Queering the Waters: The Subversive Potential in E. Pauline Johnson's Canoe

O, sweetest of all music, the far-off laughter of a rapid, rollicking and scampering among its stones. Nearer, nearer it came; the ripple grew into a roar, the sweet, wild laughter arose into boisterous, tempestuous merriment, and in another moment we swirled round a bend, dashing headlong into a tossing, twirling mass of waters that fretted and fumed themselves into eddies and whirlpools and showers of pearly spray, with a petulance that defied restraint.

—E. Pauline Johnson, "Forty-Five Miles on the Grand" (1892)

Thinking about queerness through gesture animates how bodies move in the world, and how we assign meaning in ways that are always already infused with cultural modes of knowing.

—Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings

Emily Pauline Johnson was a master of gestures, both literal and figurative. Whether steering her canoe through the rapids of the Grand River or taking her recital tour to the elite of London, her hyperconscious self-fashioning of her public persona emphasized her doubleness as Mohawk princess and Victorian New Woman. The quote above, taken from an article in Ontario's Brantford Expositor, appeared during the emergence of Canada's recreational canoe craze in the late-Victorian era. The newspaper situates Johnson's essay after a leading, multipage article proudly touts Brantford's "early settlement" a century earlier, when the "sturdy and true pioneers of the province appeared upon the scene" (1). What follows are two pages replete with dozens of photographs of "The Representative Men of Brantford County," a visual reminder of the hierarchy and ambition in the growing town. Juxtaposing this account of settler colonialism with Johnson's relatively lighthearted narrative of paddling forty-five miles on the Grand River renders both texts testaments to British North America's successful navigation of settler-Indigenous relations and concomitant establishment of patriarchal power structures. Interspersing her story with photographs of the Brantford Canoe Club and other athletic organizations, the emerging newspaper culture simultaneously posits the newly named province of Ontario's—and, by extension, Canada's—dedication to physical vitality and modern leisure.

Like the calculating editorial staff at the Expositor, Johnson, too, had a knack for shrewd moves and nuanced navigation. A close look at her article reveals the often overlapping and seemingly contradictory characteristics that affected a great deal of her writing and performance. First she fashions herself as a modern Mohawk who is loyal to the British Crown, taking care along her narrated canoe run to identify sites like the home of Alexander Graham Bell (who was a friend of her father's and named an honorary chief of the Mohawks) and "the oldest chapel in Upper Canada … built especially for the Mohawks" (20). While Johnson's amicable references to these constructed sites suggest a cultural hybridity, her narration is also prone to place-based musings of an ecologically dynamic, pre-settler space.¹ Though she opens the article with the declaration that "Ontario boasts many a beautiful inland river" and reminds readers that "a lovelier run cannot be found in the province," she still laments the loss of the "erstwhile rapids" whose remaining ripples and rills are but "souvenirs of the long ago" and recalls "the olden days" before the Grand became "a broad, semi-sluggish stretch of water, owing to many mills and their requisite dams" (17). The photograph accompanying Johnson's narrative depicts her attired in the materials of modern leisure expected of proper female canoeists, yet she sits alone in the stern, poised and in possession of the sole means with which to navigate the fragile vessel through the rapids that remain—the paddle (fig. 1). While her rhetoric and appearance express congenial acceptance of late-Victorian era behavior and the British empire's land claims with their requisite names and borders, she simultaneously embodies the memory and unchecked energy of precolonial, prepatriarchal,

Fig 1.

E. Pauline Johnson in canoe. Photo courtesy of the Brant Historical Society.

unbordered ecology, proudly aligning herself with what once was "the most...