with the express view that Christianizing the “Indian” advanced an
advocacy for the moral and fair treatment of them (Mathes 1). As Valerie Sherer Mathes writes,
the WNIA particularly focused its efforts on “that of caring for Indian women and children […].
The children would be taught to speak and write English while the women learned to make
comfortable homes, to cook ‘foods of civilization,’ and to care for their children” (Mathes 8).
This Association was devoted to “imparting the Victorian ‘role of domesticity’ and the ‘culture of
true womanhood’ to Indian women and children” (Mathes 8). The WNAI was able to perform
this activity with the support of the American Federal government that “gratefully opened all
reservations to these resourceful women” (Mathes 8). Who was grateful, in this case, is a key
question that was not considered.
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which included a necklace of cinnamon bear claws, and a bracelet of panther claws” (“At
a Meeting in Boston”). The Daily Times in Watertown, New York offers a similar
description of the costume:
Boston has an Indian poetess. This is Miss E. Pauline Johnson, daughter of a
Mohawk chief. At a reception at the club the other evening when she recited several
of her poems we are told that she was “attired in a red woolen sleeveless short dress,
over which was a fringe tunic of buckskin, ornamented with ermine tails and
colored beads, and with bear claws and panther teeth for bracelets and necklace.” It
will be noted that in this picturesque description one important detail is omitted—
the tomahawk she carries concealed with which to scalp the editors who reject her
poems (“Talk of the Day”)
These reviews are illustrative of John M. Coward’s observation about nineteenth-century
newspapers that were, “notorious for their production and circulation of stereotypes of
American Indians due to the popularity of sensationalism” (Coward in Carpenter 4).
However the reviews are useful in highlighting some of the dramatic changes that
Johnson made for her debut performance in the United States, including new elements in
her costume. These reviews offer the first mention of Johnson’s use of “bear claws” and
“panther claws” on her “Indian dress.” Though Johnson did not advertise the sources of
these materials, their significance, in terms of the American relationship to Indigeneity,
cannot go unremarked. Johnson’s will, republished in 1956 in Vancouver’s The Province,
reveals that “the pair of bead and tooth’s bracelets [were] given to [her] by Ernest
Thompson Seton” (Howarth). The Museum of Vancouver, to which Johnson bequeathed
her costume in March of 1913, also lists Seaton as the “original owner” of Johnson’s bear
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claw necklace, a piece that “comprised” a significant part of her costume (Garner and
Cvick). In contrast, biographer Charlotte Gray asserts that “[t]he famous necklace of
bears’ claws interspersed with glass beads [was] presented to her by the poet Charles
Mair (always a sucker for a pretty face)” (Gray 484).
While the original ownership of the necklace is disputed by critics, most (but not
all) of the costume elements appear to have been Canadian in origin. It is clear that
Johnson used her associates and acquaintances to look out for or to help acquire these
materials. Both Seton and Mair are clearly identified as contributors. Charlotte Gray
notes in her biography of Johnson, that Charles Mair, Canada’s famous poet “was [also]
more than happy to contribute to her ‘Indian poetess’ stage persona. He agreed to keep an
eye out for […] eagle feathers, bear’s teeth and claws, arrows” (Gray 158-159). This is
significant because both Seton and Mair were key players in the transatlantic marketplace
that bargained for and traded “Indian” relics. Walter McRaye says that by 1893, Johnson
had become acquainted with Ernest Thompson Seton (artist, author and naturalist). She
“had been one of the first to admire his painting ‘Waited in Vain’ that caused so much
controversy at the Chicago World’s Fair” (McRaye 52).71 Some seventeen years later, in
1910, Seton chaired the founding committee of the Boy Scouts of America; he is credited
as being a major proponent of the integration of “Indian Lore” into the American

71
See Ham, Penny. Article reports that Seton’s “art was far from conventional and occasionally
drew adverse criticism. In 1893, Seton, just back from Paris, painted the controversial Waited in
Vain. When the painting was rejected as part of the Canadian exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair,
the Canadian press protested. The realism of the painting has offended the conservative members
of the selection committee. The painting was later hung in Chicago.”
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scouting movement. 72 Seaton attempted to develop an iconic “American Boy”
distinguished by a participation in “Indian things” and pursuits:
American boys, it pained him to say, were little more than ‘flat chested cigarette
smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality.’ What they needed were ‘the
cleaner, saner pursuits of woodcraft and scouting.’ ‘Most boys love to play Indian,’
he wrote in 1904, ‘and would like to learn more about it. They want to know all
the interesting Indian things that are possible for them to do. Our watchword is:
‘the best things of the best Indians.’ (Ellis 8)
As early as 1893, Pauline Johnson, the true “Canadian Girl” on account of her
Indigeneous descent, had already started to incorporate some of “ ‘these best things of the
best Indians’ ” into her performative choices for American audiences. By transforming
her billing, costume and repertoire, she was responding to the influence of trans-national
markets that were circulating Indigeneity as a ‘hot’ commodity. In addition to
embellishing her costume with ‘pan-indigeneous’ elements, Johnson also took on a new
stage name for the Boston “Indian Association” performance. Billing herself as
‘Tekahionwake’ allowed her to emphasize her Indigenous identification and to rationalize
the use of wampum in her performance. After the success of her performances for the
“Indian Association,” The Boston Herald featured a biographical column on Pauline
Johnson entitled “Tekahionwake’s Daughter.” The meaning and function of the name

72
He was eventually drummed out in 1915 for his pacifism, but his influence was obvious on the
Scouts. In 1932, the Scouts introduced the “Indian Lore merit badge.” The Scouts continued to
emphasize Playing Indian throughout their literature published in that year “What real, red-
blooded American Boy has not at some time or other wished that he could live with the Indians,
because in all of us is inherent a spirit of romance and adventure that the indian seems to typify?”
By the 1940’s there were more than one hundred Scouting Indian lore clubs and honor societies.”
(see Ellis 9).

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Tekahionwake is described by Johnson’s sister, Evelyn, in a later Toronto Star newspaper
article, published in 1927:
Tekahionwake, meaning “Double Wampum” or “Double Wampum Belts” which
Pauline Johnson used, was in reality our great-grandfather’s name. Indians had but
one name in early days (it is not the Sachem name). He and his sister were little
children when a great missionary meeting was held at Niagara and these little
children were brought by their parents (who were lower Mohawks) up the Mohawk
river to be christened. The boy’s name was to be Jacob but the parents wanted a
second name for the child, and there was some delay in choosing it. Sir William
Johnson, as British Superintendent general asked why the delay. When he was told
he came forward and said “Call him Johnson after me.” This was immediately done
and the boy was christened Jacob Johnson. Later when the revolutionary war broke
out the children and some women were sent to Sandusky, Ohio where there were
other Indians. After the war was over the then Canadian Six Nations Indians sent to
Sandusky for all the Indians to come to Canada. These children were then orphans
and lived, married, and died in the Six Nations Indian Reserve, but the boy as he
grew old was always known as “Old Tekahionwake.” (Evelyn Johnson in Keppler).
Evelyn Johnson’s account of her great-grandfather’s name and history is quite
extraordinary, in many ways. She offers stark insights into early assimilation practices
that were upheld by official representatives of colonial rule. The re-naming of Pauline
Johnson’s great-grandfather through Christian baptism and by a legal representative of
the British crown was clearly indicative of the erasure of Indigeneous culture practised by
the settler culture. Therefore, Johnson’s appropriation of her great-grandfather’s name, in
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some respects, can be read as a legitimate re-appropriation of her Mohawk heritage, as
well as an effective marketing strategy for her performance persona.
In short, the adoption of “Tekahionwake” had benefits that were cultural,
theatrical and commercial. First, it demonstrated Johnson’s deep reverence for her family
history, her connection and reclamation of Kanien’kéha (Mohawk) language, and stands
as a refutation (even inversion) of colonial-settler practices that attempted to erase, and
assimilate Indigenous histories and identities. The Mohawk stage name consolidated her
‘right’ to the presentation of her particular history. Second, the name enabled Johnson to
coherently relate costume elements, such as the wampum tied at her waist, to a cultural
memory and to a repertoire that included poems like “The White Wampum.” Third, there
was a commercial value to the name, in that it buttressed her celebrity by positioning her
as an ‘exotic’ Indigenous star in a marketplace that was commodifying Indigeneity.
Ironically, Johnson uses this name for a performance at a meeting of an “Indian
Association” whose politics were explicitly devoted to assimilation. Would the audience
of the “Indian Association” have been aware of this strategy of re-appropriation? Would
the histories to which this name alluded have been self-evident or even discernible? It
seems unlikely. In fact, the name was co-opted by audiences and critics in the “Indian
Princess” trope. By December 16th 1893, The Chicago Tribune referred to Johnson as the
“Indian Princess” who “[c]aptured Boston.” It featured a sketch of “Princess Johnson” in
costume:
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Figure 33.
Significantly, reviews of Johnson’s performances in Boston rarely mention her repertoire
or comment on the performance of her selections. Instead, they concentrate on Johnson’s
personal history. The subtitle under the image of “Princess Johnson” in The Chicago
Tribune identifies her as the daughter of “Owanonsyshon (the man with a big house), the
well-known chief of the Six Nations.” The Tribune mentions her father’s “cultivat[ion],”
and claims that her “poetical expression” can be “owe[d]” to her mother, Emily S.
Howells, who comes “from a well-known and gifted literary family.” The paper also
refers to Johnson’s grandfather, and asserts that “for forty years [he] was the Speaker of
the Six Nations Council” and “fought for the British in 1812” (“Indian Princess Captures
Boston”).
The addition of artifacts to the costume that Johnson used for her American
performances was an on-going process, that had already started in Canada in the second
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half of her debut year 1892, and which would continue well into the later years of her
career. In this sense, she was adapting her performance approach to American audience
expectations and their admiration for the alleged ‘authenticity’ of her costume and
portrayals. For her American audiences, this very aspect was key to the exotic appeal of
her “Indian” persona; this version of Indigeneity, in which she becomes almost a novelty
“Indian”, is what these audiences were interested in seeing. Consequently, her
performances in the United States generally featured her as using only one costume—her
“Indian” costume—that continued to undergo substantial transformation. As early as
1896, there is evidence that Johnson began using a knife and various scalps in her
performance, and that she added ermine, wampum, and silver ornaments onto her
costume. For her performances in Grand Rapids, Michigan in November 1896, reviewers
remarked with interest on the “Indian Trappings, Jewels, Ocolps, Wampum, Fire Bags,
Weird Symbols” featured within them. The reviews note that the repertoire was largely
devoted to “embod[ying the] fancy of Indian legends and romance.” One review specifies
what she performed for this Grand Rapids crowd: “ ‘Ojisdah73, the White Star of the
Mohawks’ in which was related a thrilling incident of the wars between the Mohawk and
Huron tribes, ‘The Cattle Thief’ a tragic poem including a Cree maiden’s appeal; ‘The
White Wampum’ in which was told a legend of the prairies and the northern lights, and
‘His Sister’s Son,’ showing the tragic results of the system of civilizing the Indians of the
British Northwest […]” (“Mohawk Princess of Royal Indian Blood and Native Indian
Eloquence”).
According to this reviewer, Johnson “embodied” these selections with the help of
many props—some of which were new. The first new performance prop was “her

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father’s steel dagger” which she carried “in her belt, using it to portray passages in her
readings.” Presumably, a dramatic recitation of Ojistoh (what the reviewer names
“Ojisdah” 74) benefitted from the use of the knife. This poem recounts the capture of a
Mohawk woman named Ojistoh by the Hurons and relates how a Huron man tries to
“bribe” Ojistoh to join their nation:
With evil Huron speech: ‘Would I consent
To take of wealth? be queen of all their tribe?
Have wampum, ermine?’ Back I flung the bribe
Into their teeth, and said, “While I have life
Know this—Ojistoh is the Mohawk’s wife.’ (in Gerson and Strong-Boag 115)
The poem describes how Ojistoh is captured and “flung […] on [the Huron’s] pony’s
back” (115) and “bound with buckskin to his hated waist.” She uses her feminine wiles to
secure her release: “I smiled, and laid my cheek against his back:/ ‘Loose thou my hands,’
I said. ‘This pace let slack. […] I like thee better than my Mohawk now.’” (emphasis in
original Gerson and Strong-Boag 116). Pretending to be disloyal and unfaithful to her
Mohawk husband, Ojistoh convinces her Huron captor to “cut the cords” and “cease[…]
the maddening haste” (116) Then she uses her knife to obtain her freedom:
I wound my arms about his tawny waist;
My hand crept up the buckskin of his belt;
His knife hilt in my burning palm I felt;
One hand caressed his cheek, the other drew

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Some suggestion here that Johnson pronounced “Ojistoh” as “Ojisdah.” This would suggest
that Johnson was using typical Mohawk pronunciation in her recitation of these poems. In the
language of Kanien’kéha (Mohawk) “t” consonants are pronounced with the same sound as “d”
consonants within the English language.
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The weapon softly—‘I love you, love you,’
I whispered, ‘I love you as my life.’
And—buried in his back his scalping knife. (116)
The poem concludes with a gripping description of Ojistoh’s return “[b]ack to [her]
Mohawk and [her] home.” She steals away with the Huron’s horse by “gallop[ing] like a
northern gale” (116). She soon comes upon her home, and her love:
And then my distant Mohawk’s fires aflame
I saw, as nearer, nearer still I came,
My hands all wet, stained with a life’s red dye,
But pure my soul, pure as those stars on high—
‘My Mohawk’s pure white star, Ojistoh, still am I.’ (116)
What is noteworthy here is how the props of the costume supported the performance of
the poem – how Johnson embodies her repertoire. The poem specifically mentions
wampum, ermine and a knife, which are made visible to the audience by the use of these
elements in her performance costume. Johnson even refers to the knife that she uses in
her performance as a “scalping knife.” Even more interesting is that, for this performance
in Michigan, she also adds, to her waist, “a scalp of an American Sioux Indian taken by
an Indian of the fierce blood tribe” (“Mohawk Princess of Royal Indian Blood and Native
Indian Eloquence”). Here, Johnson’s “Indian” costume becomes a key part of her
presentation: the knife, dramatically supporting her embodiment of Ojistoh, and the
scalps, heightening the dramatic appeal of her ‘script’.
In other instances, the props were incorporated to generate the story that she was
presenting, rather than to merely support representative action. The same review of
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Johnson’s Grand Rapids performances suggests that her poem “The White Wampum”
was “interpreted from a wampum belt, the most precious thing she possesses” (“Mohawk
Princess of Royal…”). Johnson’s collections do not have a poem named “The White
Wampum.” However, there are some newspapers references to a section of a poem under
that title – a poem entitled Dawendine which was published in 1894, in her collection The
White Wampum. The poem tells a story, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers
Romeo and Juliet: The main character, Dawendine, falls in love with a man who goes to
battle with her own brother. She waits to hear the “war-cry” which will confirm the death
of either her kinsman or her lover:
And she listens, listens, listens—till a war-cry rends the night,
Cry of her victorious lover, monarch he of all the height;
And his triumph wakes the horrors,
Kills the silence of the night.
Heart of her! it throbs so madly, then lies freezing in her breast,
For the icy hand of death has chilled the brother she loved best ;
And her lover dealt the deathblow ;
And her heart dies in her breast. (in Gerson and Strong-Boag 113)
Urged on by her mother, Dawendine uses wampum to “sue for peace” between her lover
and her family:
And she hears her mother saying, “Take thy belt of wampum
white;
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Go unto yon evil savage while he glories on the height;
Sing and sue for peace between us:
At his feet lay wampum white. (113)
She presents the wampum belt to her brother’s “hated foeman,” but he demands more:
Answers he, ‘O Dawendine! I will let thy kinsmen be,
I accept thy belt of wampum; but my hate demands for me
That they give their fairest treasure,
Ere I ley thy kinsmen be. (113)
By November of 1894, Johnson had already acquired a belt of white wampum to use in
this second half of her performance. Johnson referred to this important costume piece, in
a June 1894 article in The Windsor Evening Record as a “‘Ladies Belt’” (“Fate of the Red
Man)76, and explained the ceremonial function of the belt in peace making:
In a case of murder, the old Indian law of ‘blood for blood’ is invariable, save in
some instance where an unmarried female relation of the murderer presents this belt
to the avenger and petitions that he allow the offender to go unavenged; the avenger
is bound to accept the offering of peace. (“Fate of the Red Man”).
Johnson’s theatrical use of these performance accessories continued to contribute to her
celebrity. A review of an 1897 performance in Chicago states that:

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In the same article from the Windsor Evening Record, Johnson offers that she also had a
“purple” belt, which she refers to as a “belt of hospitality.” She explains
: “the circles are emblematic of a polished basswood bowl where is served the national dish:
beaver- tail soup.” (“Fate of the Red Man”).
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Miss Johnson has a collection of Indian relics which would almost cause an
ethnologist to turn green with envy. Her native costume […] glitters with silver
ornaments and beads hundreds of years old. Dangling at her girdle there is an
American Sioux scalp, taken at Fort McCloud by a Canadian Blood Indian, while
the necklace of bears’ claws which encircles her brown throat has a history almost
as thrilling (“Woman’s World”).
By 1898, Johnson would again add to this costume, by obtaining another scalp,
apparently “taken by her people” and attaching it to her costume’s waist (“This Young
Indian Woman”).
Figure 34. “To Appear Here.

ONE NIGHT ONLY.” The Fort
Wayne Sentinel (Fort Wayne,
Indiana). 23 November 1896.
Page 4.
According to American reviewers it was “in her role of Indian interpreter of the
laws and customs of her people that [Johnson …] made her money and success” (“This
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Young Indian Woman”). By 1898, Johnson was using interjections and explanations in
her performances. In her Johnstown, New York performance that same year, these
interjections and explanations were said to create a more appealing performance: “Miss
Johnson interspersed many bright and witty anecdotes and introductory remarks
throughout the programme, which served to bring her in complete touch with the
audience” (“A Talented Young Woman”). It was this kind of performance practice that
led Johnson to be heralded in Chicago, as “Tekahionwake, the one woman who is ranked
[as one of] the six great interpreters of Canadian life […]” (“Poetess of the Iroquois.
Tekahionwake”). Clearly, the accessories and props that she used in her performances
helped her in this explanatory role. As such, the composition of and the material
additions to her performance costume had an enhanced appeal and value as “relics”; they
were more than just decorative additions in as much as they enabled her to embody her
repertoire, and to interpret it for the audience (“A Daughter of the Iroquois).
It is in her role as “interpreter” of her Canadian “Indian” identity that Johnson
would become famous to American audiences; even in the later part of her performance
history in the United States such a legacy could not be shaken. By June of 1907, Johnson
embarked upon another major tour of the Chautauqua circuit, in the United States.
Appearing in locations such as Springfield, Missouri; Clay Center, Kansas; Fort Scott,
Kansas; and Emporia, Kansas, Johnson had to live up to lofty expectations. Notices
promoting her appearance at the Slayton Lyceum announced that she would “be the best
novelty entertainment ever offered to the Chautauqua Assemblies.” By this time, Johnson
was no longer read by American audiences as an advocate or “olive branch of the
Iroquois.” By now, she had become a “novelty entertainment”—an “Indian Princess”
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performing exclusively on this American circuit as “Tekahionwake”. The Times of Clay
Center, Kansas lists her as one of the performers in the right hand column of the
following advertisement:
Figure 35. Advertisement for Chautauqua Performance. The Times. Clay Center, Kansas.
Image not to original size.
In these performances, Johnson does not make use of a sequence of costuming.
Rarely is there any mention of her requiring space backstage to perform a quick change.
What the ephemera, performance notices, and clippings suggest is that Johnson, when
performing in the United States, was presenting a distinctly recognizable persona,
performing in only one “Indian” costume that met the expectations of this major
American market.
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Performances back in Canada: E. Pauline Johnson (Not Tekahionwake)
In her American performance tours, Johnson reinforced her Kanien’kéha
(Mohawk) identity through the use of a single Indigenous costume, exoticized billing,
and the addition of valuable props that reflected the material culture mentioned in her
repertoire. However, when she performed in Canada she largely returned to her earlier
costuming conventions and altered her billing back to “E. Pauline Johnson.” During
Johnson’s early touring schedule, she regularly appeared in both the United States and
Canada. In between her performances for American audiences, she returned to familiar
locales in Canada. After her performance at the American Canoe Association in 1893, for
instance, Johnson performed once again at the Association Hall in Hamilton, Ontario.
There she reintroduced her well-known dual costuming sequence and introduced new
pieces. Her November 1893 repertoire for this performance consisted of the poems
“Stepping Stones” and “The Icicle Maiden.” In addition, she performed “At Half-Mast,”
using dialect. Although no extant text exists for “Stepping Stones,” her other selection
“The Icicle Maiden” perhaps refers to a poem, published in 1903 in Canadian Born,
under the title “Lady Icicle.”77 In this piece, Johnson anthropomorphizes the icicle as a
“Lady.” This “Little Lady Icicle” lives in the “northland” where she “dream[s],” “wak[es]”
“laugh[s],” and “sing[s],” celebrating the joy and beauty of “snow” and winter (Gerson
and Strong-Boag 144).

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Yet again, the relationship between Johnson’s performance history and publication history
reveals how her archive is shaped through the performance of this work for audiences.
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This was a fitting choice for an early winter performance in Hamilton. The appeal of the
evening was enhanced by the performance of her other poem “At Half Mast,”78 that
showcased Johnson’s oral versatility. A review in The Globe noted that this performance
in “dialect” was received with much pleasure. The poem is about a talented singer named
Billy, a rancher in the West, who returns home in the east to take care of his dying mother.
One can imagine Johnson speaking with a twang in such lines as “‘Twas the only time I
ever seen poor Bill that he didn’t laugh/Or sing an’ kick up a rumpus an’ racket around,
and chaff” (Gerson and Strong-Boag 140-141). The diction used in this poem calls for
vocal artistry; words and phrases such as “feller”, “jist a-thinkin’,” and “a-ranchin’ ” have
a strikingly different flavour from that of Johnson’s other poems. Given that Owen Smily,
Johnson’s stage partner, had great command over accents and used them effectively, it is
perhaps not surprising that Johnson drew inspiration from this and added this popular
feature to her own vocal repertoire.
Johnson changed up the second half of this Hamilton performance by appearing in
her “handsome and striking Indian costume” (“MUSIC AND THE DRAMA: THE
STUDENTS AT THE GRANDE”) and by performing pieces that had previously
appealed to American audiences, including “A Cattle Thief” and “The White Wampum.”
Practice and repetition in the U.S. may have polished her presentation, because one
reviewer noted that Johnson performed with “a greater degree of power, finish, and
effectiveness than ever before” (“MUSIC AND THE DRAMA: THE STUDENTS AT
THE GRAND”).

78
Significantly, Gerson and Strong-Boag suggest that “there is no record of this poem’s
publication before its appearance in Canadian Born in June 1903” (139-144). It seems that
Johnson had developed many of these poems, which were subsequently published in Canadian
Born, in her stage performances.
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The next month, December 1893, Pauline Johnson performed at Indian
Associations in Boston and then returned to Canada to perform, once again, in southern
Ontario before a scheduled tour of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and
Massachusetts in late March 1894. The best attended of these Canadian performances
was the one at the Atheneum Club on Christmas Eve. Here, Johnson would use, once
again, more than one costume. For this December 24th evening performance with partner
Owen Smiley, Johnson appeared in a number of dresses. The reviewer describes how “in
her first number Miss Johnson wore a handsome gown of grey satin brocade, with pale
pink and lace, which she afterwards changed for her beautiful Indian costume. In her last
recital, also an Indian story, her gown was of soft blue silk crepon, made with full sleeves,
and fastened across the breast with a net work [?] of gold cord. In the centre of which a
large jewel flashed and sparkled brightly” (“A PAGE FOR THE YOUNG FOLK”).
There is evidence that Johnson used a similar costuming sequence (with Johnson
appearing first in a Victorian dress) throughout her other early Canadian performances.
By 1894, Johnson’s advertising material went to great lengths to emphasize the
dramatic appeal of a ‘new’ “Indian costume.” The image below from the Canadian
Entertainment Bureau magazine features her exclusively in this costume, and even seems
to suggest to viewers that Johnson would appear in not just one Indian costume, but in
“effective Indian costumes” (emphasis mine).
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Figure 36. Advertisement page pulled from 1894 Canadian Entertainment Bureau
catalogue. Canadian entertainment bureau, Toronto, Ont. -- [electronic resource] [s.l. :
s.n., 1894?] ([Toronto]: Toronto Lith. Co.) Jos. Patrick.
Such advertising material was somewhat confusing, if not misleading, in that it appeared
to set up audience expectations for Johnson to appear only in Indian costuming.
Therefore, the retention of her Victorian dress/Indian costume sequence in her Canadian
performances provoked a certain amount of surprise and comment. Nellie McClung, the
famous Canadian suffragette, drew attention to this after attending a Pauline Johnson
performance in Manitoba, Canada. She describes how Johnson’s performance costuming
contradicted her advertising, and in the process, overturned the expectations of the
audience:
Pauline's advertising had shown only the Indian girl in her beaded chamois costume
and feather headdress, so when a beautiful young woman in white satin evening
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dress came out of the vestry door and walked to the platform, there was a gasp of
surprise from the audience. Pauline smiled at us reassuringly, knowing what was in
our minds. ‘I am going to be a white woman first,’ she said in her deep voice, ‘the
Indian part will follow...’ In the second part of the program, the grand lady was
gone and a lithe Indian girl took her place, telling us stories of her people, and their
battle for existence. (McClung 29)
As far as the evidence suggests, this kind of “costume recital”—Johnson’s play with dual
costuming and multiple characters—only occurred in her performances across Canada.
For example, in her 1895 Windsor appearance, Johnson performed “selections of her own
writing” in both her “Indian costume” and another dress. Presumably, her selections
“Stepping Stones,” “Beyond the Blue” and “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” were performed in
her evening gown(s), while “The White Wampum” and “Ojistoh” were performed in her
“Indian costume.” (“E Pauline Johnson: She Gives an Excellent Program at the Methodist
Church”).80
Another major difference between appearances north and south of the border,
centered on the name she used in her performance billing, in that, what she used in
Canada differed from her early 1894 American performances. When she returned to
Canada after her appearances in Boston, she did not appear under the name
“Tekahionwake” (which she had used in Boston). This is evident in the The Globe and
Mail’s announcement on January 29 1894 of Johnson’s upcoming dual recital with
Smily: “Miss Pauline Johnson will give several of her new compositions, such as

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When Johnson had to wear only one costume, consistently it was her “gowns” that she
preferred to wear in Canadian contexts. For her 1895 performance in Lady Laurier’s drawing
room, she wore only a “gown of white brocade.”
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“Wolverine,” “Cherry” and “Temptation.”81 (“MUSIC AND THE DRAMA: THE
ATTRACTIONS AT THE THEATRES…”). Again, The Globe lists Johnson as “Miss E.
Pauline Johnson” in announcements of her performance in February 1894 at Convocation
Hall of Victoria College (University of Toronto). Similarly, reviews in March 1894
mention “Miss Pauline Johnson[‘s] […] successful recitals […] at Welland, Port Dover,
Caledonia and other towns” (“MUSIC AND THE DRAMA: The Young Liberals’
Concert Next Week”). By April, for her performance in Windsor, she was still billed in
local papers as “Miss Pauline Johnson.” Canadian advertising material (such as shown in
Figure 36) indicates that prominence was given to the name “Miss E. Pauline Johnson”
and that her Mohawk stage name was given in much smaller, almost inconspicuous, print.
Figure 37. “Methodist Church.” The Windsor Evening Record. 4 February 1895. Pg. 4.

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The Globe suggests that “Temptation” was a new piece, but that she had performed it earlier in
March of 1892. See chapter 1. The selection “Wolverine” was new and echoed the concern
expressed in other pieces like “The Cattle Thief” about the “dehumanize[ing]” impulses that
characterize “genocide” (see Strong-Boag “E Pauline Johnson Constructs the New Nation”).
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This nomenclature was retained for her performances further west in Canada. In
Winnipeg, for example, posters notified audiences of “E. Pauline Johnson[’s] Costume
Recitals.” Even though she might have been known as the “Indian Poet Reciter” or
“Indian Poet-elocutionist” to these audiences, and have used images of herself in her
“Indian” costume to publicize her performance, she generally did not appear in notices
under the name “Tekahionwake.”
Manitoba Morning Free Press (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) · Fri, Feb 3, 1899 · Page 3
http://www.newspapers.com/image/65304137 Downloaded on Jul 3, 2014
Copyright © 2014 Newspapers.com. All Rights Reserved.
Figure 38. Manitoba Figure 39. “Music and the Drama.”

Morning Free Press. 3 Manitoba Morning Free Press. 2
February 1899. Pg 3 February 1899.
It is clear that Johnson’s billing eventually became more and more specific for her
Canadian tours, in ways that her billing in the U.S. and England did not. Her letterhead
for her 1905-1906 season included tribal identification (“The Mohawk Author
Entertainer”), and noted that the programme for this season would be “All Canadian.”
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Figure 40. From Joseph Keppler Jr. Papers. Reel 7. Slide 203. Cornell Library.
See Johnson “My Dear Mr. Keppler.”
Johnson’s billing in Canada would retain this tribal distinction for her “Farewell Tour”
with Walter McRaye and to the end of her performance career in 1907.
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Figure 41. Pauline Johnson’s Letter to Joseph Keppler. Joseph Keppler Jr. Iroquois
Papers. Reel 7, Slide 258. Cornell University Library. See Johnson “Big Chief.”
No longer just an “Indian” poet reciter, she was now billed as “E. Pauline Johnson
‘Tekahionwake’: The Mohawk Poet-Entertainer” as indicated by the letter above (Figure
41). Even Johnson’s calling card (see below) “ostensibly distributed to booking agents,
well connected fans, and potential creative collaborators announce[d] her tribal
distinction” (Evans 109)
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Figure 42. Johnson’s name card. Pauline Johnson Archives McMaster University. Series
10, file 11.
The kind distinct tribal identification now seen in Johnson’s performance billing is
introduced in current literature on American Indian Literary nationalism as a “new line of
inquiry” (Cox and Heath-Justice 5).82 While academic analysis of its literary contexts
may be “new”, Johnson herself had already been advocating for specificity of tribal
national identification in literary portrayal, as early as 1892, in her essay, “A Strong Race
Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” (as discussed in chapter one of this
dissertation). She deplored the use of the generic “Indian” and the lack of accurate and
specific cultural recognition of aboriginal peoples typically found in the literature of her
day:
[the Indian girl in modern fiction…] must not be one of womankind at large,
neither must she have an originality, a singularity that is not definitely ‘Indian.’ I
quote ‘Indian’ as there seems to be an impression amongst authors that such a thing

82
Tribal national specificity “encourages a shift in critical focus from identity, authenticity,
hybridity, and cross-cultural mediation to the Native intellectual, cultural, political, historical, and
tribal national contexts from which Indigenous literatures emerge” (Cox and Heath-Justice 5).
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as tribal distinction does not exist among the North American aborigines. The term
‘Indian’ signifies about as much as the term ‘European,’ but I cannot recall ever
having read a story where the heroine was described as ‘a European.’ (Johnson “A
Strong Race Opinion” in Gerson and Strong-Boag 178)
Perhaps it is the sentiment found in that final sentence that led Johnson to dedicate so
much of her performance effort to giving her characters distinct and unique “flesh and
blood existence,” and to introduce tribal distinction into her publicity and advertising
material. Johnson could only do that, however, in certain contexts and for certain
audiences; it was only within the borders of her own country, Canada, that she expressly
performed this distinction.
Across the Atlantic: Introducing the Apostle Tekahionwake and an “Indian Boadicea”
The analysis offered above suggests that throughout the early and middle part of her
performance career, Johnson had developed two separate acts—the performance of
“Tekahionwake” for American audiences, and the costume recital performance of “E.
Pauline Johnson” (the Mohawk Tekahionwake) for Canadian audiences. In each of these
performance spheres, Johnson played with Indigeneity in different ways. In Canada,
Johnson experimented with a multiplicity of characters—developing a costuming
sequence whereby she often began her performance in a Victorian evening gown and
then changed into her “Indian dress.” For American audiences, her “Indian” character
was more exclusively performed, and her “Indian” costume included acquired accessories
and props to add dramatic and illustrative effects to her poems.
Johnson’s differing approaches illustrate Kate Flint’s suggestion that the image of
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the “iconic Indian” was fundamental to the expansion of the new nation of the United
States (1). I will add to Flint’s argument by proposing that a vision of Indigeneity was
equally important to the development of Canadian nationalism, but that this was a
different vision of Indigeneity performed by Johnson herself. Flint also argues that the
“Indian” was “central to Britain’s conceptualization of the whole American continent”
(2). If so, how did Johnson’s performance in London demonstrate an understanding of
that conceptualization, and play with its limits?
Between her American and Canadian tours, Johnson travelled twice to London,
England: first, in June of 1894, and next in June and July of 1906. Her first tour to the
British capital was a momentous occasion in her career, worthy of celebration. Before her
departure, in April of 1894, Johnson’s family gave her a Bon Voyage party in Brantford
at the Kerby House. Her sister and brother—Evelyn (Eva) Johnson and Allen Johnson—
travelled with her as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with Johnson continuing on alone
to New York where she boarded the Cunard steamship Eturua for Britain (Keller).
Interestingly, the performance style she chose for her first 1894 appearances in
London seems, at first glance, to be similar to the style used in her early American
performances. And yet, in England, Johnson emphasized her status as a “Canadian Indian”
within the larger paradigm of the “iconic Indian” character that had been constructed for
the American public. Clearly, Johnson’s performances in England were memorable. An
obituary for Mr. Martin Anderson, the owner of “Cynicus Castle” describes the
“bohemian” performance by Pauline Johnson in her “Red Indian dress, declaiming
barbaric war songs” and “scar[ing] Keir Hardie stiff” (“Death of Popular Caricaturist”).
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However, Johnson offered more than just an exoticized and stereotypical persona
to her English audiences. An interview she did with a reporter (identified only as P.A.H.)
for the London periodical The Sketch hints at more complex objectives and strategies.
The article clarifies some of the dynamics of Johnson’s performance, the props used
within it, and the ‘characters’ she constructed for her London appearances. First, there is
a reference to Johnson’s stage name:
TEKAHIONWAKE
Do not be alarmed, gentle reader. This is no word puzzle. It is the name of a
charging Mohawk Indian lady who has come to England tossing the songs of the
Iroquois in the English tongue. (“Tekahionwake”).
This billing is similar to that used by Johnson for her tours across the United States.
Secondly, Johnson evidently used the practice of showing “things” in her performance in
London. This was reminiscent of her illustrative use of costuming and props and of the
interpretive stance of her American performances. The article notes that “on a screen
were hung wampums which, it may be, have checked many a butchery in the past.” In
addition, the costume itself was presented as a relic consisting of “a fringed tunic of
buckskin, ermine tails, and bracelets and necklaces of bear claws and panther teeth.” The
sum of this presentation “all told of one who was proud of her Indian lineage and
associations” and recalled Johnson’s ‘lecture’ theatre format that she used in U.S. But
there were also new ‘things’ in this performance—materials that did not appear in other
descriptions of Johnson’s American appearances. For instance, the author noted that “on
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the mantlepiece rested the most hideous of masks, the bearded, goggle-eyed mask of the
Mystical Medicine Man” as well as photographic depictions:
Just then my eye chanced to fall upon the picture in which a Cherokee Indian,
brandishing a scalping-knife in a most murderous attitude, stands with foot upon
the throat of a writhing Mohawk: ‘But you can't say you like that sort of thing, Miss
Johnson?’ ‘I love everything Indian, and I am fond of reciting my poem, 'The
Avenger,' which that picture illustrates.’ (“Tekahionwake”).
Such contextualization of Johnson’s performance firmly placed her entertainment in the
tradition of performing the “Imaginary Indian.” But, in London, Johnson did something
more than just display mementos. She stated that she was “on a mission”:
‘I am glad you have come to see me,’ said Miss Johnson; ‘for I know The Sketch
well in Canada. You want to learn what my purpose is in coming to England. I am
here on a mission, and if you like to read these letters from the Earl of Aberdeen
and Lieutenant-Governor Kirkpatrick of Ontario you will see that I have their full
sympathy and approval.’ (emphasis mine, “Tekahionwake”)
This explicit framing of ‘missionary’ intention resulted in Johnson being referred to,
throughout the article, as an “evangelist” and merits some brief critical consideration.
Historically and traditionally, the “mission” to bring European ‘civilization’ (i.e. culture
and religion) to the ‘new world’ of the colonies, moved on an east-to-west transatlantic
trajectory. Johnson reverses a sense of this flow by performing in the role of (what
Edward E. Andrews terms) the “Native Apostle” at the very heart of an imperial and
colonizing power. She approaches her English audiences as if they, and the culture they
represent, need ‘civilizing’ by learning from Indigenous and particularly Iroquois nations.
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Much of The Sketch article draws on language that affirms this ‘evangelical’
perception, noting that Johnson’s goal was to “awaken [London audiences] to a truer
sense of the mental power and high qualities of the people who have the best claim to the
title-deeds of the vast continent of North America.” Johnson aims for this “awaken[ing]”
through the invocation of Indigenous histories and nationalism and the sophistication of
the Iroquoian nations.83 She sternly reminds English readers of the important role of the
Iroquois in alliances with the English in support of their colonial wars and underscores
the historical bonds formed between these two nations:
You English, who owe so much to the Indian--where would your British
America have been had he helped the French as he helped you long years
ago?--you have a very poor idea of the grandeur of the Indian nature. I
daresay, you, like the rest, think and write of him as a poor degraded savage,
walking round with a scalping knife in one hand and a tomahawk in the other,
seeking whom he may devour. Go to my home on the Grand River Reserve,
in Ontario, and you will find my countrymen under a free Constitution,
framed more than four centuries ago by that greatest of Indian statesmen,
Hiawatha--no god, as dear, dead Longfellow pictured him. Here our chiefs
are elected, our councils are conducted, and our civil policy is decided as
nearly as possible by the rules of the ancient league. The tokens of the bear,
the wolf, and the turtle form part of a coat of arms older than many European
devices, and represent a free commonwealth, older than any in Europe except

83
Johnson had exhibited this kind of Iroquoian nationalism in print before: “The history of the
Iroquois is unquestionably the most interesting of the myriad native tribes in the Americas from
the time of the formation of the great Iroquois Confederacy more than four hundred years ago,
down to the present day” (“The Iroquois of the Grand River” in Harper’s Weekly).
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those of England and Switzerland, and perhaps, two of the little republics
hidden away among the Pyrenees and Apennines. (“Tekahionwake”)
This “mission” allowed her to use the red blanket as a metaphor for a kind of colonizing
inversion—an inversion of the acculturation practised by the British in North America.
As a powerful symbol of Indigenous identity, the red blanket was an important material
addition to her performance. A separate article in The Daily Derby noted that “At her
rooms [Johnson] show[ed] her visitors interesting mementos of the ceremony at which
the Duke of Connaught was elected by Miss Johnson’s tribe as one of their chiefs” (The
latest evangelist”). At a later date, Walter McRaye, one of Johnson’s stage partners,
placed the use of this significant accessory in context:
HRH Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was later to become the governor general of
Canada, visited this country [the land we now call Canada] in 1869. He was a guest
of the Johnsons and was made a Chief of the Six Nations. Pauline's father and
grandfather, which Chief George Buck of the Onondagas, led the ceremony that
installed Queen Victoria's son as eligible to sit in the Council. The Iroquois gave
him the name "Kavakoudge", that is "The Flying Sun." During the ceremony a red
broadcloth blanket was used for a carpet, on which the Prince stood. Years
afterwards it was used by Pauline Johnson as a part of her native costume in her
recitations. (McRaye 22)
By deliberately cloaking herself in this red blanket in front of a British audience, Johnson
was subtly appropriating a historical ritual of conversion and national initiation. While
one can only speculate on the extent of deliberate intention underlying Johnson’s
performance, the allusion to the Iroquois initiation of British royalty into the Iroquois
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elite is quite clear. Here, “becoming Indian” is re-framed as something “royal” and
invested with status and power, thereby making it something to be desired.
By referencing the Iroquois adoption of a British prince, and “the fact that the
British owe[d] their 1812 victory against the Americans to Iroquois warriors, and that this
put the British under a strong obligation towards them” (Flint 279), Johnson underscores
a crucial British-Canadian relationship. In this way, she broadens the scope and
implications of a transatlantic connection, because, as Flint says, “ ‘the transatlantic’ is a
greatly weakened term if it is taken to apply to British-American traffic alone”(Flint 7).
This conventional understanding, articulated by Flint, was now being challenged by the
notion of Canadian and American Indigenous nationhoods as key and integral players in
transatlantic histories/movements and circuits.
Johnson’s performance of a particular “Canadian” Indigeneity afforded the British
press the opportunity to define Canada in contrast to the United States and to frame this
contrast around the differing relationships that their governments had with “the Indian.”
A review of Johnson’s performance in The Daily Derby took the position that “It is in the
United States where the Red Man does not receive his due, and Miss E. Pauline Johnson,
whose native name is Tekahionwake, has nothing but kind words for the Canadian
Government, whose treatment of ‘Mr. Lo,’ as current slang calls the Indian, has
prevented him from complete extinction” (“The latest evangelist”).
By the time of Johnson’s second tour to London in 1906, she was registered with
the Keith Rowse Entertainment Agency. This time Johnson travelled to London with her
stage partner, Walter McRaye, from New York to Southhampton on Canadian Pacific’s
Lake Champlain. They were initially billed as “Garden Party Entertainers” and were
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introduced to high society under the patronage of Lord and Lady Strathcona (Strathcona
was the Canadian High Commissioner in London). Upon arrival, Johnson’s social
calendar was immediately booked up—she was slated to perform at the Imperial
Institute’s Dominion Day Party (July 1st), invited for tea on the House of Commons
terrace, and booked for a meeting with Sir Arthur Pearson (the newspaper magnate) to
discuss the pieces she was commissioned to write for his Daily Express, during her stay
in London (Morgan 321).
Figure 43. Letter

from Agent to
Johnson. McMaster
University Pauline
Johnson archive.
Box 1, File 8.
The most publicized performance for this tour took place in Steinway Hall. For
this tour (according to press coverage), Johnson assumed the performance persona of
“Princess Tekahionwake.” As such, she was no longer presenting herself as having to
fulfill a “mission” but was presenting herself as an Indigenous version of royalty. Her
billing reflects this interesting shift of focus. The InterOcean noted her appearance as
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follows: “Princess Tekahionwake, Sister by Adoption of Duke of Connaught, Will Recite
From Her Own Works” (emphasis mine). This was suggestive of a kind of reverse
adoption—a kind of reverse ceremonial integration. By contrast, in 1894, Johnson had
referenced the inverse, in her performance with the red ceremonial blanket that alluded to
the ‘adoption’ of the Duke of Connaught by the Iroquois nation. Her 1906 performance
presentation re-instated the dynamic of British-Iroquois relations to its original state with
Johnson’s vision of Indigenous power, nationalism, and ruling rights subsumed in the
discourse of colonialism.
Figure 44. McMaster University Pauline Johnson archive
In this second tour, reviews of Johnson’s performance also began to align her with
the language and icons of a British national mythology, despite her efforts to cast her
presentation within the iconography of a distinct and powerful Canadian Indigenous
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identity. One review declared that “ ‘Princess Tekahionwake’s’ recitations consisted of
excerpts from her own works, which she delivered with fiery and impressive elegance.
Clad in her native garb, she looked like some Indian Boadicea demanding the allegiance
of her subjects.” Many reviews referred to Johnson as an “Indian Boadicea.” Such re-
framing of her performance was particularly significant in light of contemporaneous
English perceptions of the “Boadicea Group”. Completed in 1898 by Thomas
Thornycorft and erected on Westminster Bridge (Vandrei) in 1902, this sculpture marked
the resurgence of Boudicea as an important and recognizable national symbol. Boudicea
(AD 60/61), queen of the Iceni tribe in Britannia who led an uprising against the forces of
the Roman Empire, “projected a nationalistic motivation through the glorification of the
ancient British queen as an upholder of British nationality at a time of foreign oppression.
[…] Boadicea was reinvented as an upholder of Britain’s imperial might.” (169-170).
Several aspects of Johnson’s performance at Steinway Hall may have
strengthened this perceived alignment with the character of Boudicea. Johnson’s
inclusion of the scarlet blanket in her performance mirrored an image of Boudicea in the
British imagination that had been popularized by an eighteenth century painting by John
Opie. In addition, the selections that Johnson performed seemed to embody many aspects
of the Iceni Queen. Johnson’s performance of Ojistoh is suggestive of Boudicea as a
“powerful warrior…seeking to avenge political, sexual, and familial wrongs” (Hingley
and Unwin 165). As well, the plot of Johnson’s other selection, “As It Was in the
Beginning,” (presumably performed in some sort of revised and truncated stage version)
expressed the same kind of courageous resistance to foreign domination as that
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demonstrated by Boudicea.84 This selection opens with the story of a young girl who is
taken from her family by a “Blackcoat” minister to a mission school, in an assimilative
strategy reminiscent of the Ancient Roman practice of Britanno-Celtic assimilation:
The first grief of my life was when we reached the mission. They took my
buckskin dress off, saying I was now a little Christian girl and must dress like all
the white people at the mission. Oh, how I hated that still new calico dress and
those leather shoes! But, little as I was, I said nothing, only thought of the time
when I should be grown and do as my mother did, and wear buckskins and the
blanket.
My next serious grief was then I began to speak the English, that they forbade me
to use any Cree words whatever. The rule of the school was that any child heard
using its native tongue must get a slight punishment. I never understood it, I cannot
understand it now, why the use of my dear Cree tongue could be a matter for
correction or an action deserving punishment. (in Gerson and Strong-Boag 206-
207)
Esther describes her life in the mission, and her relationship with the Minister’s nephew
Laurence, who has fallen in love with her. Laurence is secretly advised by Father Paul to

84 Of
all of Johnson’s published materials, this story illustrates the materiality of her performance
in the most striking ways. The story continually references the powerful effect of buckskin. The
character, Esther, describes the “feeling[s] [that] overcame” her upon seeing it: “I was in the
Hudson’s Bay store when an Indian came in from the north with a large pack of buckskin. As
they unrolled it a dash of its insinuating odor filled the store. I went over and leaned above the
skins for a second, then buried my face in them, swallowing, drinking the fragrance of them, that
went to my head like wine. Oh, the wild wonder of that wood-smoked tan, the subtlety of it, the
untamed smell of it! I drank it into my lungs, my innermost being was saturated with it, till my
mind reeled and my heart seemed twisted with a physical agony. My childhood recollections
rushed upon me, devoured me.” It is out of the “beaded back of her buckskin dress” that Esther
takes out the poisoned flint arrow. Of course, Johnson’s costume featured a beaded bag.

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avoid marrying Esther on account of her family history and race, in a conversation that is
overheard by Esther:
‘…poor Esther comes of uncertain blood; would it do for you—the missionary’s
nephew, and adopted son, you might say—to marry the daughter of a pagan Indian?
Her mother is hopelessly uncivilized; her father has a dash of French somewhere—
half-breed, you know, my boy, half breed.’ Then with still lower tone and half-shut,
craft eyes, he added: ‘The blood is a bad, bad mixture, you know that; you know,
too, that I am very fond of the girl, poor dear Esther. I have tried to separate her
from evil pagan influences; she is the daughter of the church; I want her to have no
other parent; but you can never tell what lurks in a caged animal that has once been
while. My whole heart is with the Indian people, my son; my whole heart, my
whole life, has been devoted to brining them to Christ, but it is a different thing to
marry with one of them.’ (emphasis in original, Gerson and Strong-Boag 210)
After learning of the missionary’s ambitions for Laurence to marry a “Hudson’s Bay
factor’s daughter” instead, Esther’s frustration and jealousy coalesce into vengeful action:
I crept to the closet in my dark little room. I felt for a bundle I had not looked at
for years—yes, it was there, the buckskin dress I had worn as a little child when
they brought me to the mission. I tucked it under my arm and descended the stairs
noiselessly. I would look into the study and speak good-bye to Laurence; then I
would—
[…]
What was this in the beaded bag of my buckskin dress? this little thing rolled in
tan that my mother had given me at parting with the words, ‘Don’t touch much, but
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some time maybe you want it!’ Oh! I knew well enough what it was—a small flint
arrow-head dipped in the venom of some strange snake.
I knelt beside him and laid my hot lips on his hand. I worshipped him, oh, how,
how I worshipped him! Then again the vision of her baby face, her yellow hair—I
scratched his wrist twice with the arrow-tip. A single drop of red blood oozed up;
he stirred. I turned the lamp down and slipped out of the room—out of the house.
(emphasis in original, 211-212)
By the end of the story, Esther returns home to her mother and father, and learns that,
although she is suspected of Laurence’s murder, there is no proof.
Johnson’s 1906 London performance of these two selections, “Ojistoh” and “As It
Was in the Beginning,” attested to the power and force of both the Canadian-Iroquois and
female voice. This performance explored themes of dominance, resistance, bigotry and
vengeance common to the histories of Britain and of Canadian Indigenous peoples
(specifically Indigenous women), and to their national imaginaries. In effect, British
reviews that reframed Johnson’s performance persona as an “Indian Boudicea” now
allowed for the claiming of Johnson’s Indigenous story of valour and resistance as a
British story, driving an attribution of a broader performance identity in Britain than the
more singular one assigned to Johnson by her American audiences.
Pauline Johnson the “Show Person”
After an 1896 performance in Anne Arbor Michigan, Johnson’s (then) stage
partner Owen Smily broke into song while being interviewed for The Democrat. The
reviewer “having a pencil with [him], put […] down” the Smily improvisation as follows:
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Where do you go from here?
Say! where do you go from here?
We hear the same old question
Wherever we may appear.
The barber as he shaves us
Remarks with an accent queer
“Fifteen cents, t’ank’e sah!
Where do you go from here?”
And sometimes we go to a hotel
In trembling and in fear
Perhaps they don’t like “show people”
And want us to “go from here”
And when we go up to Heaven,
St. Peter looks out with a leer:
“Oh! yes, I know you’re “show people.”
Say, where do you go from here?” (“Johnson-Smily combination”)
Smily’s impromptu song neatly characterizes the itinerant nature of Johnson’s touring
career, as well as the critical engagement with it by more contemporary scholars. From
1893 to the end of her stage career in 1912, Pauline Johnson was mostly in transit. She
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travelled to a great number of places—circulating different ‘acts’. She was a “show
person” who was undoubtedly aware of the pervasive anti-theatrical prejudice that
characterized the society of her time. This biased discourse has persisted in evaluations of
Johnson after her death, with the gatekeepers of Canadian literature ignoring the
subtleties and complexity of her performance and regarding it instead as a sort of
necessary evil for Johnson herself.
The history presented in this chapter aims to trace, with rigorous detail, the
“show[womanship]” at work in Johnson’s performances. The analysis of the
performances focused on in this chapter suggests that Johnson—as a notable performer,
national icon, and Indigenous woman—operated within contexts that negotiated
Indigeneity in various ways. Johnson was an important player in the performance of
national identity formation within the entire “North Atlantic triangle”, not just within
Canadian paradigms and contexts.
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CHAPTER FOUR:
Beyond the ‘Double Wampum’: Partnerships, Dialects, and Multiple Personalities
Inconsistencies in Johnson’s Performance History
“Oh consistency! … How can one be consistent until the world ceases to change with the
changing days?”
–Pauline Johnson in Strong-Boag and Gerson Paddling 114
The analysis I offered in the last chapter functions as an initial mapping of the
various ways in which Johnson adapted her performances within the “North Atlantic
Triangle.” Johnson is interpolated into different national orientations to Indigenous
nationality—within each space Johnson travels through, the character of Indigeneity
alters, its limits and its borders change. Johnson’s performance of the character E. Pauline
Johnson, the “Canadian Girl,” was very different than the performance of “Tekahionwake”
that she developed for American audiences, and very different from the “missionary”
Tekahionwake or even “Indian Boudicea” that greeted British audiences in London.
The analysis of this performance history reveals some trends in critical approach.
At first glance, it appears to strengthen Carole Gerson’s and Veronica Strong-Boag’s
argument that it was Johnson’s “fate to be turned into the artificially noble, passionate,
self sacrificing Indian Maiden” (146)—that “the rapid and enduring circulation of
stereotypes across the transatlantic” (Flint 3) was so forceful that even Johnson, despite
her own philosophical and performative stance, was unable to escape its impact and
demands.
The strength of that argument seems, at first, to be supported by Johnson’s own
admissions. As Lorraine York notes, Johnson “present[ed] herself as at the mercy of her
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celebrity; in a letter that she wrote describing how she had to go on stage instead of
travelling to her brother’s funeral, she bitterly described herself as “‘the mere doll of the
people and slave to money’” (qtd. in Johnston 126). Though Johnson herself admits to
this pressure, a vision of her crossing the Atlantic as the “Imaginary Indian” at the will of
external demands—the Princess that the white American and British marketplace
desired—also serves to bolster an antitheatrical bias and rhetoric that dissuades critical
engagement with Johnson’s performance history. In this framework, performance is again
viewed, not as a site of personal empowerment and assertion, but rather as a site of a
more passive, merely self-sacrificing survival. Charles Mair, in his introduction to
Johnson’s collection The Moccasin Maker, posits that it was through poetry, not theatre,
that Johnson’s (and so many other authors’) sophisticated identity politics flourished. He
claims that economic concerns were the only reason for Johnson’s appearance on the
stage:
in a period when all alike were engrossed in a stern struggle for existence, the
poets, as we know there were some, were forced, like other people, to earn,
by labour of hand, their daily bread. If in England their [the poets’] struggle
was severe, in Canada it was unrelenting; a bald prospect, certainly, which
lasted, one is sorry to say, far down in our literary history. Probably owing to
this, and partly through advice, and partly by inclination, Miss Johnson took
to the public platform for a living.
Mair’s explanation of Johnson’s history attempts to excuse, to a degree, her choice to
perform. His introduction offers a rationale for the choices that Johnson made regarding
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her performance (as discussed in my previous chapter): Johnson’s purchase of props, the
‘anthropologicalization’ of her performing persona, her costuming sequence, her
participation within a marketplace of commodified Indigeneity as both seller and
collector, her disingenuous performance with wampum—all adding up to forced
‘inauthenticity’. Such a reading of Johnson’s performances asserts that her advocacy for
Indigenous nationalism, her determinism, only persists through her literature in “spite of,”
as Margaret Atwood has said, Johnson’s performance of her Indigeneity (Atwood in
Martin). According to this criticism, the accusation of inauthenticity or artificiality is the
inevitable result – the “fate” of Johnson’s performance history.
Rosemary Bank addresses this sort of interpretative framework. She disparages
the “insistent inscription” by critics, of “native Americans as ‘things’ in history and
culture, acted upon, incapable of effective counter measures or actions in their own part”
(460). She suggests that the way to “circumvent [this] insistent inscription…is to extend
to theatre research ethnography’s idea that people exploited by progress and empire
seldom are passive about their victimization” (Bank 462). Bank’s methodological
recommendation (even if focused on the antebellum period) is useful in that it offers an
invitation that is significant to any research engaging with Johnson’s (and late nineteenth
century) performance history—it asks me to consider the exceptionality of Johnson’s
performance. It proposes a way out of the antitheatrical bias underlying such
interpretations as Mair’s, namely that performance was something Johnson ‘had’ to do—
that if it were not for her poverty, she would never have “read” wampum in Johnstown,
raised her “Ojistoh knife” in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recited “The Riders of the Plains”
at Massey Hall in Toronto, “rendered” humorous pantomimes and sketches in Revelstoke,
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displayed a “bearded, goggle-eyed mask of the Mystical Medicine Man” in her Portland
Road Holland Park West apartment in London, or changed from an evening gown into a
buckskin dress in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
An analytic framework that views Johnson’s performance as a “forced” discipline
completely ignores the import, as well as the complexity that emerges from its mutability.
If Johnson was, as Mair claims, “forced” to perform (Johnson herself admits that, at times,
she was unwilling to do so), then Johnson’s sophisicated and deliberate negotiation of
performance motivations, choices and strategies must necessarily be rejected by critics. It
follows, according to this criticism, that the episodes, stories, sketches, characters, ideas
that Johnson did embody had to be disappointing, silly, unsophisticated, un-poetic, and
therefore quite unworthy of serious analysis. I hope that the performance history outlined
in the previous chapter has changed this interpretation—this static understanding of
Johnson’s performance. At the same time, it is clear that Johnson made some sacrifices—
ones that may be read as disappointing and at odds with the Indigenous nationalism and
advocacy present in her prose work. This contradiction is especially true of her
performances in the U.S., but to focus solely on those performances and compromises
within these boundaries, fails to do justice to the larger exceptional scope of Johnson’s
theatrical past, and defies the deeper characterization of her performance that I present in
this dissertation.
For any researcher of Johnson, fixity is elusive. Johnson is known for flouting
consistency. She herself said, “Oh consistency! … How can one be consistent until the
world ceases to change with the changing days?” (in Strong-Boag and Gerson Paddling
114). It is in the inconsistencies of her performance history that reveal Johnson’s
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resistance to her “fate”—where her ‘push back’ against the constant interpolation within
markets, within stereotypical structures, becomes even further evident. In these spaces a
new understanding and appreciation of some of Johnson’s performance choices emerges,
and her performance once more offers a vision that has nothing to do with authenticity,
but much more to do with a theatre artist’s experimentation with new traditions: with
humor and with traditions of performance that were influential to her artistic development
at the turn of the century.
In this chapter, I will focus on some ‘consistent inconsistencies’ related to
Johnson’s performance history. First, I discuss Johnson’s partnership with McRaye, and
how it marked her turn to a dialect performance style—one that distinctly positioned her
work between the traditions of minstrelsy and elocution. Following that, I discuss the
‘inconsistency’ related to her costuming. Newspaper accounts of Johnson appearances
assert that by 1900, Johnson performed first in her “Indian dress” and then in her “other”
silk dress. As I have already mentioned in Chapter Two of this dissertation, to date, this
sequence of costuming has, in most critical assessments (like that of Rick Monture, and
further illustrated by Charlotte Gray), been read as symbolic of assimilative forces in
Indigenous history and illustrative of Johnson’s tacit concession to this process (see
Monture 129). Perhaps this is why Johnson’s ‘other dress’ which is preserved in the
collection at the Woodland Cultural Centre, receives so little critical attention, compared
to Johnson’s more spectacular “Indian” costume that remains on permanent view through
the Museum of Vancouver website. However, during the second half of her performance,
and in her “other” dresses, Johnson largely performed society sketches and satirical
pieces. Described below, these performances speak to Johnson’s command over
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completely different styles and genres. They also suggest that Johnson was staging more
than just her ‘selves’ or ‘double identities’ in performance. It is specifically in these
performances, in her “other” dresses that she draws on comediettas which were in broad
circulation by the turn of the century, a genre that she used in order to critique settler
society—to lampoon the customs of an upper class after giving a more earnest portrayal
of lower class characters.
An exploration of these consistent ‘exceptions’ in Johnson’s history enables me to
offer a closer analysis of Johnson’s performance of multiple identities or ‘doubling’.
Specifically, I intend to focus on the approaches to performance used by Johnson around
1900, and how she retained these unique strategies in the later years of her theatre career.
I argue that her approaches to recitation, and the repertoire she used while in her
Victorian dresses, enabled her to avoid the “fate [of being] turned into [an] Indian
Maiden” (146). By rejecting the judgment that Johnson’s performance was only and
exclusively a narcissistic reflection or navigation of her own identity politics (what G.H.
Smith calls a “politics of distraction” (Smith in Fee 119)) and attending, instead, to her
repertoire, partnerships, and use of dialect at play in Johnson’s performances, the
intricacies and exceptionalism of her onstage work emerge. She represents an intriguing
figure that used theatrical spectacle, as much as she was a slave to it. The findings
presented in this chapter seek to articulate that tension.
Doubling with the Voice in Ottawa
On November 1st 1901 in Ottawa’s Orme’s Hall, E. Pauline Johnson and Walter
McRaye performed before a distinguished crowd that included Prime Minister Sir
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Wilfred Laurier and Lady Laurier, the Hon. Clifford Sifton and Mrs. Sifton, and the Hon.
Wm. Paterson (“At the Theatre”). Descriptions of this performance offer clues to
Johnson’s experimentation with a different kind of performance tradition. Unlike
reactions to her previous work, critics were less interested in the spectacle of Johnson’s
costume. Instead, they were captivated by Johnson’s repertoire, her vocal performance,
and the unique mimetic qualities that she had honed through her partnership with Walter
McRaye. This performance is illustrative of the versatility of Johnson’s performance
history, and her experimentation with vocal traditions like those found in the performance
of “costume recitals” that were popular in late nineteenth-century North American theatre.
The Ottawa Citizen noted that Johnson started the evening by performing some of
her standard pieces: “The Riders of the Plains,” with its patriotic text, was sure to appeal
to an audience of government dignitaries. Written in rhyming couplet form, it is generally
regarded as a “tribute to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police” (Gerson “ReReading”),
celebrating the members of the RCMP as “fearless fighters” and “men of action” who
“keep the peace of the people and the honour of British Law”:
Then down with the cur that questions,--let him slink to his craven den,--
For he daren't deny our hot reply as to "who are our mounted men."
He shall honour them east and westward, he shall honour them south and north,
He shall bare his head to that coat of red wherever that red rides forth.
'Tis well that he knows the fibre that the great North-West contains,
The North-West pride in her men that ride on the Territorial plains,--
For of such as these are the muscles and the teeth in the Lion's jaw,
And they keep the peace of our people and the honour of British law. (134)
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While it is plausible that Johnson performed these lines with a solemnly patriotic delivery,
there is also some indication in her archival materials, that she may have altered her
delivery of these lines to offer a critique of the RCMP, the “Riders of the Plains.” Box
Two of McMaster University’s Pauline Johnson collection, contains a postcard, retained
by Johnson and inscribed by her with the title “The Riders of the Plains,” which features
Mounted Police engaging in an “Indian arrest.”
Figure 45. Fronto of postcard Figure 46. Verso of postcard
One of many postcards collected by Johnson. This one is annotated with description
“Riders of the Plains.” In McMaster University Pauline Johnson collection. Series 5, box
2.
The postcard artifact suggests that Johnson held some position on the engagements
(sometimes violent) of the RCMP with Indigenous peoples, on the “plains” west of
Ontario. It invites an deeper examination of her vocal delivery; how she made “choices of
signification” by using her voice to offer new interpretations of the text, a “ ‘text within a
text’ ” (Pavis 79). Johnson’s voice, just as much as her costume, could be seen as a
“signal transmitter[] […] pertinent to the text in [its] materiality” that would “influence
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the spectator’s perception and decoding of messages” (Elam 43). Of course, these
semiotics are difficult to determine in historical work. In the absence of audio or video
traces of Johnson’s work, there is no definitive way of knowing how Johnson modified
her voice. However, the postcard offers a tantalizing clue that encourages a more
thorough engagement with the semiotics of Johnson’s voice onstage and how her use of
voice intersected with traditions of racial portrayal popular in the late 1890’s.
The other pieces performed in the first half of her Orme’s Hall performance
certainly required vocal precision and flexibility. Johnson’s recitation of the selection
“Wolverine” required her to use dialects and accents. The poem is about a trapper, who
tells the story of how a Chief, named ‘Wolverine’, saved the trapper from certain death
by a pack of hungry wolves. Wolverine was later assassinated by a group of settlers who
misinterpreted his generosity as mischief. A look at the opening stanzas of the poem
indicates the kind of command over dialect that its successful performance required. Here,
the trapper, with accented voice, recounts his experiences while working for the
Hudson’s Bay Company with “Indyans” north of “the Soo”:
No. Them old Indyans ain’t so bad, not if you treat ’em square.
Why, I lived in amongst ’em all the winters I was there,
An’ I never lost a copper, an’ I never lost a hair.
“But I’d have lost my life the time that you’ve heard tell about;
I don’t think I’d be settin’ here, but dead beyond a doubt,
If that there Indyan ‘Wolverine’ jest hadn’t helped me out. (Johnson 92)
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The trapper describes how, on one of his expeditions, he found himself surrounded by a
pack of wolves with no escape possible. At this point, the voice of the poem changes with
the introduction of the character Wolverine, the Chief who comes to the trapper’s rescue.
The poem switches to the trapper’s imitation of the Chief’s voice as he describes
Wolverine’s generous help:
“An’ then—a voice, an Indyan voice, that called out clear and clean,
‘Take Indyan’s horse, I run like deer, wolf can’t catch Wolverine.’
I says, ‘Thank Heaven.’ There stood the chief I’d nicknamed Wolverine.” (92)
Finally, the trapper tells how he discovered, that same autumn, that “some Whites” had
killed what they described as an “Injun dog.” Only after they shot the man, did the settler
killers acknowledge that the shooting was a mistake and that the “Red” was merely
attempting to return some items that had fallen off their cart to “the Whites”:
“But when their plucky Englishmen had put a bit of lead
Right through the heart of one of them, an’ rolled him over, dead,
The other cowards said that they had come on peace instead.
“‘That they (the Whites) had lost some stores, from off their little
Pack,
An’ that the Red they peppered dead had followed up their track,
Because he’d found the packages an’ came to give them back.’
“‘Oh!’ they said, ‘they were quite sorry, but it wasn’t like as if
They had killed a decent Whiteman by mistake or in a tiff,
It was only some old Injun dog that lay there stark an’ stiff.’
“I said, ‘You are the meanest dogs that ever yet I seen,’
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Then I rolled the body over as it lay out on the green;
I peered into the face—My God! ’twas poor old Wolverine.” (93-94)
In this recitation, Johnson was required to take on the voice of the trapper, and re-quote,
within the body of the story, the other voices of the main characters: the Chief, Wolverine,
and the “mean” racist “dogs” responsible for the his death.
Johnson’s other piece for this evening performance was “The Legend of
Qu’Appelle Valley” This poem is a reflection on the relationship between settler and
Indigenous identities and how they intersect. It represents a “place legend,” first reported
by Métis trader Daniel Harmon in the early 19th century (Anuik), telling how the
Qu’Appelle Valley received its name, and illustrates Johnson’s sustained interest in the
function of language in constructing place:
The most familiar version tells of a love story between a Cree man and woman who
were soon to wed. Away from home on a hunting trip, he paddles home to her, for
they are to marry the next day. As he is nearing her home, he hears a voice calling
out his name. He responds Kâ-têpwêt (who calls?) in Cree, then Qu’appelle? in
French, but there is no reply so he travels on. Her arrives at her home and finds her
family grieving. They tell him that she has left for the spirit world, but all, ‘Twice
did she call for thee last night.’ (Kovach 92).
In Johnson’s poetic version of this story, she omits the Cree word “Kâ-têpwêt,” but the
Cree speaker in her poem does cry out the French question “Qu’Appelle?” after hearing
voices on his travels in the Valley:
I am the one who heard the spirit voice,
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Of which the paleface settlers love to tell;
From whose strange story they have made their choice
Of naming this fair valley the ‘Qu’Appelle.’
[…]
So the long days went slowly drifting past;
It seemed that half my life must intervene
Before the morrow, when I said at last—
‘One more day’s journey and I win my queen!’
I rested then, and, drifting, dreamed the more
Of all the happiness I was to claim,—
When suddenly from out the shadowed shore,
I heard a voice speak tenderly my name.
‘Who calls?’ I answered; no reply; and long
I stilled my paddle blade and listened. Then
Above the night’s wind melancholy song
I heard distinctly that strange voice again—
A woman’s voice, that through the twilight came
Like to a soul unborn—a song unsung.
I leaned and listened—yes, she spoke my name,
And then I answered in the quaint French tongue,
‘Qu’Appelle? Qu’Appelle?’ No answer, and the night
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Seemed stiller for the sound, till round me fell
The far-off echoes from the far-off height—
‘Qu’Appelle?’ my voice came back, ‘Qu’Appelle? Qu’Appelle?’
This—and no more; I called aloud until
I shuddered as the gloom of night increased,
And, like a pallid spectre wan and chill,
The moon arose in silence from the east. (126-127)
Johnson’s performance of dialect and her interest in the relationship between
language and identity was complemented by the work of her stage partner, Walter
McRaye. During the same 1900 evening performance in Ottawa at Orme’s Hall at which,
Johnson performed “Wolverine” and “The Legend of Qu’Appelle Valley”85, McRaye
chose to recite “Le Vieux Temps,” written by Dr. W.H. Drummond (“At the Theatres”).
The “habitant poetry” of Dr. W. H. Drummond required an immense degree of vocal
precision and flexibility for its successful recitation. A quick look at the poem, performed
by McRaye, reveals the intricate dialect required for oration:
Venez ici, mon cher ami, an' sit down by me—so
An' I will tole you story of old tam long ago—
W'en ev'ryt'ing is happy--w'en all de bird is sing
An' me!--I'm young an' strong lak moose an' not afraid no t'ing.
I close my eye jus' so, an' see de place w'ere I am born—

It is important to note that this title refers to the poem’s printed title. In various reviews of
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Johnson’s performances, the selection is referred to as “The Legend of Qu’Appelle” or by other

short-hands.
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I close my ear an' lissen to musique of de horn,
Dat 's horn ma dear ole moder blow--an only t'ing she play
Is "viens donc vite Napoléon--'peche toi pour votre souper."--
An' w'en he 's hear dat nice musique--ma leetle dog "Carleau"
Is place hees tail upon hees back--an' den he 's let heem go—
He 's jomp on fence--he 's swimmin' crik--he 's ronne two forty gait,
He say "dat 's somet'ing good for eat--Carleau mus' not be late." (Drummond, 11)
The stanzas are written in distinctively accented speech that required considerable
expertise of vocal delivery. Drummond’s dialect pieces gained notoriety at the turn of the
century for their representation of the French Canadian. His works were simultaneously
parodic and sympathetic in presenting “[t]he habitant” as a “parody of the submissive,
ignorant, unworldly, inarticulate frontier farmer, who was nevertheless crammed with
human decency and unlearned folk wisdom” (Lepage 23).
Until 1906, Johnson and McRaye performed this type of repertoire together, in a
showcasing of dialect mastery. Johnson in her “Indian costumes” recited the dialects of
trappers and Cree heroes, sometimes returning to characters such as Ojistoh (a poem
which required Johnson to say a word in the Kanien’kéha language); McRaye recited
Drummond’s dialect speech—one that was meant to please (largely) Anglo-Canadian
audiences for its depiction of French-Canadian speakers as “[s]ocial simpletons…
manifested [by] linguistic difference” (Lepage 25).
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In some sense, these performances of “linguistic difference” by both Johnson and
McRaye—their appropriation of various ethnic or lower class identities in and through
voice—did not fit within an elocutionary tradition. Biographers like Gray conceive of
Johnson’s performance as operating within this tradition, but Johnson herself positioned
her performance differently. Indeed, Johnson’s own admissions supported this aesthetic
distinction. As one critic reported in 1900, Johnson “refuse[d] to be called an elocutionist”
(“Footlight Flashes”). Why was she so resistant to her performance being defined in these
terms? If her staging of this kind of poetry was not elocution, then what was it but a kind
of “redding up”, made popular by all sorts of performers, both non-Indigenous (as with
Edwin Forrest’s Metamora)86 and Indigenous (as with the participant/actors of Bill
Cody’s Wild West shows).
Dwight Conquergood, in his study of the function of elocution in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, suggests that “elocution was designed to recuperate the vitality
of the spoken word from rural and rough working class contexts by regulating and
refining its ‘performance excess’[…] elocution sought to tap the power of popular speech
but curb its unruly embodiments and refine its coarse and uncouth features”
(Conquergood 327). Johnson’s performance in the voice of Chief ‘Wolverine’ and the
trapper does nothing of this sort. Neither does McRaye’s appropriation of the “parochial”
voice of the habitant figure. Rather, they were both staging various lower-class voices to
comedic effect. A review of a later performance in Comber, Ontario stated that McRaye’s
“dialect sketches” “kept the audience convulsed with laughter” (“A Delighted Audience”).
Conquergood argues that, by the turn of the century, elocution and minstrelsy were

86
Matthew Rebhorn refers to Forest’s performance of Metamora as “redding up”—and likens it
to a blackface tradition. See Rebhorn 2006.
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“antithetical in style.” This raises a question regarding the positioning, by critics, of the
Johnson/McRaye performance in Orme’s hall, to which the audience reacted with
laughing “convuls[ion].” If it was not a performance of elocution, was it a kind of
minstrel performance?
McRaye’s choice of Drummond’s “Le Vieux Temps” for his performance is
particularly interesting and should be addressed in answer to this question. By the turn of
the century, Drummond was celebrated for his “habitant poetry,” characterized by a style
that did not descend to the buffoonery or vulgarity that it, nevertheless, seemed to elicit
through its recitation. In the introduction to Drummond’s collection of poems released in
1897, Louis Fréchette identifies the sophistication of Drummond’s representations:
Above all, he well understood the type to reproduce, its habits, passions, sentiments,
inclinations, its superstitions and weaknesses. But how, without falling into the
charge of buffoonery, does one make one’s characters speak a foreign language,
necessarily incorrect in the mouths of those who learn by ear, who cannot read even
in their own language?... In his study of the French Canadian, Mr. Drummond has
found a way of avoiding a trap that would have seemed inevitable for all others. He
has remained true without lapsing into vulgarity, and sharp without becoming
grotesque. (Frechette vii–viii in Lepage 25).
Perhaps McRaye chose to mimic the habitant precisely because of the critical perception,
as cited above, that Drummond’s work avoided the “grotesque.” This appeared to make
its performance quite distinct from a minstrel tradition.
Johnson’s selections too, athough appropriating stereotypical voices (specifically
the voice of Wolverine), seemed to stray from the parodic function of minstrelsy.
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However, Johnson’s selections are also not quite ‘proper’ elocution—in “Wolverine” and
“Legend of Qu’Appelle,” there is no “just and graceful management of the voice,
countenance, and gesture". Instead, there is an attempt to portray characters who speak an
idiom of English that is either broken or altered (Conquergood 331).
If the antithesis of minstrelsy’s “vulgar entertainment” (Conquergood 331) was
elocution’s mimicry of the upper class, then perhaps the entertainments of McRaye and
Johnson stand somewhere between these traditions. As Conquergood suggests, there was
often “mutual acknowledgement, cross-over, and some slippage between these
contemporary performance traditions” (331). He observes that “dialect pieces” were
indicative of that “slippage.” By such measurement, the Johnson/McRaye repertoire of
dialect-rich selections seems to occupy this middle ground.
Susan A. Glenn characterizes this space of “mimicry” as the “comedy of
personality” (Glenn 73). In Glenn’s study of the theatrical roots of modern feminism, she
examines the nuance of mimicry at the turn of the century, and locates the source of its
popularity. Discussing “ ‘The Imitation Craze’ ” that swept American vaudeville stages
of the period, Glenn argues that the stage work of mimics represented “a significant break”
from the genre of gender impersonation and racial/ethnic impersonation (characteristic of
the popular stage at this time). She proposes that “unlike those who devoted themselves
chiefly to the comedy of blackface caricature and gender impersonation, these vaudeville
mimics moved beyond generic and stereotyped images of race and gender to what could
best be described as the comedy of personality” (75). In Glenn’s terms, what
characterized this specific genre of performance was a “rapid-fire switching from one
personality to the next” (76). The structure of the Johnson and McRaye partnership, as
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well as the ‘quick-change’ costuming effect that was a feature of Johnson’s performances
by 1900, correspond to the demand of the “comedy of personalities” for a quick
succession of portrayals, sustained throughout a performance.
Johnson and McRaye’s “personality” act was sustained throughout most of their
partnership. Reviews of Johnson’s performances with McRaye indicate that, by 1900, her
success as a mimic had grown. A review in the Comber Herald notes that she showed
“careful study,” “natural ability” and “realistic manner” in her portrayal of various
characters. For a 1904 performance in Revelstoke, BC, a critic declared that McRaye’s
performance of “Les Vieux Temps” was a “charming picture of pathos and humour.” The
Herald critic applauded McRaye for his “easy stage presence,” affirming that he “[could]
tell a story in capital style.” In particular, the review notes that McRaye’s “rendition of
Dr. Drummond’s French-Canadian stories is inimitable. Drummond’s sketches of the
simple hearty home life of the Voyageur and Habitant Farmer and their pathetically
attractive way of expressing themselves are intensely interesting from beginning to end”
(Revelstoke Herald). By 1906, the dialect/character recitations of Johnson and McRaye
had gained even more popularity. The Winnipeg Daily Tribune celebrated their
partnership: “As contrast to her stories of the great lakes and rolling prairies of the West,
Mr. Walter McRaye recited the delightfully humorous and pathetic verses of Dr.
Drummond on the old French Canadian life in the East (“Musical and Dramatic”).
The critical response to Johnson’s imitative performances resembles the discourse
surrounding personality performance. As one review observes: “One of Miss Johnson’s
great charms as a reciter[…]is her spontaneity. She rarely says a piece twice successively
in the same manner. She feels her work and so makes the audience feel with her.” There
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is a significant paradox at work in this reviewer’s commentary—one that is, as Glenn
argues, “central to the early twentieth century intellectual reformations”: “the idea that
imitations could also be original creations” (Glenn 83). Johnson was doing imitative
work, but perhaps her gift lay in varying the imitation itself—in adding nuance to
presentation, and aligning it with shifting aesthetics that encouraged actors to “allow their
own feelings and personality to shape the interpretation of the role” (Glenn 82).
This interpretation refashions and challenges the common understanding of
Johnson’s performance work that has been developed to date. In biographies, Johnson is
never described as an actress. Only rarely is she described as working in the theatre. Yet,
there is no doubt that her dialect work with McRaye corresponded to a particular style of
presentation popular in vaudevillian culture. This is not the only historical material that
indicates Johnson’s deep immersion in theatre culture, and her performance of multiple
identities. Indeed, I will address the most theatrical and spectacular aspect of Johnson’s
performance history—her performance of comedietta and personality sketches, in the
sections to follow.
Doubling in Dramatic Comedietta
If the first half of the 1901 Orme’s Hall performance in Ottawa was dedicated to the
impersonation of romanticized “others” in a Canadian cultural milieu, the second half of
the same performance imitated and often lampooned, in comedic fashion, the audience
for which it was performed. Rather than performing these dialect recitations separately,
Johnson and McRaye worked together to present a number of “society sketches.” These
selections marked a generic shift for the second half of their performances. While moving
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from poetic to dramatic presentation, they continued their use of doubling, a tool in the
comedy of personality.
Johnson and McRaye shifted to the presentation of various dramatic “sketches”
after their dialect recitations. Fortunately, reviewers offer some titles and descriptions of
this half of the performance that give some insight into Johnson’s presentation. A review
in The Ottawa Journal notes that Johnson and McRaye performed selections that
included “The Englishman,” “Success of the Season,” and “At the Ball.” Other reviews
mention the success of the Johnson/McRaye performance of additional titles like
“Fashionable Intelligence,” and “Mrs. Stewarts Five O’Clock Tea.” These selections
were performed at later dates and in other locations during the duo’s tours. References to
these sketches suggest that the pair’s dramatic repertoire was quite diverse.
To date, critical analysis of these performances has not been conducted because
texts for these named selections have hitherto not been found. Strong-Boag and Gerson,
in their extensively researched biography of Johnson, Paddling her Own Canoe: The
Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson, call these selections “untraced titles” (Paddling
235) and argue that Johnson’s comedic sketches, or for that matter, any history of her
“humorous” engagement with audiences, did not “survive in the written record”
(Paddling 109). Despite their findings, the descriptions of these performances in reviews
invite further investigation, and make connections to a number of texts that arguably offer
dramatic evidence of the kind of humorous fare that Johnson performed onstage.
A review of Johnson’s Orme’s Hall performance by the Ottawa Citizen ends with
a surprising description of Johnson’s stage work with Walter McRaye: “in company with
Mr. McRaye, [Johnson performed] At the Ball […] an amusing incident supposed to
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occur at a ball in an insane asylum, where two visitors mistake each other for patients”
(Miss E. Pauline Johnson: Canada’s Indian Elocutionist”). This reference to Johnson’s
final selection, performed together with McRaye, is most curious. It is the piece of
evidence that does not seem to ‘fit’ with the characteristics of Johnson’s performance
history. What was this comedy “At the Ball”? What does it tell us about Johnson’s
performance history—about her navigation of cultural capital, dramatic traditions, and
her performative skill set? Questions such as these require a broader analysis of this
particular piece of repertoire by drawing attention to other descriptions of this
performance—not just in the context of Johnson and McRaye’s recital of it at Orme’s
Hall.
Other reviews offer more complete descriptions of “At The Ball’s” content. For a
performance in Peterborough in 1903, Johnson again presented this sketch with McRaye.
A more detailed outline was given in The Daily Examiner Peterborough:
The latter half of the programme was opened with a playlet entitled “At the
Ball,” in which Miss Johnson acted the part of Clara Manners while Mr.
McRaye took the part of Captain Fielding. The scene of this selection was a
ball given in Kensington lunatic asylum for patients who were not very
violent. Miss Manners and Captain Fielding were the guests of Dr. Adams.
The two guests seek refuge from the throng of dancing maniacs, and meet in
a small room. Here each takes the other for a lunatic and acts as such. They,
however, discover their mistake prior to the conclusion of the very clever
little piece of acting. (“Delightful Programme Presented By Miss E. Pauline
Johnson and Mr. W. McRaye”)
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The reviewer’s more engaged description of the selection points to the source for this
sketch. Entitled “At the Ball,” it corresponds closely in content and character with W.R.
Walkes dramatic sketch called “A Pair of Lunatics.” Published by Samuel French and
played in the Drury Lane and Avenue Theatres in 1889, this sketch features two
characters: “He (otherwise Captain George Fielding) played originally by Mr. George
Alexander” and “She (otherwise Clara Manners) played originally by Miss Maude Millet.”
Pauline Johnson had had some previous association with George Alexander. An actor and
producer, he had introduced both Johnson and McRaye to the agent of the American
Slayton Lyceum Society (Keller 103).87
Walkes’ sketch opens with characters that match exaxtly those mentioned by the
reviewer in Johnson’s sketch. The scene opens with Captain Fielding escaping from the
banality of an unusual evening event. He goes into a “back drawing room” and is grateful,
at first, that he has found a refuge from the “madness” of the strange ball to which he has
been invited:
He. (looks in) Nobody here! Thank goodness! (Enters, yawning.) I’ve had about
enough of this. (Yawns.) I’ve spent many depressing evenings in my time, but a
ball at a lunatic asylum beats the lot. Just fancy! Two hundred dancers, and almost
every one of them mad! (Sits) What an ass I was to come! Confound Jack Adams!
It was all his fault. He said I should find it such splendid fun to listen to the strange
delusions of the patients. Fun indeed! Well, perhaps I’ve no sense of humour, but to
me they are just about as funny as a funeral. And they’re so depressingly

87
On her first tour to London in 1894, Johnson met George Alexander, the actor who debuted “A
Pair of Lunatics” at the Drury.

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monotonous. They got but a poor half-dozen or so delusions between them; and
they copy one another’s words and business like a lot of understudies. (Walkes, np).
After his delivery of this soliloquy, Fielding falls asleep and Clara Manners, another ball
attendee, enters the same room and throws herself into a chair without, at first, seeing the
Captain:
SHE. Thank goodness, here’s an empty room (throws herself into chair a little up
R) where I can rest for a while in quiet. Oh why did Aunt Maria bring me to this
ghastly, gruesome function! My head’s in a perfect whirl! Dr. Adams assured me
that all my partners would be harmless. I suppose he meant they wouldn’t try to
murder me—and of course that’s some comfort—but their insane ramblings makes
my very flesh creep, and their vacant laughter—oh! (shudders) it’s horrible—
horrible! (Walkes, 4)
Soon Fielding wakes up, and both he and Clara mistake each other for patients in the
asylum:
HE. (waking up.) Jove! Just beginning to doze? (Yawns.) Fancied I heard
voices. (Rises and looks around.) Hullo! Followed and found out! Eh! (Puts
his head to his nose in great alarm.) It’s all right. It’s another one. How D’ye
do? (Nodding.) Now, I wonder who this distinguished stranger may be! Lady
Macbeth or the Sultan of Zanzibar.
SHE. (coming around) (aside, seeing him). Ah there he is! He’s taken his
waistcoat off. I hope he isn’t a violent one. (Creeps down timidly R).
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HE. (aside.) I suppose I must address her in the usual humouring fashion.
(Aloud.) I beg your pardon, but do you happen to be looking for anyone, the
Editor of the “Times” or Hamlet, Prince of Denmark? (Above her L.)
SHE. (aside.) I knew it, he’s a lunatic! I must humour him and get away.
(Aloud, timidly.) Yes, I am engaged to Hamlet for the next dance, have you
seen him? (Walkes 4)
This physical comedy of mistaken identities continues for some time. Clara pretends to
be “insane” by reciting Ophelia’s speeches from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, while Fielding
masquerades as a “maniac.” Soon enough they become too exhausted to stay in character,
and they both realize that they have retired to the room for for the same reason—to
escape the “lunatics” that they themselves, over the course of the sketch, have been
imitating. They return to their ‘natural’ states, and rejoice.
The sketch allows for a show of talent in the performance of “personality” or
“mimicry.” The metatheatricality of the piece (a play within a short comedietta play)
requires a versatile, flexible performer. In this instance, the asides in the text require the
performer to move with break-neck speech between the imitation of lunacy, and a return
to a ‘normal’ character. As such, the pleasure was in watching the characters of Manners
and Fielding imitate lunacy within the sketch; they did not act as “lunatics.” The text of
the play does not correspond to a newly emerging realistic acting style that “emphasized
natural speech, subtle physical gestures, and the psychology of the character being played”
(Glenn 82). Rather, as the character “HE” states, it is the “humouring [of] a lady-like
lunatic [that] is distinctly entertaining” (6)—for both the character, and the audience.
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The “lunatic” conceit required Johnson and McRae to imitate more than just
“lunacy” in their presentation. The play required that they also mimic performances of
popular Shakespearean characters as shown by the following passage:
SHE: (aside) What awful madness! If only I could calm him. (Suddenly.) An idea!
I’ve heard that they often soothe these poor creatures with amateur acting. It sounds
impossible, but I’ll try it. I’ll give him as much as I can remember of “Ophelia.”
(Goes up a little and proceeds to let down her hair.)
HE: (turns and catches sight of her.) (Aside.) Hullo! What’s she up to now! I’ll be
hanged if she isn’t undressing. (Aloud, in a tone of alarm.) Here I say, Sultana of
Zanzibar, or whoever you are, it isn’t bedtime yet. Decency forbids, you know.
Hang it all, I’m a single man.
SHE. (ignored his outburst, places some grasses from her bouquet in her hair, and
takes some flowers from the same and carriers them in her hand; and speaks in a
moonstuck manner of “Ophelia.”) Single, are you? “The owl was the baker’s
daughter. We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.” (Sings.)
“How should I your true love know
From another one?” (7)
Here, Johnson was imitating Manners in her imitation of a lunatic imitating Ophelia.
Meanwhile, McRaye was imitating “HE” catching on to the pretense of Manners. The
character “HE” joins the game by giving a poor imitation of Hamlet:
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HE. (aside, puzzled.) What is her little game. (Suddenly.) By Jove. It’s
play acting. She’s doing Shakespeare—Ophelia. Well I don’t know much
about the Bard myself, but I’ll do my best to keep up: so here goes. (Aloud,
ranting.)
To be or not to be: Alas, poor Yorick!
Whether ‘twere better in this world to call
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!
Or take a cab, or else a Putney ‘bus.
So get thee to a Nunnery, and when thou’rt there
Off with his head, and tell him straight from me
My name is Norval on the Grampian Hills
My father feeds his flock on threes of Scotch
And so whene’er they take their walks abroad
There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. (8)
The play’s metatheatricality aligned it with the genre of personality performance—the
same genre that Johnson and McRaye were playing with through the vocal variation used
in the first part of their performance. Johnson and McRaye were performing the
characters of Fielding and Manners who were performing lunacy by imitating memories
of theatrical performances of Shakespeare in service of that illusion. In short, there are
four layers of performance nested within this short comedietta. This ‘doubling’ (actually,
‘quadrupling’) corresponds to a vaudeville tradition that often featured routines wherein
performers would imitate the previous performance of a character. Their popularity
accounts for the acclaim of contemporaneous American vaudeville mimics like Cissie
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Loftus, whose imitations of Sarah Bernhardt’s performances of classical heroines like
Phaedra were met with much delight (Glenn 82). For the Orme’s Hall performance,
McRaye and Johnson chose a selection that highlighted the flexibility of their character
performance, and which firmly placed their presentation in the style of “the comedy of
personality” (Glenn 76).
Furthermore, the appeal of this selection went beyond just genre, in the
significance of its exploration of the connection between imitation and lunacy. It
responds to the “complex theorizing about the psychological meanings and implications
of imitation” (Glenn) as well as to the use of staging and spectacle within psychiatric
contexts. Though a modern reader might interpret the play’s setting as contributing only
to the work’s comedic value (“why organize a ball at an asylum?”), it also responds to the
nineteenth century use of the asylum as a stage or site of spectacle:
Psychiatry in the nineteenth century was something of a spectator sport. Promoters
and superintendents of asylums encouraged visitors because they wanted to raise
funds, gain approval from legislators, allay public suspicion about the institutions
and demonstrate that the harsh treatments of the past had been replaced by
humanitarian kindness. And so asylums were popular tourist destinations, where
ordinary citizens could bask in […]the benevolent treatment of the most
unfortunate (Reiss 13).
The setting of the play and its contexts integrates this cultural reality. In this respect, the
selection engages (perhaps without intent) in staging the relationship between hysteria
and the theatrical art. As Susan Glenn argues, psychiatry at the turn of the century was
deeply interested in proposing connections between hysteria and the “ ‘tendency to
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imitation’ […] and the tendency to develop dissociated (multiple) personality states”
(Glenn 89). At the same time, a “newer and eventually predominate model in American
social science viewed imitation as a universal human faculty, key not only to the
development of a healthy and normal selfhood but also to a harmonious, well functioning
social order” (Glenn 90). “At the Ball” –or its original version entitled “A Pair of
Lunatics”—stages social anxieties related to imitation. This was pleasing to audiences
that desired the “fantasy of the fluid self” (Glenn 77). In 1908, theatre critic Alan Dale
explained that mimicry appealed to those who felt ‘chained’ to their own ‘individuality’”
(Glenn 77). This pleasure was evidently felt by the audiences of Johnson and McRaye, as
both “He” and “She” share a laugh about their performance of multiple personalities by
the end of the play. The audiences shared a joy, perhaps, not only in the doubling
performed within the sketch itself, but also in the doubling across the entire repertoire.
The Johnson/McRaye performance of personality at Orme’s Hall did not just end
there. She ended her performance with another imitative number that she and reviewers
identified as “Success of the Season.” Like so many scholars before me, I have not been
able to find a text corresponding to this title that matches review descriptions of the
sketch. However, several reviewers have provided enough details about the piece to allow
for a credible framing of Johnson’s performance within the tradition of “personality
acting.” One review described “Success of the Season” as “a witty comedietta describing
an afternoon tea given in Ottawa by the ambitious wife of an MP. The sketch allows for
some clever impersonations—one of Miss Johnson’s many gifts. In it she caricatures Sir
Charles Tupper and Sir William Van Horne in a most amusing manner” (“Footlight
Flashes”). Tupper, one of the ‘Fathers of Confederation’ would have been an obvious
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target for comedic imitation, especially for an audience that included Laurier. In fact,
Laurier, a Liberal, had defeated Tupper, a Conservative, in the 1896 election. Tupper had
served for only ten weeks as Prime Minister of Canada before his defeat at the polls. By
1903, the date of the Johnson/McRaye Orme’s Hall performance, Laurier had already
served seven years of his fifteen year tenure as Prime Minister (“Sir Charles Tupper”).
Johnson’s comedic representation of William Van Horne, then President of the Canadian
Pacific Railway, indicates that many of her sketches drew on the presentation of
personalities of note, whose satirical representation would have been particulary popular
with audiences of the Canadian elite. This same review also suggests that by 1903,
impersonation had become a key feature of Johnson’s performance practice and that her
performance underwent adaptation to the audience’s needs and desires.
But was she only impersonating popular public figures in Canada? Another
review suggests that the sketch referred to as “Success of the Season” may have,
eventually, been billed under another name: “Mrs. Stewart’s Five O’Clock Tea”.88 An
undated performance review suggests that the sketch required Johnson to perform a
“programme of mimicry and speeches” that “set the audience in ecstasies of laughter”:

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It is worth considering why Johnson might have changed the names of these titles. I
hypothesize that this may have had to do with copyright—that Johnson and McRaye were not
paying royalty fees for their production of these works. But it might also have to do with the
conventions Johnson had earlier established in her performances. In her early career, Johnson
“occupied a unique niche as ‘the only living woman who recite[d] her own poetry’” (cited in
Gerson and Strong-Boag, 112). Admitting the actual authorship of these new dramatic works
might have tainted this reputation. Perhaps this is why Johnson also added so much local flavor to
her performances. The degree to which Johnson and McRaye adapted the texts like “A Pair of
Lunatics” and “Fashionable Intelligence” can obviously not be ascertained in the absence of film
footage or recordings of their performances. However, as this chapter shows, the infusion of
‘local flavour’ into her work is evident, and perhaps confirms Johnson’s reputation as a performer
who could write her own work.
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In the second part of the programme Miss Johnson appeared in evening dress
and turned her attention to scenes in civilized life. Mrs. Stewart’s Five
O’Clock Tea set the audience in ecstasies of laughter. Mrs. Stewart was
represented as the wife of an Ottawa member of parliament, who was
spending the period of the session at Ottawa where her husband was assisting
in making the laws of the country. It was not stated whether he was a Grit or a
Tory but it was averred that Mr. Stewart was fond of yachting and fishing and
when his constituents had innocently thought that he was watching their
interests in the House of Commons he was frequently up the Gatineau or
elsewhere on a yachting expedition. Mrs. Stewart on one occasion decided to
give a “tea” that would be the talk of the town. Miss Johnson took the place
of Mrs. Stewart and her manner of arranging her invitations formed the
course of the introductory chapter. After disposing of Mrs. Graham, a curious
and inquisitive neighbor who had broached in unexpectedly upon her while
arranging her invitations and bouncing her neighbor politely out with a
sarcastic leer to the audience when Mrs. Graham’s back was turned. Miss
Johnson went through the programme of mimicry of the speeches and
recitations of the different guests at the “tea.” The “tea” was the treat of the
evening and decided bit. (“Miss Pauline Johnson’s Recitals” McMaster Box 4,
File 11)
This review offers a startling insight into the repertoire that Johnson was performing
for this Canadian audience. The comedic material, which included impersonation of
active figures in Canada’s elite political class, had Johnson “leering” to the audience.
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What is particularly fascinating is the description of a satirical performance of tea
time, a popular symbol of English civility and cultural expression. As Andrews states,
tea was “[c]ritically important for the British imperial economy, crucial to the
networking of socialites and politicos, and the commodity of choice for Bostonian
protestors to dump overboard […] [It] was universally understood as vital to the
constitutions of English bodies and essential to the conduct of social life” (Andrews
151, Native Apostles). Johnson may have been wearing a brocade or silk crepon dress
when playing Mrs. Stewart in all her hostess glory, but she also was plainly mocking
the social choreographies of the British empire that were still an integral part of
Canadian social life.
These kinds of performance reflected Johnson’s private disdain for society
manners. By 1890, she wrote to her friend Archie Kains to express her distaste for
the “general society woman’s clatter”:
I hope I am not a “Women’s Righter” or a masculine Amazon because I
sometimes despise the littleness that interests other women. I confess a
likeness for certain feminine conventionalities such as five o’clock teas or
“Hen parties” but to be forever bored with the average girl’s talk on fashions
or gossip, or the general society women’s clatter on devotion and how well
one looks in this evening dress etc. is something that shortens my life and
deadens my love for living (Letter to Archie Kains. Brantford. October 1890.
At Chiefswood Museum)
Evidently, the “feminine conventionalities” of “tea time” served as source material for a
personality sketch that would prove one of her most comedic “bit[s].”
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There is some indication that Johnson may have adapted “Mrs. Stewart’s Five
O’Clock Tea” from the work of her cousin, W.D. Howells who wrote a comedietta titled
“Five O’Clock Tea” that also mocked the tradition of tea-time. The lead heroine of this
comedietta is Mrs. Somers and there is no character named Mrs. Stewart. The opening
scene of the playlet describes “Mrs. Amy Somers, in a lightly floating tea gown”
(Howells, np) performing in front of a mirror. She “advance[es] upon her image with
certain little bobs and bows, and retreat[s] from it with a variety of fan practice and
elaborated courtesies, finally degenerating into burlesque, and a series of grimaces and
mouths made at the responsive reflex.” Johnson’s comedic ‘send up’ of tea time,
followed by imitative work, certainly aligned with the style that Howells called for in his
script.
In broad terms, the “personality” and vaudevillian performance styles of
Johnson’s Orme’s Hall performance reflect other theatrical influences which are worth
noting. Understanding Johnson’s long friendship with performer Rosina Vokes can lead
to a deeper understanding of Johnson’s performance techniques. Vokes became popular
on the vaudeville circuit for her performances in charming comediettas like Percy
Pendragon, Wig and Gown, and My Milliner’s Bill. She gained fame on the London
Lyceum circuit in the late 1860’s, became a popular American touring star by the 1890’s,
and died in 1894 after a hectic and demanding touring schedule. She is credited for
popularizing the “practice of offering several short plays for a single evening’s
performance” for American audiences (Clay 70). As a performer of “transformative
comedy” (Glenn 77) associated with the “personality” style of performance, Vokes was
credited by Johnson as being one of her inspirations.
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Vokes had already made a name for herself as a leader in mimicry and comedietta
performance by the turn of the century. She frequently wrote about performance, giving
advice to young girls about the uselessness of elocution lessons in training for theatrical
work and the importance of learning by observation:
I do not believe in elocution lessons in the lease [sic]. What on earth is the good of
a young lady reciting ‘The Quality of Mercy’ when she is going to play ingénues
and soubrettes for at least a few years? I do believe in seeing a good deal of acting.
If a young lady, having made up her mind for what line of parts she is most suited,
would take any favorite address, ingénue or soubrette and study her methods, and
notice how she produces her effects, simulates gaiety, sentiment, coquetry, emotion,
etc., she would do well. (“The Mimic World”)
Pauline Johnson seems to have modeled her own theatrical education on these
recommendations. As noted earlier, she resisted being labeled an elocutionist and instead
studied the “methods” of many successful performers, including Vokes. On her trips to
New York, for instance, Johnson also expressed a deep interest in seeing the theatrical
work of Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett.
In her personal letters to her friend Archibald Kains, Johnson wrote about her
visits and connection with members of Rosina’s Vokes’ company, and about her
aspirations to see performances in Brooklyn, New York. In 1890, while in Brantford
Ontario, she wrote to her friend:
“I go to Toronto if all is well on Tues 20th. I will be at the Russian House with my
friends Mr. and Mrs. Bell in Rosina Voke’s Company. They play a week and have
asked me to be their guest for that time. I was with them for five days last session.
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They are most delightful people and I am so fond of them—consequently I am
looking forward to seeing them with the greatest pleasure. Apart from being with
them all day I will be every night at the theatre and you know how much I love to
see a curtain rise.” (Johnson “Letter to Archie”)
Johnson’s passion for attending performance is rarely mentioned in biographies, but
letters reveal her continual attendance at the theatre—not just locally and within Canada,
but also internationally. While in Newark, New Jersey in the 1890’s, Johnson wrote to
Mr. Kains asking if he could assist her in attending a performance that she felt was
important for her to see: “If you have no engagement for Saturday afternoon will you not
take me over to Brooklyn to see Booth and Barrett? I hear they are playing there and it
has been one of my life dreams to see them—I cannot well get into any performance but
a matinee […] when I go into New York I take the Liberty St. Ferry-so if you could come
there for me it would be more convenient for both of us.” Kains appears to have
succeeded in helping her in this endeavor. She wrote to him later, saying: “By the way
Archie do you know that I have never yet ‘got even’ with you about that Booth-Barrett
affair. I am an Indian and do not forget. I owe you—not a revenge, but something even
harder to return” (October 1890).89 These personal stories illustrate Johnson’s passion for
professional performance. She had forged connections with famous performers and
sought out exemplars. No doubt, these helped to shape her development as a performer
and to influence the style of repertoire and presentation that she and McRaye offered.
By the end of her performance at Orme’s Hall in 1903, Johnson had played a
trapper near James Bay, a Cree in Qu’Appelle, an affluent high society lady visiting an

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Johnson would have seen one of the last Booth-Barrett performances. Barrett died in March
1891, and Edwin Booth not long after.
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insane asylum (and for a moment mimicking the “insane’s” imitation of a performance of
Ophelia), Sir Charles Tupper (as well as other Canadian dignitaries), the wife of a
Canadian MP loathing the niceties of tea time, as well as numerous other tea time guests.
Johnson’s doubling capabilities and her mimetic prowess are clearly in play within this
singular performance—one that I believe merits this closer reading because it is
characteristic of the repertoire that she used on her tours with Walter McRaye.90 Their
repertoire required both physical and vocal versatility for the successful presentation of a
multitude of characters. The evidence shows that Johnson was not simply performing a
vision of assimilation in her costume. She was, I believe, underscoring her abilities as a
performer. She was an Indigenous woman who could not only dress “correctly”—as has
been argued in my last chapters—but also perform with skill and versatility—not in a
minstrel style, but in proven comediettas that had received international acclaim and
which she adapted to suit the audiences who came to see her perform.
What Is Still Lost?
The scripts and texts of Johnson and McRaye’s ‘duo’ performance that still exist indicate
their robust interest in the “personality” genre—the circulating genre that, as
Conquergood argues, stood between elocution and recitation on one side, and minstrel

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1903 was not the first time that Johnson had performed many of the sketches considered in this
chapter. In December of 1897, The Emerson Journal reported on Johnson’s performance of “The
Success of the Season,” noting that Johnson played all the characters “that were named in the
program” as “true to life as possible.” The Winnipeg Free Press remarked, of this selection, that
Johnson “afforded much amusement by her pictures of the follies and insincerities of fashionable,
or would-be fashionable, society.” I have chosen to focus on the Johnson/McRaye presentation in
Orme’s Hall because of the amount of material McRaye and Johnson performed in this one
evening. Not only did they both recite their poetry selections, but they then engaged in the
performance of a great number of sketches.

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ethnic caricature on the other side of the theatrical-political spectrum in the late
nineteenth century. Access to the texts of these performances or, in the absence of these
resources, to the descriptions of sketches by many reviewers, makes this analysis possible.
It is worth asking why these materials have, to date, been “untraced.” The
assumption that Johnson only performed her own material is contradicted by evidence of
Johnson’s performance of more humorous sketch material. This is made clear by a
historical engagement with Johnson’s history; it coincides with the historiographic
critique I have attempted to offer in this dissertation. Pauline Johnson’s theatre history
has consistently been viewed in paradigms of authenticity—ones that assume that
Johnson used performance to reflect on and work through her own “doubled” personality.
This has led many scholars to ignore clues that Johnson may have desired to perform
works authored by other people; that she may have made a living on the stage not just
through her Indigenous identity, but also through her unique flexibility as a performer
and mimic.
If Johnson’s “Indian” costume offered an avenue for performing multiple
Indigenous identities onstage (as my previous chapters have argued), her use of voice and
the repertoire presented in her ‘other costume’ offered an avenue to perform an even
greater number of characters. This chapter has focused more intently on her performance
at Orme’s Hall in order to to reveal those characters because I believe that this
performance is representative of the repertoire she used in her later touring career.
At the same time, it is worth noting that Johnson continued to add to this
repertoire. In 1906, three years after her Orme’s Hall performance, Johnson was still
performing with McRaye, and still performing short dramatic one act comedies that
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required not just her “trademark” quick changes, but also the kinds of physical and vocal
flexibility discussed throughout this chapter. “Fashionable Intelligence” was one of these
pieces.
Figure 47. Poster for Johnson’s Performance in 1906. McMaster University,

Pauline Johnson Archives, box 10.
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There is no trace of a script under this title in any archival repositories related to Johnson.
However, knowing that Johnson was performing “A Pair of Lunatics” under a new title
with Walter McRaye, makes consideration of a one act play called “Fashionable
Intelligence” by Percy Fendall worthwhile. This work was quite popular in the late
1890’s and was produced in London at the same time that Johnson was performing there.
“Fashionable Intelligence” was produced at the Court Theatre in London in 1894 (the
same year Johnson embarked on her first tour to England) and featured two characters,
Algernon Egerton and Mrs. Fitz-Adam. Egerton tries to court Fitz-Adam, a recent
widower, through deceit. He publishes a false marriage announcement in the
“Fashionable Intelligence” section of the newspaper in order make Fitz-Adam jealous.
She confronts him but then quickly sees through his tactics, while pretending ignorance
and indifference about the announcement. The nested deceits are soon revealed, and both
characters fall into each other’s arms. This format is quite similar in structure and content
to earlier sketches performed by Johnson like “At the Ball” and share a metatheatricality
centered on comedy. In both cases, nested imitative performances and ‘doubling’ are
used in the pursuit of romance.
Plays like these suggest that Johnson’s performance was more than an “act in
which she externalized the duality of a ‘mixed-blood’ inheritance through the device of
costume” (Collett “Other Woman” 362). To be sure, Johnson did perform in a sequence
of costuming where she changed from an “Indian costume” into a gown, but her use of
this costume in tandem with modifications of voice, as well as her choice of repertoire,
suggests that she was doing more than merely “costum[ing], stag[ing] and market[ing]
the duality of her ‘mixed blood’ heritage for public consumption (and tailored to public
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taste)” (Collett 362). Johnson was concerned with more than just her own character in her
performance. Indeed, she was clearly invested in the performance portrayal of Canadian
characters of varying backgrounds, including Indigenous and Quebequois, as well as in
the “personality” portrayals of society women and men.
The Remains of Johnson’s Comedy
Toward the end of Johnson’s career, after she had returned to touring as a solo
performer, the performance of numerous personalities remained an integral part of her
performance. She had decided views on what she needed for the staging of her
performance—how it would ‘work.’ She makes this plain in a letter that she writes to
“Mr. James” from Kamloops, B.C. in October 1907 (after her return from the
Chautauqua). Johnson reminds the promoter that she “shall require a dressing room
directly off the stage, also a small table and two chairs on the stage, and if the musicians
do not object I should like rugs on the stage also” (emphasis in original, Johnson, Letter
to Mr. James). She directs him to “please allow three of your other artists to come out so
that I may have time to change my gown and put as my last number ‘The Success of the
Season’” (Johnson, Letter to Mr. James). Her comedy would end the performance.
This letter demonstrates Johnson’s judgment and experience as a performer. She
appears to know what will ‘work’ best for her audience in Kamloops, and seems
remarkably concerned with reception—the sustainability of audience attention. She
reminds the promoter, Mr. James, that “it is a great mistake to have a programme too
long” and notes that she does not “want to eat up too much of [the performance’s] time.”
She indicates which of her selections will work best, citing “Ojistoh” as her preferred
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number, and then “Legend of the Northern Lights.” She says that she would prefer to do
three numbers, but knows that her last number, ‘Success of the Season’, will “last twenty
minutes.” She underscores the importance of her ad hoc improvisations in her
performance, stating that “it is necessary for me to supplement my readings with some [?]
stories.” She makes her expectations for the entertainment clear with a presumption: “of
course you will open and close with music.” This letter affirms that by 1908, Johnson’s
performance was solidified as a certain kind of entertainment—one that drew on the
theatricality of her ornate costumes, improvisational storytelling, vaudevillian satire, and
mastery of both impersonation and recitation. She used doubling in service of a style of
performance that Johnson knew to be popular.
Johnson’s aptitude and professional acumen—her fluency in theatrical
languages—must be highlighted here in the context of the late nineteenth century. Alan
Filewod, in his introduction to Theatre Histories (2007) observes that “for the most part,
Aboriginal cultures appear in theatre historiography only in the obligatory reference to
pre-contact performance, usually narrated as ‘ritual’; they appear once again in the
1990’s with the emergence of professional First Nations theatre companies and a canon
of native Drama” (x). Johnson represents a fine example that stands directly in between
these periods. The repositioning of her performance history in the tradition of
“personality acting” and “mimic” indicates that she was operating neither in the tradition
of Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, nor merely resisting spectacle and performing only
lyrical elocution. Johnson’s performances operate between these polarities. Their iterative
inconsistency reflects a deep passion for experimentation with different styles of
performance and the embodiment of distinct and various characters.
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The evidence of Johnson’s comedic performances de-stabilizes the distressing
historical narratives that have been constructed around Johnson’s doubling. Generally,
Johnson’s performance is described as a “‘two-ness’” (Stigter 52) or “dual representation”
(Stigter 51) that “resulted in a rather hollow activism when it came to addressing Iroquois
issues of the day” (Monture “Beneath the British Flag”). The “disappointment”
(Viehmann) of Johnson’s performance is predicated on the sequence with which she
presented a ‘duality.’ She is a victim of non-Indigenous perceptions, in these historical
narratives. Her Indigenous identity disappears in the second act of her performance—or
so the story goes. What I hope the presentation of the comedic texts underscores is that an
engagement with Johnson’s presentation of character is more complex than this reading
implies. The exclusion of Johnson’s comedic texts and performance from the historian’s
gaze has, to date, enabled Johnson to function as yet another tragic figure in the history of
Indigenous performance. This historical impulse is, as Gerald Vizenor argues “a racial
burden, a postcolonial over-compensation at best" (Vizenor 9-11).
Evidence of Johnson’s command over performance styles resists this typology.
However, it does not mean that Johnson did not appeal to her audiences, even those that
were made up of white upper class elites that were responsible for the systemic de-
privileging of various Indigenous populations. It does not mean that she was not a slave
to economies of representation—ones that may have driven the kinds of “personality”
portrayals that both Johnson and McRaye presented in their dual performance.
What it does mean is that Johnson’s comedy was more than simply “de-
authentication.” This is a term that Monique Mojica, Kuna and Rappahannock actor and
playwright, uses to describe the pressure that Indigenous artists face as a result of “being
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urban, being bi-cultural, not being fluent in the language.” In Mojica’s experience as an
artist working in twenty-first century theatre, “de-authenticat[ion]” is a constant
framework that she must confront and resist—it is the tool used by critics that “makes
you less Indigenous” (Mojica)—“not Kuna enough.” It is worth noting that Mojica
herself featured Pauline Johnson in a play produced in 2007 that imagined Johnson
encountering these same processes—these same mechanisms that aim to de-Indigenize
her on the basis of her bi-cultural identity.
I argue that these creative responses resist the historical imaginings of Johnson’s
performance that have pictured Johnson as the “de-authenticated Indian.” Generally, the
first half of her “dual” performance is criticized as a vision of the “Pan-Indian” “Mohawk
Princess” and the second half of her performance is regarded as a submission to the
audience’s desire for a depiction of assimilative romance. Either way, Johnson is a victim
of the marketplace. What the inclusion of the comedic texts in this chapter has aimed to
reveal is that this vision of Johnson as a victim to her own duality—this dichotomy—
ignores the multitude of strategies she was employing throughout her performance.
Johnson may not have been ‘successful’ by our critical postcolonial standards—but her
use of dialect, her partnerships, and her selection of dramatic texts indicate a fluency in a
variety of theatrical languages. Her nuanced presentation of comedy speaks to her
flexibility and maturity as an Indigenous artist operating at the turn of the century.
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CONCLUSION:
Losing, Weaving, and Masking Pauline Johnson’s Theatrical Histories
In 1909, Johnson was diagnosed with breast cancer and her declining health
ended her performance career. Her ornate and well-attended funeral reflected the
theatricality of her career: “So admired was Pauline Johnson at the time of her death on 7
March 1913, that she received a civic funeral from the city of Vancouver, which declared
a half-holiday in her honor” (Gerson “Pauline Johnson and Celebrity” 228). It is alleged
that Evelyn Johnson destroyed the written evidence (the scripts) of Johnson’s
performance career after her sister’s death—written artifacts that might have made
Johnson’s theatrical history more accessible. Therefore, when I began research work for
this dissertation, it was generally agreed that what remained of Johnson’s performance
lay not in words, but rather in memories and material artifacts. Until now, this is how we
have known about her activity as a theatre artist: her white dress in the Woodland
Cultural Centre, reviews and ticket stubs of her performances held in the McMaster
University collection in Hamilton, the memory of Johnson’s performance from her
community at the Six Nations. I hope this dissertation has opened up new avenues of
exploration by attending to the choreographies that I myself pursued. My research has
brought me to the door of the house in which she performed at Holland Park, to various
comedietta scripts that hitherto were deemed destroyed or unknowable, to her old home
at Chiefswood, to museums in Muskoka and in other part of Canada, to sites—now
abandoned or built over—where Johnson’s voice, body, and characters once enthralled a
generation of Canadians.
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While this dissertation proposes that a close examination of Johnson’s theatrical ‘routes’
can lead to a clearer understanding of the sources of her performance, it also highlights
the artifacts that Johnson has left behind. Like so many other historians and biographers, I
have been consistently fascinated by the most gripping and enticing of them all: her
“Indian costume.” In 1913, Johnson bequeathed her magnificent costume to the Museum
of Vancouver, where it is held in storage:
I bequeath to the Museum of the City of Vancouver…my Indian costume intact,
and comprising the scalps, silver brooches and all other decorations, and including
the skirt and bodice, moccasins, bear claw necklace, eagle crest, and the pair of
bead and tooth bracelets given to me by Ernest Thompson Seaton, also the scarlet
‘blanket’ used in the ceremony of making His Royal Highness, the Duke of
Connaught, chief of the Sixth Nation Indians, also the single ‘baby’ moccasin worn
by my late father, also the wooden ladle left me by my Indian grandmother, also my
‘Ojistoh’ dagger which is the steel dagger with deerhorn handle, which belonged to
my father, also the personally autographed letters written me by Paul Bluett (Max
O’Rell), Sir Frederick Leighton, John Greenlead Whittier, and the Duke of Argyll.
(Howarth)
This costume has become the “archival fragment [that] operates as a literal substitute for
the lost object, the unrecoverable past” of Johnson’s performance history (Freshwater
735). The semiotic difficulty of interpreting this artifact has contributed to the
‘unrecoverability’ of Johnson’s performance history.
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Figure 48: Museum of Vancouver Website Image of Johnson’s Performance Costume.
In the course of my research on Johnson, I have often looked at the photograph of her
costume and been struck by the absence of its vital owner. In some ways, this dissertation
marks an obsession with the ‘loss’ implicit in the photograph—my work has endeavored
to re-animate the performance costume that stands so silently in the Museum’s still image.
This sense of loss is also felt in the Johnson postage stamp. I have attempted to make
Johnson ‘present’ by engaging with her ‘lost’ performances, in spite of narratives that
have hitherto suggested that any study of Johnson’s performances was unfeasible because
of this loss. But Johnson’s performances reveal themselves by attending to what is
missing: Johnson herself—the movements of her body, her voice, and her gestures; her
stage partners: the influence of Walter McRaye and Owen Smily; the context: the spaces
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backstage where she hastily threw off or on her buckskin dress and silk crepon gown; the
repertoire: the selections she used to bring her scalps, knife, and taffeta to life; the “other”
dresses, and the materials she bought and sold through her touring years; the audience
with all their their prejudices and aspirations.
Throughout my dissertation, I have resisted placing Johnson’s work within an
ongoing “subversion-containment debate.” Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield explore
this concept in their consideration of cultural materialist approaches to Shakespeare. They
offer a historiographic analysis of criticism that tends to interpret texts within a binary
model in which a text can either, contain a “dominant order” and thereby reinforce a
cultural reality, or else “subvert that order” (10). This is a useful debate to end my
analysis with because it is one that I have encountered again and again in the course of
my research on Pauline Johnson.
In some ways, much of Johnson’s theatre history speaks to subversive politics.
Indeed, Johnson’s performance of “A Cattle Thief” and “Wolverine,” selections that
“reject the dehumanization that accompanies genocide” (Strong Boag 138), seems to
meet Stephen Greenblatt’s working definition of subversion: it is “not merely the attempt
to seize existing authority, but […] a challenge to the principles upon which authority is
based” (in Dollimore and Sinfeld 13). Even Johnson’s “Indian” costume can be thought
of as subversive but only through an understanding of its “context of articulation”--its
context and reception: its operation within the frameworks of Victorian codes of
correctness and its interpretation as a mildly offensive (or at least inadequate) “pastiche.”
Thus, elements of subversion emerge in this history. And in some ways, the work
undertaken in this dissertation may contribute to the understanding of Johnson’s
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performance proposed by scholars such as Veronica Strong-Boag. She envisions Johnson
as a “Canadian Post-Colonial Performer” (131), who functioned as a “social critic,” and
proposes how “[Johnson’s] work as a subversive narrative reveals a ‘conscious effort to
enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, and make it
acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories’ (Said 216 in Strong-Boag
131). Strong-Boag asserts that Johnson “tried to translate Aboriginal and Mixed Race
experience into public images that settlers could value” through her stage and published
work (131). This is an argument for subversion that captures Johnson’s function as
“containment”—“translating” her work for an authority but not challenging the very
principles of that authority.
I have tried not to place Johnson on either side of the “subversive-containment
debate” because the histories I have exposed reveal “not a straightforward position, but a
process much more complex” at the site of her performances (Dollimore 10). In Chapter
Four, I have discussed Johnson’s use of wampum in performance, her stage exploitation
of relics for American audiences, her ‘anthropologicalization’ of her own performance
identity. These aspects of Johnson’s performance history do not fit with a post-modern
reading of her stage persona.
Indeed, it is what Johnson was doing offstage that is perhaps the most “containing”
aspect of her performance history. In 1897, she sold wampum belts and other ceremonial
materials to David Boyle, curator of the Canadian Institute Museum. This fact has led to
Johnson being accused of “hollow activism” (Monture 138); her participation within
networks of authority that bartered in Indigeneity perhaps negate any ‘pure’ intentions
(Kovacs “Double Wampum”). Below is the letter she wrote to a possible buyer, Joseph
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Keppler, explaining why she needed to part with the “renowned belt” whose “history is
beyond question”:
I am compelled to sacrifice it, to part with it, either completely sell it, or sell it at a
[?] to be repurchased by myself [at the?] end of three years at much higher [?]. I
would of course prefer the latter plan, for I frankly admit, nothing but the most [?]
demands would compel me to think of parting with it at all. I have had the belt
valued at about eighteen hundred dollars but would let it go at a much more
reasonable rate than that. Of course you know enough of wampums to consider the
difference in value between ordinary belts and the renowned “Hiawatha” League
Belts, so therein lies the value of the one I own. My belt is comprised entirely
[double underline] of beads same as the largest two enclosed here (I know some
League belts consist of the smaller beads- (same as smaller sample). My belt is
thirty eight [“about 36” struck through] inches long, and four inches wide, and for
so ancient a specimen is in good repair- of course it has come broken in places-
They all have, not having been restrung for so many years.
Will you kindly write and tell me if you know of a possible purchaser. I have a
splendid opportunity to present myself to the Public in England—another such
chance may never come and I am using every means in my power to avail myself
of it. (Johnson “My Dear Mr. Keppler”).
This letter, written to Keppler on March 11th 1905, suggests that Johnson had become a
slave to her love of performance.
The document cited above might, at first, be regarded as yet another disappointing
feature of Johnson’s theatre history. I have argued elsewhere for a rethinking of this
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tendency to regard Johnson’s treatment of archival materials as destructive, by asking
about the politics of care. Still, these legacies reveal a tension in my own argument about
Johnson’s performance of an Indigenous determinism. So how do we move past this
negotiation of Johnson’s performances as successful/unsuccessful based on her
“subversion/containment”? Clearly, there were times that Johnson’s performances were
subversive and clearly, there were times when she might have contained that subversion.
What is important in all of this is the underlying nuance.
A consideration of the mutable process of her performance moves this analysis
away from the binary catagorization of her post-colonial and intercultural engagements.
Such categorization positions Johnson’s significance, subversiveness, or containment
within frameworks of authenticity. As such, it is not surprising that so many historians
keep returning to Johnson’s spectacularly theatrical “Indian costume” that even Johnson
called “the most difficult thing in the world.” This costume and its theatricality provokes
the question about Johnson that Margery Fee articulates: “The impossible question that
haunts Johnson’s career (and that even got to her on occasion) might be posed this way:
“Pauline Johnson: was she really Mohawk?” (Fee 119). Indeed it is Johnson’s theatre
history—her inauthentic play—that sacrifices and puts into question her Indigeneity.
Even more so—it is the process by which Johnson arrived at the development of her
costume (her participation within markets that bartered in “Indian” trade) that further
make her performance a target for inauthenticity. Kateri Damm warns of these
expectations for most Native people who are, by virtue of their nationality, “expected to
know everything about our own cultures and histories from land claims to spiritual
practices to traditional dress” (5). When Johnson’s performance is taken as evidence of
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this lack of knowledge it is either ignored or excused.
In short, Johnson’s function as a performer is consistently judged within
frameworks of the ‘real’ and authentic. Was her costume real? Was her advocacy real?
Re-framings of Johnson as a post-modern and post-colonial artist take great liberties in
imagining that Johnson’s performance did not require acting—she was just being ‘real’:
“Much like other performance artists, she communicated in ways that are ‘intensely
intimate,’ with an ‘emphasis on personal experience and emotional material, not ‘acted’
or distanced from artist or audience’” (Forte 255 in Strong-Boag 133). Here, post-
colonialism functions as the Godzilla-like monster, imagined by Thomas King —
“flatter[ing],” but also “a dangerous thing […] especially dangerous when we do not even
see that the premise from which we start a discussion is not the hard fact that we thought
it was, but one of the fancies we churn out of our imaginations to help us get from the
beginning of an idea to the end” (King “Godzilla vs. Postcolonial” 183).
A great deal of the writing about Johnson’s performance begins with the kinds of
“fancy” of which King warns. The small image of Johnson of the 1961 postage stamp,
discussed at the beginning of this dissertation, grows to the size of Godzilla within these
post-colonial narratives. This is a convenient narrative—the imagining of Johnson as only
subverting normative understandings of Indigenous identity or else playing into them
(performing the “Mohawk Princess”). The former interpretation of Johnson’s history is
one that postcolonial theory prefers—it positions Johnson as an actor within a narrative
of “progress in which primitivism gives way to sophistication, suggesting as it does that
such a movement is both natural and desirable” (186). The latter interpretation positions
Johnson as a victim –placing her within a tragic trope that ignores the possibility that, for
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Johnson, survival might have been located in the pleasure of performance, applause,
laughter, and theatrical acumen.
At the risk of perpetuating the ahistorical approaches of postcolonial scholars, it is
worth proposing a relationship between Johnson and figurehead Indigenous theatre artists
working today. Artists like Tomson Highway continually resist being framed as victims
or tokens. Highway notes:
In the beginning [of his career], I had a tendency to write about the painful aspect
of Native life in this country, this partly because the concept of “the Native as
victim” has been so drummed into all our heads, into Canadian culture as a whole.
Well, as I get older, I realize more and more that there are many, many positive
things about Native culture in this country – that we are not necessarily victims and
can, in fact, be winners, victors. So my stuff these days is more about positive
experience. And humour, lots and lots of humour, which lies at the core of Native
culture because of the presence of the Trickster in our lives, our language, our
dream world. This cosmic clown who laughs and laughs and laughs. (Muskrat
Magazine)
Though Johnson’s career began with a “cry” onstage at the Young Men’s Liberal Club
(perhaps fulfilling the expectations of her settler audience through the presentation of a
“painful” woman who is victimized), she, like Highway, also turned to humour later on in
her touring days. Before she died of cancer, her final performances featured comedic
selections like “Success of the Season” that produced “laughs and laughs.”
These perspectives from today’s Indigenous theatre artists offer some further
insights and warnings for researchers considering the value of postcolonialism as a
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historical and analytical category. As Mudrooroo argues: “I fail to see why the
postcolonial was let loose on us Aborigines, and why, whether we like it or not, we are to
be digested and displayed as part of the postcolonial. In fact, I, as an Aboriginal writer,
feel that this non-Australian predator should be captured and taken back to its own native
land, wherever that might be” (in Turcotte “Re-Marking on History”).
And so, which interpretive methodology can overturn this postcolonial
methodology? In the case of Johnson’s theatre history, I think moving beyond the
standard of ‘authenticity or else’ by which Johnson’s performances have consistently
been judged would help to reinvest this performance history with its deserved complexity
and nuance. Instead of trying to determine if the discrete aspects of her performance
history reveal a politics of authentic subversion or inauthentic engagement, I am more
concerned with Johnson’s exceptional weaving together of distinct performance cultures.
By addressing how Johnson’s performance choices coincide with complex codified
traditions like “correct” costuming, dialect performance, personality acting, mimicry, and
the comedietta, I aim to discredit the shame attached to this performance history. I
highlight how the methodologies used to address and study Johnson’s poetry are not the
same methodologies that should be applied to an analysis or engagement with her
performance. Erika Fischer-Lichte reminds us: “Even if performers set the decisive
preconditions for the progression of a performance – preconditions that are determined by
a set of rules or the process of the mise en scène, they are not in a position to fully control
the course of the performance. Many elements emerge during a performance as a
consequence of certain interactions” (Fischer-Lichte “Interweaving” np). It is the “many
elements” that are not contained within the text of Johnson’s performances (the poems
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she used or the reviews that cite her repertoire) that I have attempted to highlight here:
the effect of Johnson’s partners; the conditions and spaces she performed within; her
audience’s expectations, developed through participation in particular turn-of-the-century
theatrical cultures.
Johnson wove not only her own cultural legacies and stories, but also the stories
of many other Indigenous and non-Indigenous figures into these particular traditions of
performance. How do we name this history outside the vocabularies of subversion or
containment? How can this be categorized outside the category of postcolonial—one that,
as Tomas King reminds “might be an excellent term to use to describe Canadian
literature, but […] will not do to describe Native literature” (King 185). Tom King offers
useful alternative terms such as “tribal, interfusional, polemical, and associational to
describe the range of Native writing” (185). Do these terms better speak to or describe the
strategies of Johnson’s performance? In so far as interfusional “describe[s] that part of
Native literature which is a blending of oral literature and written literature” (186), it
seems a useful term for this performance. But does it reflect Johnson’s own practices?
It seems to me that interweaving may be the best term to apply to the
performativity of Johnson’s theatre history in that it returns one to the image of her
wampum belts, has a resonant connection with her book of poetry The White Wampum,
and pays homage to her choice of stage name: Tekahionwake (double wampum). Erika
Fischer-Lichte suggests this imagery of interweaving can move criticism beyond
intercultural frameworks and vocabularies that have defined postcolonial studies, and
that she identifies as “problematic” because “the concept presupposes that a performance
culture’s components can always be clearly separated from one another, that is, that one
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culture’s contribution will be easily distinguishable from another’s” (5). For Fischer-
Lichte the concept of “interweaving cultures” suggests a moment in performance in
which cultures are woven together “without erasing their differences.” In this moment,
“performances, as sites of in-betweenness, are able to constitute new realities – realities
of the future[…]” (Fischer-Lichte 254). A fixation on defining the inauthentic and
authentic aspects of Johnson’s performance in order to define her theatrical work as
subversive or containing has limited an appreciation of the nuance in her performance,
and has cast so much shame on Johnson’s theatricality that its import for Indigenous and
Canadian performance culture today and in the future has been wholly ignored.
The impact of Johnson’s history on that “future” of Indigenous settler
relationships is one that this dissertation project does not wholly capture. Perhaps one of
the most interesting and problematic artifacts in the Museum of Vancouver, and the one
that relates directly to the significance of Johnson’s theatricality, is her death mask.
Donated by Peggy Imredy to the MOV, this mask was made by Charles Marega, an
Italian sculptor and friend of Pauline Johnson. The mask itself is mired in controversy.
Before her death, Johnson “entrust[ed] funeral arrangements to Vancouver’s social upper
crust rather than to her own family” (Anderson & Robertson 105). She particularly
requested that her funeral not have any flowers and that there be no viewing of her body.
Despite these wishes, the Women’s Canadian Club invited a local artist to “fashion a
death mask and arrangements of flowers overflowed Christ Church Cathedral in
downtown Vancouver” (Anderson and Robertson 107).
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Figure 49. Death mask of E. Pauline Johnson by Charles Marega, 1913. Museum of
Vancouver. Reference code AM1102-S3-: LEG427.5.
This mask does, however, speak to the immense significance of Johnson’s history
on the future of Indigenous performance. Since her death in 1913, the history of E.
Pauline Johnson (who later took on the stage name Tekahionwake) has been performed,
played, and reimagined in various shapes and configurations during significant and
controversial moments of tension between Canadian and “Indian” policy: her character
has been featured in performances during the 1967 centennial celebrations (Montagnes),
on the Six Nations reserve following the 1990 Oka Crisis (Kreig), at the Vancouver 2010
Olympic ceremonies (Olympic), during the height of the Missing and Murdered
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Indigenous Women (MMIW) emergency (Pauline), and in the aftermath of the 2015
release of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation report (Paddle Song).
The mask, which I only encountered at the end of my study of Johnson’s
performance history, invites continued study of the significance of her reappearances.
Johnson now functions as a persona through which positions are taken and enacted
regarding settler colonialism, Indigenous sovereignty, Canadian nationalism, cultural
genocide, and reconciliation. My upcoming work will address the ways in which
Johnson’s history is being redesigned as an advocacy tool for distinctly different political
agendas. These manifestations of Johnson’s theatre history complicate previous
assumptions about the reach of Johnson’s influence, and the impact of the influence of
performance on the nature of settler-colonial relationships in Canada.
My interest in Johnson was sparked a decade ago—before the inauguration of
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools (2008);
before the federal government of Canada promised an inquiry into Missing and Murdered
Aboriginal women; before the creation of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association;
before Indigenous content requirement courses became mandatory at universities in
Winnipeg, Manitoba and in British Columbia, and before the conversation about the
principles of Indigenous pedagogy (Heath-Justice 21 November 2015). However, during
the last decade and over the course of my research I have also heard about the death of
Tina Fontaine in August of 2014; I have heard political denial that the 1,100 cases of
missing and murdered Aboriginal women (the number keeps growing) in Canada could
not be viewed as a “sociological phenomena” (Boutillier); I have seen cultural
insensitivity and illiteracy practiced in pop culture fashion, as in Dsquared2’s unveiling
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of their #Dsquaw fashion collection (“Dsquared2 under fire”); I have witnessed, again
and again, instances of racism, cultural insensitivity, violence, and ignorance overtake
conversations and meetings. During the very revision of the conclusion to this
dissertation, a headline flashed across my screen to warn of yet another state of
emergency in Attawapiskat (Ward). Obviously, there is still much work to be done.
Johnson re-appears in many expressive endeavors. She has been given form in a
hall in Vancouver’s eastside, replaying her performance of Ojistoh in a workshop
production of Margaret Atwood’s opera Pauline. She has appeared on the Six Nations
through a lecture by Daniel David Moses, and was present in the body of Cheri Maracle
during the Indigenous Literary Studies Association’s meeting at the Woodland Cultural
Centre, and during Native Earth Performing Arts’ 2015 WEESAGEECHAK BEGINS
TO DANCE 27 festival. Her performance haunts the halls of the house her father
designed at Chiefswood and continues to animate other spaces of artistic inspiration.
While I was in Banff for my own artistic development, I turned a corner after a long day
of workshop and rehearsal to find a few inspirational prints by George Littlechild
hanging in a studio.
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Figure 50. Photo by Sasha Kovacs of George Littlechild’s art. May 19th 2015. Banff,
Alberta.
Johnson is more than just a source of artistic inspiration. Her biography and the
complexity of her performance history continue to facilitate connection across all
boundaries. With this doctoral dissertation, I have explored the significance of Pauline
Johnson and her performance history in the context of turn-of-the-century cultural
politics. It is my hope that her legacy and the artifacts connected to it, as revealed in this
paper, will draw future scholars to consider the immense importance that she continues to
have in scripting and configuring the future of Indigenous and settler relationships on
Turtle Island.
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“I may act till the world grows wild and tense”:

The Performances of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake

Alexandra V. (Sasha) Kovacs, M.A.

Alexandra V. (Sasha) Kovacs

Although her performance history is intriguing, most scholarship about Johnson

fragments of Johnson’s archive.

mostly in chronological format. In addition, I address the substantial sophistication of her

performing to settler audiences, within a framework of specific economies of representation.

My examination of Johnson’s theatre history begins with a micro-historical focus on Johnson’s

broader critical engagements with Indigenous performance histories.

actor/dramaturges Jonathan Heppner and Emily Hincks— supported my interest in Johnson’s

research and the writing of this dissertation.

support of this project.

I am indebted to the archivists, knowledge keepers, and generous scholars who

continually shared information with me about Johnson’s performance in person, by email, at

research and writing all the more.

Nancy Hodgson at Canadian Stamp News.

in the development of Canada’s cultural and political ecology.

Thanks further to my artistic collaborators who stood by me and continually supported

Megan Deeks, and Megan MacKeigan.

feel what they meant.

O! pathless world of seeming!

-Selection from E. Pauline Johnson’s “Shadow River: Muskoka”

Flint and Feather. First published in Saturday Night, 20 July 1889.

i. The Recirculation of E. Pauline Johnson as the “Canadian Indian”

i. Identifying the “beginning”: January 1892

i. Interpreting Johnson’s Early Costumes

i. A “Canadian Girl” is an “Indian” actress

i. Inconsistencies in Johnson’s Performance History

Figures 9, 10, 11-

Figure 27 & 28-

Figure 45 & 46-

INTRODUCTION: METHODS AND CONTEXTS

The Recirculation of E. Pauline Johnson as the “Canadian Indian”

In 1961, on the centenary of her birth, E. Pauline Johnson was honored on a

Canadian commemorative stamp. The decision to celebrate Johnson on the stamp

represented a posthumous recognition of Johnson’s own dreams of international exposure

and appreciation. As a successful “platform recitalist” and “comedienne” (Keller 8) from

commemoration of Pauline Johnson as a culturally important person on a Canadian

repository of Canadian iconography, should itself contribute to the discourse of

appearance and disappearance that is associated with Johnson by incorrectly cataloguing

opaque and contradictory nature of Pauline Johnson’s legacy.

As I pieced together the ‘story’ of this stamp’s creation, questions began to

offer an interesting metaphor for the evolution of Johnson’s performance history.

Johnson stamp. In attempting to capture the mutable, substantially contrived subject of

historical and cultural positioning.

accessible starting point for an examination of Johnson’s identity, presentation, and

Johnson, may be illustrative of a broader failure by critics to acknowledge the

methodological progress (so indispensible to the analysis of E. Pauline Johnson’s career,

step in the progression of divergent critical approaches. September 2013

A Stamp and a Performance

How could Pauline Johnson be resurrected in the context of the ambitious

positioning Johnson as a synecdoche for her entire “race.”

Numerous representational variations of Johnson were produced in the

diversity of misrepresentation. Some of the covers contain glaring biographical errors.

poetess” (see figure 1).

Figure 1- First Day Cover by “Rosecraft” Company.

illuminate the ‘work in progress’ that is E. Pauline Johnson.

complexity of Johnson’s identity politics and performance body.

Canadian government in the graphic arts section at Canadian Forces Headquarters,

his designs (Lamarre n.p.).

National Archives of Canada) or because they seemed inessential to the contextualization

imagination. These nuances continue to play an important part in the analysis of