Early Indigenous LiteraturesMain MenuThe Child Who Would be Sovereign: Settler Colonial Frustrations and the Figure of the Child in Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's American Indian StoriesBy: Kai ChaseIllicit Relations: The Challenges and Possibilities of Black and Indigenous Relationssoumya rachel shailendraLegibility and Ambivalence in 19th Century Indigenous Women's WritingAn exhibit on E. Pauline Johnson and Sarah Winnemucca by Emma CohenLyric Histories: An Investigation of Early Black (and) Native America through Poetic Vignettesby Kira TuckerMarriage and Empire in 19th Century Native American Women's Literatureby Angad SinghNot-not blood quantum: the Dawes Act and ambivalent Indigeneityby Yasmin YoonReading Indigenous Authorial Presence in 18th- and 19th-century ParatextsTitle Page for Isabel Griffith-Gorgati's ExhibitResistance on and off the Page: A Collaborative Conversation between Black and Indigenous Literary ContributorsFeaturing James Printer, Katherine Garret, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant (17th-18th Century Early Print Culture Participants)- By Lauren JohnsonSpiritual Armies, Resurrected Bones, and “Boundless” Continents: How Indigenous Activists in Early New England Reconfigured Puritan Millennialist NarrativesFeaturing texts of Samson Occom, William Apess, and the Wampanoag Bible. By Surya MilnerSovereignty or Removal: The Conflicting Indigenous Policies of 1835 in the Continental United StatesJulia GilmanWhat Does Water Do For Indigenous Peoples of the Great Lakes Region?Featuring Heid E. Erdrich, Simon Pokagon, Black Hawk, and Simon Kofe by Sarah Nisenson(Re)introducing Black Hawk and The Life (1833)BHR 1-IntroYasmin Yoonf7f231e474bf43796f973cd0ee560919050f7427Lydia Abedeen321b94302eca10e499769fd0179e64cd33bc4cd5Kira Tuckeracf97d948460e98cd439646cc2db7ae17c5ebd9dsarah nisenson7cb5d2c1682fbd145e76716f3924f03bf25c616aKai Chased7cab5968a3a916efd1a14a48cc4832d5d5514aeSoumya Shailendra86c246fcc4aea83787381bffd2b839885bef5096Bennett Herson-Roeserc8289125445a56c819045a0091daf0402b3e0875Surya Milner077f837f3d662fd5ef9055f8258e5c47bb11f714Julia Gilmanb860a8277eea484f91a1a9e0423cab4b52bae522Lauren Johnson98dac03e7c9c1ad41e1c0a8583704e55802f98baAngad Singhd2b8d1d68ec374981c9e99b7cb400803bc678231Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1Charlotte Goddu2d4c020870148128c7824ece179e04cffe180d95Isabel Griffith-Gorgati985a05928a67a856791fffac3dbba8acc85f6f37
Canadian Entertainment Bureau
1media/Canadian entertainment bureau_thumb.jpg2022-12-07T08:24:27-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1416961Johnson Advertisement ercplain2022-12-07T08:24:27-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1
12022-12-07T08:32:55-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1"A Red Indian from Canada"Emma Cohen2plain2022-12-07T08:33:02-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1
12022-12-07T08:30:43-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1Tales, Legends, and TragediesEmma Cohen2plain2022-12-07T08:30:52-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1
12022-12-07T08:28:41-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1Heritage and PlaceEmma Cohen2plain2022-12-07T08:28:50-08:00Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1
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12022-12-07T08:15:35-08:00E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake5Johnson Page 1 ercplain2022-12-07T10:06:51-08:00E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake was born on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario in 1861. The daughter of Emily Johnson, an Englishwoman, and George Johnson, a Mohawk member of the Iroquois Confederacy Council who worked as an interpreter, Johnson began publishing poetry in her early twenties (Fee and Nason 13). An 1892 poetry reading in Toronto launched a reading tour and lengthy performance career that would take Johnson across Canada, into the United States, and to London (Fee and Nason 14). As an unmarried woman, these performances, as well as a steady stream of publications in various magazines and newspapers, afforded Johnson some level of security after her father’s death left her family in constrained financial circumstances, and her writing continued to support her through her retirement—when she retired to Vancouver and was diagnosed with breast cancer, friends helped her pay for her medical care by crafting collections from her previously published poems and stories (Gerson 417, Fee and Nason 14).
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"