Journal Article

Pauline Johnson, Canada's 'Indian Poetess': 'The Most Unique Fixture in the Literary World of Today'

Gerson, Carole

2022

Overview

The White Wampum (London: John Lane, 1895), Canadian Born (Toronto: Morang, 1903), and Flint and Feather, erroneously described as her \"Complete Poems\" (Toronto: Musson, 1912 and many later editions).4 At the time of her death from breast cancer on 7 March 1913, three days before her fifty-second birthday, Pauline Johnson was Canada's best-known female poet. The outspoken first-person female voices in her best-known performance narratives counter the self-sacrificing Native woman of Felicia Hemans's \"Indian Woman's Death Song,\" a trope that Johnson vehemently rejected.7 Asserting Indigenous rights to recognition and fairness, the speaker of \"A Cry from an Indian Wife\" proclaims \"By right, by birth, we Indians own these lands\" (Collected 15), while in \"The Cattle Thief,\" the daughter of the murdered Cree chief (who was not stealing anything) berates British settlers for robbing her people of land and food: \"How have you paid us for our game? How paid us for our land? / By a book to save our souls from the sins you brought in your other hand\" (Collected 99). In The Political Poetess, Lootens has much to say about African Americans, but Native Americans appear only in relation to her discussion of Felicia Hemans's \"Indian Woman's Death Song\" (65–67).

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: African Americans / American Indians / Canoes & canoeing / Daughters / Females / Gender / Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne (1793-1835) / Modernism / Native rights / Poetry / Poets / Women