E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake
Entertainment Bureau Advertisement
The following advertisement was circulated by the Canadian Entertainment Bureau in 1894. Notifying audiences in Toronto of Johnson’s future performances and touting her previous success, it dramatizes a tension between representing Johnson as an eminent Canadian poet and underscoring her relationship to an “authentic” Indigeneity.To fully unpack the significance of the photograph that is the centerpiece of the advertisement, it is perhaps useful to place it alongside another studio photograph of Johnson, created more than a decade earlier in 1879. Taken in her hometown of Brantford Ontario, sent to her mother, and eventually pulled into a collection by her sister, this image allows us to see a representation of Johnson that circulated in more intimate family circles, as opposed to the national and international audience of the advertisement. In the earlier photograph, Johnson is posed in a three-quarter profile, gazing into the middle distance, placing her within a Western-European lineage of portraiture. Wearing a high-collared dress with her hair pinned up, Johnson appears self-contained and seemingly in line with European norms of dress and representation in the period. In the advertisement image, on the other hand, a pastiche of Indigeneity is foregrounded. Compared to the contained quality of the earlier portrait, this image is a veritable profusion of textures, Johnson’s loose hair cascading downwards towards swaths of feathers and fringe. Carole Gerson has suggested that Johnson’s outfits for her performances were typically “a collage of various aspects of Native culture, inspired by an image of Longfellow’s Minnehaha (according to her sister Evelyn Johnson’s memoir in the Archives of Ontario) rather than a representation of any particular tribe” (Gerson 427).
Performing and Complicating the “Indian Princess”
Through this non-specific display of Indigeneity, Johnson’s advertisement photograph appears to be participating in the “Indian Princess” trope often associated with Johnson’ work. In her essay “The Pocahontas Perplex,” Rayna Green traces the history of the Princess archetype, pointing to a long history of representing the Americas as an “Indian Queen,” a militant mother or goddess figure who could serve “as a representative of American liberty and European classical virtue translated into New World terms” (Green 703). Tension abounded even in these early images—feminized embodiments of desirable land collapsed colonial conquest and gendered dominance, while at the same time associating the Indian Queen with valorized qualities like liberty and virtue—but Green argues that the Princess image developed through the Pocahontas story became a particularly complex representational mode. Quickly diverging from any accurate portrayal of the historical figure, proliferating images of Pocahontas imagine a “mystical scene” in which a Native American woman aids a White man, falls in love, and converts (Green 700). Simultaneously exotic and civilized, she displays a desirable Otherness while remaining fundamentally non-threatening. The Princess is, however, always on the verge of slipping into her inverse, the hyper-sexualized figure of the Sq—w. For Green, Indigenous women are caught between the two extremes of this binary: “as some abstract, noble Princess tied to ‘America’ and to sacrificial zeal, she has power as a symbol. As the Sq—w, a depersonalized object of scornful convenience, she is powerless” (Green 713).Given the unforgiving poles of this binary, it seems reasonable to think that deploying the Indian Princess trope, flatted and caricatured as it may be, could be a mode of self-protection for Indigenous women, giving them access to the marginally more powerful half of the Princess-Sq—w dichotomy. With her abstracted Indigeneity and exoticized costume, perhaps Johnson is doing just that. Given the photograph’s position within text that connects Johnson to European audiences, we might read the image as participating in the sense of the Princess as a point of connection between settler and Indigenous culture. Her pose in the image, too, might mediate between desirable exoticism and an assurance of safety: Johnson’s shoulders face the camera, keeping her from fulfilling the complete profile position that recalls early ethnographic photography rather than portraiture, but her face is completely turned to the side, allowing the audience to view Johnson without receiving any part of her gaze in return. Avoiding a direct gaze that could suggest confrontation and agency on the part of the photographic subject, Johnson’s image seems to point towards the compliance and visual availability associated with the Princess trope. Although Johnson’s Canadian context could distance her from the specific history of the Pocahontas story, Julie Rak has suggested that Canada similarly activated images of fetishized Indigeneity in order to establish national specificity (Rak 164)—it seems possible that the Princess trope, unmoored from specific historical content, may have circulated beyond the confines of the United States, framing and influencing Johnson’s representational methods.
At the same time, it is possible to identify ways in which Johnson appears to be complicating the Princess trope even as she deploys it. While the photograph circulated in the advertisement may simply reinforce notions of exotic and non-threatening Indigeneity, it is ultimately inviting its viewers to witness a much more dynamic, embodied performance by Johnson. On the one hand, these performances may be seen as promising even greater access to Johnson as a source of entertainment, affective activation, and knowledge—Rak has argued that “the conditions of visibility to which she had to adhere in order to be seen as a speaking subject meant that as a racial subject she could not be seen to speak as anything other than spectacle” (Rak 164-5). But at the same time, “Johnson used aspects of this fetishized identity to resist white hegemony,” complicating static tropes of Indigeneity even if she was unable to evade them entirely (Rak 164). To take one example, we might think of the fact that Johnson often changed costumes partway through her performances, appearing first in an outfit reminiscent of the one she wears in the advertisement, only to re-emerge in a European evening gown. Rather than remaining fixed as an abstracted Other onto which settler fantasies could be projected, Johnson’s performances unsettled the protective barrier between an Indigenous spectacle and an otherwise invisible settler audience. Perhaps more significantly, we will see through an analysis of Johnson’s short story that her work often contained pointed political critiques that held the potential to deeply unsettle the status quo of settler culture. In a manner similar to Winnemucca, if Johnson donned a costume that perpetuated the Indian Princess trope, it was in the service of promoting and circulating work that could ultimately prove threatening, upending the sense of the Princess as operating purely in service of settler culture.
To investigate the ways in which this tension is played out in literary forms, see "A Red Girl's Reasoning"
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