Mackenzie King and the Prairie West by Robert A. Wardhaugh (review)

HUMANITIES 315 poetry. The canoe voyage, explored in Johnson=s poetry and prose, makes its way into the title of Gerson and Strong-Boag=s work as a multivalent reference suggesting passion, communion with nature, the agency and activity of the newly athletic New Woman, and the advocacy of an adventurous and bohemian way of life. Another way of dismissing Johnson=s poetry has been to suggest that she was really a popular performer, not a poet. In The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, David Jackel describes Johnson as >a compelling performer = while characterizing her poetry as >derivative and shallow.= Gerson and Strong-Boag investigate complex relationships between poetry and performance. As a performer, Johnson still occupied a literary space, since she was an author who recited her own works. She mediated between arenas of popular culture and elite literary circles. Her performed work can be seen as less ephemeral than the printed work, during her lifetime. Performances expanded the life of poems read once in a newspaper and made poems which advocated change in attitudes towards Native people, such as >A Cry from an Indian Wife,= repeatedly available and current to thousands of Canadians whom the printed poem would not have reached. And, of course, Johnson=s performances in buckskin affected not only the production but the reception of her poetry and of herself. A performer in more ways than one, adept at negotiating different social and cultural milieus and nurtured by both Mohawk and European cultures (because of her English mother), Johnson as a subject raises issues of identity and its stability. However, I am not sure I agree with Gerson and Strong-Boag=s statement that Johnson=s identity is >always a process of discussion= or share their concern that >confining Johnson to her Mohawk, or even Aboriginal, identity ultimately understates her significance.= It seems to me that Johnson was, in fact, a Mohawk who also declared an identity as a Canadian. She was born in and lived at Six Nations on the Grand River until the age of twenty-four. She represented herself as a Mohawk. To say that she was a Mohawk is not >confining= but recognizing the complexity of the Mohawk society at Six Nations, which did intermarry, which did advocate European education, which did negotiate and interact with European culture and society (as Gerson and Strong-Boag discuss in their chapter on Six Nations) while advocating the right to sovereignty. In this light, Johnson=s >Native= writing is not simply that which refers to Native subject matter, but all of it. None of this lessens the significance of her contribution to Canadian literature and culture. But here I am engaging in the >process of discussion= Gerson and Strong-Boag both explore and predict. Paddling Her Own Canoe undertakes a serious study of Johnson=s poetry, essays, fiction, and performances within historical and feminist contexts, and will surely aid and stimulate further scholarship. (LALLY GRAUER) Robert A. Wardhaugh. Mackenzie King and the Prairie West 316 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 University of Toronto Press. 328. $55.00 Until quite recently, William Lyon Mackenzie King received rather little good press. For conservative historians like W.L. Morton and Donald Creighton, King and his Liberal party represented all that had gone wrong with Canada in the twentieth century. Then, with the opening of King=s infamous diaries, Canadians were stunned to find that their nation=s longest-serving prime minister had dabbled in the occult, had seriously worshipped his mother, was oddly devoted to his little dogs, and may have consorted with prostitutes as a young man. But as Robert Wardhaugh points out, in 1943 the noted newspaper publisher J.W. Dafoe, normally no great fan, concluded >that there is more to this man than I have thought.= Then, in the late 1990s, a group of twenty-five Canadian historians rated King as Canada=s best prime minister because, they said, he divided Canadians the least; faint praise indeed. Surprisingly, I too must admit to possessing some admiration for the enigmatic King. While researching my own 1998 book on Franklin Roosevelt and the origins of the CanadianAmerican security alliance, I had expected to encounter a fawning, subservient...