Pauline Johnson’s Contexts
Long hailed as Canada’s first notable Indigenous literary author, the Mohawk writer E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake (1861-1913) appealed primarily to Canadian audiences, for whom she asserted a Native presence within the country’s nascent national identity, through the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. During her lifetime and for many decades after her death, Johnson’s Euro-Canadian audience valued her publications and recitations for their contribution to what literary critic Terry Goldie termed “indigenization” (GOLDIE 1989, 13-17), meaning that her work enabled settler Canadians to feel at home by giving them Indigenous stories that fed their desire to belong to the places to which they or their families had immigrated. While Johnson frequently depended upon American and British publication venues, her most consistent readership was in English-speaking Canada. Because non-Canadian interest in Johnson has been s...