E. Pauline Johnson

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Pauline Johnson about 1895

Emily Pauline Johnson ( Tekahionwake ; born March 10, 1861 in the Six Nations of the Grand River Indian reservation , † March 7, 1913 in Vancouver ) was a Canadian poet and writer.

Johnson was the youngest daughter of the Mohawk chief George Henry Martin Johnson (Onwanonsyshon) and the Englishwoman Emily Susanna Howells . To emphasize her ancestry, she later adopted the Indian name of her great-grandfather George Jacob Johnson , Tekahionwake. Her school education was rather modest: after attending an Indian day school, she went to Brantford Central School for two years and returned to her parents' house in 1877. She was interested in English literature and read the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Walter Scott , Lord Byron , Alfred Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow .

After her father's death, the family moved to Brantford, and Pauline Johnson wrote and published her first poems during this period. She corresponded with the lyric poet Charles GD Roberts , and William Douw Lighthall included two of her poems in the anthology Songs of the great dominion in 1889 . In 1892 she invited Frank Yeigh to a reading at the Young Men's Liberal Club in Toronto. This was so successful that between October 1892 and March 1893 there were 125 performances in 50 cities in Ontario. Her poems The song my paddle sings and Ojistoh became famous .

As a performer of her poetry, Johnson toured Canada and the United States for the next seventeen years. She was accompanied by Owen Alexander Smily from 1892 to 1897 and by J. Walter McRaye from 1901 to 1909 . In 1894 she made a series of appearances in London and prepared to publish her first volume of poetry, The white wampum , which appeared in 1895. Her second collection of poems, Canadian born , was published in Toronto in 1903.

During a stay in London in 1903, she met the Squamish chief Joseph Capilano (Su-á-pu-luck), whose stories she later processed in the Legends of Vancouver (1911). She continued her recitation tours until 1909, then, suffering from cancer, she withdrew to Vancouver and only performed occasionally when her health permits. Shortly before her death, she finished work on the collection of poems Flint and feather (1912). Two volumes of short stories appeared posthumously in 1913: The Shagganappi and The Moccasin Maker .

Bibliography (selection)

Title page from The White Wampum (1895)

literature

  • Marcus Van Steen (Ed.): Pauline Johnson, Her Life and Work. Biography Written By and Poems Selected By Marcus Van Steen. Hodder and Stoughton, Toronto 1965.
  • Betty Keller: Pauline. A Biography of Pauline Johnson. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver 1981, ISBN 0-88894-322-9 .
  • Linda M. Morra: Unarrested Archives. Case Studies in Twentieth Century Canadian Women's Authorship. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2014, ISBN 9781442648814 (study on E. Pauline Johnson, Emily Carr , Sheila Watson , Jane Rule, and M. NourbeSe Philip)
  • Canoe women, part 2: Pauline Johnson - the poet. Kanu-Sport H. 12, 2012 ISSN  0022-8923 P. 30

Web links

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Wikisource: E. Pauline Johnson  - Sources and full texts (English)
personal data
SURNAME Johnson, E. Pauline
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Johnson, Emily Pauline (full name); Tekahionwake
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Six Nations of the Grand River Indian Reservation
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1913
Place of death Vancouver