E. Pauline Johnson’s Poetic Acts

Chapter Five demonstrates how the Canadian Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson deployed her performance of "Indianness"—that is, a fantasy of Native identity that was dictated by and performed for white audiences—to prove that the seemingly sincere lyrical voice was a fiction. This chapter focuses on Johnson's performances on the Chautauqua tour in 1907. To her American audiences, Johnson appeared to be a real Indian princess. But her performance dress was a bricolage of accessories and garments modeled on Minnehaha, the iconic Indian princess in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha. By adopting the tools of assimilation, Johnson's poetic acts exaggerated the idea of a Native "voice" to foreground the performativity of such a persona. But Johnson was following the imperatives of a cultural marketplace that had dissolved the distinctions between authenticity and performance. In so doing, Johnson proves that Native American selfhood was not subject to notions of fixed identity. Rather, Johnson created public space for a new embodied Indian presence, short-circuiting any easy equivalency between authentic Native subjectivity and white, Minnehaha-derived fantasies. By performing Indianness, Johnson insisted on the ongoing existence of Indians precisely because they could not be equated with these commercial figures.