E. Pauline Johnson’s Poetic Acts

In 1907, E. Pauline Johnson performed on a Chautauqua tour that took her “to Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Oklahoma”; she traveled the same route as William Jennings Bryan, who was the most famous name on any of the Chautauqua circuits.¹ But if Chautauquas were known for being “the most American thing in America,” then why was Johnson, a Canadian Mohawk “Poetess,” there?² As a Canadian and a nonwhite, Johnson seems doubly removed from the American brand of uplift Chautauqua tour organizers promoted. In some respects, the reason for her presence on the circuit is obvious—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she was an internationally popular performer in Canada, the United States, and England, celebrated for her authentic representation of Indianness. But this authenticity was always specious, as Johnson performed her poems in a costume that evoked Minnehaha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Native princess. Indeed, according to Johnson’s sister, parts of Johnson’s “Indian costume and silver brooches were copied from a picture we had of Minnehaha.”³ Like Johnson’s surprising presence on the Chautauqua circuit, this fact might give us pause: Johnson was a Canadian Mohawk who dressed up like a fictional and generic Indian princess.

In this article, I focus on the complex relationship between Johnson’s poetry and her Chautauqua performances. While Johnson is primarily known and studied within a Canadian context—she is considered Canada’s “most widely known woman poet of her time”—I situate Johnson specifically within the United States.⁴ This intersection of artist, venue, and historical moment offers critical insights into the ongoing discussion about Native American cultural history. While, as Bonita Lawrence notes, the United States and Canada each “maintained distinctly different ways of regulating Native identity,” I am interested in what Johnson’s Chautauqua tour tells us about social and political efforts to legislate American Indianness. Rather than focus on “how external definitions and controls on Indianness have impacted [Native people’s] identities,” I discuss the reverse—how Johnson developed a commercially circulating and commercially successful construction of Indianness in the United States and returned it to her audiences.⁵ My approach, in other words, is more concerned with American cultural history than with Johnson herself, who viewed herself as a Canadian of British descent and was happier touring in England than in the United States (especially given the rigors and potential dangers of a Chautauqua tour).⁶ Because she explicitly adopted Indian stereotypes based on the circulation of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), this essay will focus on how American perceptions of Indianness influenced Johnson’s performances—and, in turn, how Johnson manipulated these stereotypes in order to assert Native women’s agency.

Johnson’s poetic performances seemingly served a retrograde—if not demeaning—political purpose by bringing to life the figure that perhaps best embodied a bygone American self: the Indian. With performances that closely conform to what I call the Minnehaha model, Johnson appears to predicate her Native identity’s authenticity on white audiences’ expectations and tastes. Put another way, her poetic performances exploit the social function of Indianness in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American popular cultural imagination; they embody what Frederick Hoxie calls “the romantic Indian of Cooper and Longfellow.”⁷

Regarded as a living anachronism, Indians demonstrated to modern Americans the power of a supposedly restorative past.⁸ More than just powerful, that past had commercial appeal as well. Like Johnson, many Indians across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “participated in white people’s Indian play” by performing as themselves in public, thereby, Philip Deloria underscores, “assisting, confirming, coopting, challenging, and legitimating the performative tradition of aboriginal American identity.”⁹ Indian entertainment became increasingly popular at the turn of the century at sites such as Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows, World’s Fairs, and summer camps; and with organizations like the Boy Scouts, where children learned to “play Indian.”¹⁰ These entertainments were gendered as well; the aforementioned examples depicted a kind of rugged masculinity while performers like Johnson resonated differently, reflecting a...