E. Pauline Johnson

1861–1913

As an Indigenous woman publishing from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century in Canada, Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) stood at the intersection of race, gender, and colonialism in a period that largely excluded Indigenous peoples and women from the literary canon. Although most frequently remembered for her poem “The Song My Paddle Sings” (1892), Johnson produced a substantial body of poetry and prose over the course of her career as a Mohawk performer and writer. 

Johnson was born on 10 March 1861 at Chiefswood on the Six Nations of the Grand River territory near Brantford, Ontario. Her father, Mohawk Chief George Henry Martin Johnson (Onwanonsyshon, 1816–1884), built the home for his English wife, Emily Susanna Howells, a relative of American writer William Dean Howells (Strong-Boag & Gerson 49). Chiefswood featured a distinctive dual-entrance design, with one door facing the road and the other facing the Grand River, allowing visitors to arrive by canoe (Gray 44).

The youngest of four children, Johnson grew up in a middle-class household and was educated primarily at home. She attended the reserve school for two years and later studied at Brantford Collegiate Institute from ages fourteen to sixteen (Gray 70). In 1877, she returned to Chiefswood and spent her days reading, writing, visiting with friends, and canoeing on the Grand River. After her father’s death in 1884, the family could no longer maintain Chiefswood and moved into a smaller house in Brantford. At twenty-three, unmarried and seeking an income, Johnson began publishing poetry in periodicals such as Gems of Poetry (New York) and The Week (Toronto). By 1886, her reputation was growing, and she began signing her work with both her English name and her adopted Mohawk name, Tekahionwake, a name that had first belonged to her great-grandfather, Jacob Johnson (Keller 47).

In 1892, Johnson published “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction,” a pointed critique of the ways Indigenous women were represented in contemporary literature. That same year, she gave a powerful recitation of the politically charged poem “A Cry from an Indian Wife” to an audience of Toronto’s literary elite (Strong-Boag & Gerson 102). This event helped launch a performance career that would last for approximately seventeen years, during which she toured widely across Canada, the United States, and England. During these performances, Johnson often appeared first in a “Native” buckskin costume, then changed into an elegant evening gown for the second half of the program (Foster 42; Gerson & Strong-Boag xvii).

Johnson’s first book of poetry, The White Wampum (London: John Lane), was published in 1895 and was well received. After her mother died in 1898, Johnson moved to Winnipeg and was briefly engaged to Charles Robert Lumley Drayton that same year (Strong-Boag & Gerson 140). Her second collection, Canadian Born (Toronto: Morang), appeared in 1903.

Declining health led Johnson to retire from the stage in 1909 and relocate to Vancouver, British Columbia. There she began publishing short prose pieces in periodicals including The Mother’s Magazine, The Boys’ World, and the Vancouver Daily Province. Many of these stories drew on her friendship with Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh) Chief Joe Capilano, whom she had met in London in 1906 while he was part of a delegation petitioning King Edward VII about land rights. When Johnson became ill with breast cancer, friends and supporters organized a volume of her prose stories to raise funds for her medical care (Strong-Boag & Gerson 66; Keller 256–57). This collection, Legends of Vancouver, was privately published in 1911. A volume of her poetry, Flint and Feather (Toronto: Musson), followed in 1912 under similar circumstances. Both books remain in print.

Johnson died of breast cancer on 7 March 1913. The city of Vancouver held a public funeral several days later, with a procession from the Bute Street hospital to Christ Church Cathedral (Keller 269–70). Her ashes were interred near Ferguson Point in Stanley Park, within sight of Siwash Rock, a place that held special significance for her. A memorial service was also held at the Mohawk Church on the Six Nations Reserve (Foster 152). Two posthumous prose collections followed: The Moccasin Maker (Toronto: Briggs), which gathers many stories from The Mother’s Magazine, and The Shagganappi (Toronto: Briggs), which collects stories from The Boys’ World. In 1922, the Women’s Canadian Club erected a monument at her gravesite in Stanley Park (Keller 277; Foster 153).

Johnson’s work continues to be read, reprinted, and reinterpreted. In her archival research, The People and the Text (TPatT) team member Dr. Alix Shield discovered a note in which Johnson expressed her wish that the stories later published as Legends of Vancouver be titled Legends of the Capilano, to acknowledge her collaborations with Chief Joe Capilano (Sahp-luk) and Mary Capilano (Lixwelut). In 2023, in consultation with members of the Capilano family, Shield published Legends of the Capilano, along with five additional stories narrated by Lixwelut, as part of the University of Manitoba Press “First Voices, First Texts” series.

Selected Readings:
Johnson, E. Pauline. Canadian Born. Toronto: Morang, 1903.

---. Flint and Feather. Toronto: Musson, 1912. [many subsequent editions]

---. Legends of Vancouver. Vancouver, BC: privately printed, 1911. [many subsequent editions]

---.The Moccasin Maker. Toronto: Briggs, 1913; reprinted 1927. [several subsequent editions]

---.The Shagganappi. Toronto: Briggs, 1913; reprinted 1927.

---.The White Wampum. London: John Lane; Toronto: Copp Clark; Boston, Lamson, Wolffe, 1895.

Works Cited:
Foster, Mrs. W. Garland. The Mohawk Princess: Being Some Account of the Life of Tekahion-wake (E. Pauline Johnson). Lions' Gate Publishing Company, 1931.

Gray, Charlotte. Flint & Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake. HarperCollins, 2002.

Johnson, E. Pauline. E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Edited by Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag, U of Toronto P, 2002.

Johnson, E. Pauline (Tekahionwake), Chief Joe Capilano (Sahp-luk), and Mary Agnes Capilano (Lixwelut). Legends of the Capilano. Edited by Alix Shield. U of Manitoba P, 2023.

Keller, Betty. Pauline: A Biography of Pauline Johnson. Douglas & McIntyre, 1981.

Strong-Boag, Veronica, and Carole Gerson. Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). U of Toronto P, 2000.

Secondary Sources for Further Reading:
Daniher, Colleen Kim. “Looking at Pauline Johnson: Gender, Race, and Delsartism's Legible Body.” Theatre Journal, vol. 72, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-20.

Johnson, E. Pauline. Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's Writings on Native North America. Edited by Margery Fee and Dory Nason, Broadview P, 2016.

McRaye, Walter. Pauline Johnson and Her Friends. The Ryerson Press, 1947.

Quirk, Linda. “Labour of Love: Legends of Vancouver and the Unique Publishing Enterprise that Wrote E. Pauline Johnson into Canadian Literary History.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Cahiers de la Société Bibliographique du Canada, vol. 47, no. 2, 2009, pp. 201-51.

---. “Skyward Floating Feather: A Publishing History of E. Pauline Johnson’s Flint and Feather.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Cahiers de la Société Bibliographique du Canada, vol. 44, no.1, 2006, pp. 69-106.

E. Pauline Johnson entry by Alix Shield, December 2017.  Alix Shield is a settler scholar as well as one of the longest-serving members of The People and the Text team. She completed her PhD in the Department of English and now is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her research uses contemporary digital humanities methods to analyze collaboratively authored twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indigenous literatures in Canada. Alix has digitized many of the E. Pauline Johnson archival documents in our collection and is also responsible for the development and maintenance of our project's Drupal multisite.

The image of E. Pauline Johnson conforms to copyright laws. Photo c1902, from the Major James Skitt Matthew fonds, City of Vancouver Archives, Vancouver, BC (AM54-S4-: Port P1633).

Updates by Eli Davidovici in March 2024. Eli is an alumnus of McGill University, graduating with an M.Mus. in Jazz Performance in Summer 2024.

Updated by Kayla MacInnis in November 2025. Kayla is an MA student in English Literature at Simon Fraser University and a research assistant with The People and the Text.

Please contact Deanna Reder at dhr@sfu.ca regarding any comments or corrections
at dhr@sfu.ca.