“A Strong Race Opinion: On The Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” and “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” E. Pauline Johnson
This portion of the exhibit will read the two pieces together to outline the issues Johnson critically diagnoses in this representation, and the creative solutions that she offers in response to them. Employing a reading practice that does not privilege the critical over the creative or vice-versa, and instead recognizes their co-constitution, this essay will alternatively foreground one over the other while also engaging with other texts. “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” features as a main character a kind of individual we see mentioned at the conclusion of Nancy Ward’s 1818 petition regarding the usurpation of Cherokee land by settler-colonialists: white-men married to Native women who “ought to” be allies of the Cherokee tribe but instead end up being not so at all (30). This character type in Ward’s earlier petition, the man married to a Native woman who has an antagonistic relationship with her people’s interests, finds embodiment in Johnson’s later story through the character of Charlie McDonald. Charlie, apparently completely in love with his Native wife Christine because of her Native American exoticness, commits atrocious violence upon her once he realizes that her relationship with her heritage is not what she expected (Red, 1). Charlie, a typical colonizer with “the Indian relic-hunting craze,” fetishizes his wife as one such relic, being attracted to her because he thought she was “utterly uncivilized and uncultured, but had withal that marvellously innate refinement so universally possessed by higher tribes of North American Indians” (Red, 2). The story’s central marital problem arises due to Charlie’s assumption that Christine shares his perspective on her people’s backwardness (Hargreaves, 181). But more on that later. Let us first attend to Johnson’s diagnosis of the part of colonial discourse whose preponderance could most directly inform this assumption on Charlie’s part: the representation of Native American women in Canadian literature.
Johnson evaluates no relationship between the reality of Native American women and their representation in Canadian literature (Opinion, 2). Instead, the Indian woman is given “an individuality ungoverned by nationalisms” completely lacking any “development of her character” (Opinion, 1). Evaluating a remarkable consistency of her representation across nineteenth-century authors such as Charles Mair and Helen Hunt Jackson, Johnson views in Canadian literature only one possibility for the Native woman: to die (Opinion, 2). Rather than existing in isolation, the death exists in relation to a series of settler-colonial-related sub-plots. One is the Native American woman betraying her tribe’s interests for a white man she is in love with. Another entails killing herself when the white-man lover marries a white woman rather than her (Opinion, 3). Through such representations, Canadian authors “take away her love, her life, and last and most terrible of all, her reputation” (Opinion, 4). Jonhson’s “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” completely inverses all of these stereotypes she detects and detests among her contemporary writers. In the story, we see the titular protagonist Christine as having a fully developed character. This development manifests in the story through her having a proud relation with her Indigenous nationality, which comes to the fore when Christine severs her relationship with her husband Charlie once he reveals that he shares a colonial disgust about her people and their customs (Red, 7). She chooses her national pride over her husband, and what dies is not the Native Woman– as it would have in the archetypal story about her– but Christine’s marriage (Piatote, 96).
Besides her depiction of marriage as a site for Native American women to exert their prideful agency, Johnson’s marital tale also entails a critique of white womanhood. This criticism emerges when we consider Johnson’s representation of Mrs. Stuart in “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” alongside her complaint that Native American women are represented as individuals “ungoverned by nationalisms—but the outcome of impulse and nature and a general womanishness” (Opinion, 1). Evident in the reading above, nationalism is identified by Johnson as the entity on the basis of which Christine stands up for herself. In contrast to Christine’s decisive action stands the amorphous nothing-doing of Mrs. Stuart, a white woman who congregates in the same social circles as Christine and her (ex-)husband. Around Christine’s proud articulation of her Indigeneity, Mrs. Stuart laughs “uneasily,” stammers over her words “foreigners, or–or, perhaps I should say native,” pauses “awkwardly,” cannot find her words “‘Ah! Was all she said,” and fails to avoid conflict “‘Don’t, dear, don’t,’ interrupted Mrs. Stuart hurriedly; ‘it is bad enough now, goodness knows, don’t make–“ Then she broke off blindly” (Red, 5-6). Through these dialogues, Johnson establishes a direct contrast between Christine’s absolute agency and Mrs. Stuart’s lack thereof.
Mrs. Stuart’s absolute impotence about the reality of Christine’s forthrightness puts her in allows us to see what Johnson makes of general “womanishness,” devoid of the nationality that Native American women enjoy. Johnson suggests that it is for White women such as Mrs. Stuart that the stereotypes applied to Native American women in literature hold true. It is these settler colonial women who have no selfhood beyond that handed to them by patriarchy. Through this indirect characterization of white women as oppressed and rendered inert on the basis of their gender, we can interpret Johnson as making an inverse point regarding Native American women: that their Indigeneity combines with their womanhood to amplify their power.