It had been a long night. The audience was growing restless. The Young Men’s Liberal Club was gathered in the lecture hall of an art school on King Street, packing the room on a frigid January night in 1892. They had come to enjoy “An Evening with Canadian Authors”: the impressive bill was filled with some of the leading lights of the Canadian literary scene. But so far, the event had been deadly dull: just one dry poetry recitation after another. Despite the promising lineup, the night threatened to be a disappointment. But then, someone new appeared onstage.
Pauline Johnson was the only woman invited to read that night. She slipped out in front of the crowd in the pale grey of a silk gown, white gloves reaching up her arms, and took her place at the centre of the stage. She stood there motionless, a statue, her eyes cast upwards as she waited for the chatter of the audience to die down. And then, only then, when silence finally filled the hall, did she begin to speak. She began to tell a love story.
Pauline Johnson had grown up in the territory of the Six Nations. Her mother was an English gentlewoman; her father was a Kanien’keha:ka chief. Johnson was raised in both cultures. While her mother schooled her in the intricacies of colonial etiquette, her grandfather told her the oral histories of the Haudenosaunee. Even her name was a reflection of her multicultural heritage: her great-great-grandfather had been the godson of William Johnson, the old superintendent of Indian affairs back in the 1700s, and inherited the name from him. (She would later adopt her grandfather’s Kanien’keha:ka name, as well: Tekahionwake.) One of her first successes was a poem written for the unveiling of a statue of Joseph Brant that still stands in Brantford to this day.
Johnson had plenty of experience with love growing up: there were romantic canoe rides along the Grand River and flirtatious picnics in the summer, quickened pulses and hands inching tentatively toward each other. She was thirty years old as she stood on that stage on King Street and had already been proposed to many times. She’d broken hearts and had hers broken, too. For the rest of her life, she would wear a silver locket around her neck; inside was a photograph of a handsome and mysterious young man she refused to ever talk about. But the tragic tale she chose to recite that night in Toronto wasn’t a personal lament of her own lost loves. Instead, she told the audience a story unlike any they’d ever heard.
My Forest Brave, my Red-skin love,
farewell;
We may not meet to-morrow; who can tell
What mighty ills befall our little band,
Or what you’ll suffer from the white
man’s hand?
It was a love poem, but instead of a romantic ode to beauty and youth, it was a tale of war and of heartbreak. And it was told not from the perspective of a brave British soldier, but from the point of view of an Indigenous woman, a wife worried about her warrior husband as he headed off to battle against Canadian soldiers.
Her reading of “A Cry from an Indian Wife” was like nothing else the audience had seen that evening — or any other evening for that matter. Johnson didn’t actually read it at all, she performed it. Unlike the other poets, she could recite her work from memory. Instead of staring down at a piece of paper, she connected directly with her audience. She had theatrical experience, and she used every ounce of it, bringing her poems to life with passion and flair.
Here is your knife! I thought ’twas
sheathed for aye.
No roaming bison calls for it to-day;
No hide of prairie cattle will it maim;
The plains are bare, it seeks a nobler game:
’Twill drink the life-blood of a soldier
host.
Go; rise and strike, no matter what the
cost.
In time, she would develop her theatricality even further, using her wardrobe to full advantage. For half of her performance, she would appear onstage in all the finery of a typical English gentlewoman. In the other half, she would emerge in a costume she’d created herself: fringed leather, beads, fur, and a necklace of claws combined to produce the stereotypical image of an “Indian princess.” Playing with her audience’s own prejudices gave her the freedom to deal with subjects — like war and sex — that were considered improper for most women to broach. And by slipping from one culture into another, she was able to reach an audience of colonizers with tales told from an Indigenous perspective.
This was an era of westward expansion. In the years since Confederation, the new Canadian government had pushed beyond the Great Lakes, looking to expand its empire across the Great Plains. It turned the Prairies into a battleground. The Canadian forces were met by Indigenous resistance, most famously led by Métis leader Louis Riel. Métis and First Nations warriors, along with some early white settlers, fought back: first with the Red River Resistance (at what’s now Winnipeg) and then with the North-West Resistance (in what’s now Saskatchewan and Alberta). Sir John A. Macdonald, who’d been elected as the country’s first prime minister, responded by sending troops west to crush Riel’s resistance and bring the Prairies under Canadian control.
They but forget we Indians owned the land
From ocean unto ocean; that they stand
Upon a soil that centuries agone
Was our sole kingdom and our right
alone.
They never think how they would feel
to-day,
If some great nation came from far away,
Wresting their country from their hapless
braves,
Giving what they gave us — but wars
and graves.
Many of the soldiers who fought against Riel were militiamen from Toronto. On the day the Queen’s Own Rifles boarded a train out of Union Station, bound for the Prairies, thousands of their fellow Torontonians were there to see them off. When they returned, a cheering crowd of a hundred thousand people welcomed them home. The Toronto World called it “the greatest day Toronto ever witnessed.” Even now, a monument dedicated to the soldiers who fought against Riel stands on the lawn outside Queen’s Park.
Johnson knew her audience. In the poem, the Indigenous wife is torn between fear for her husband’s life and defiance in the face of genocide, going back and forth between encouraging her sweetheart to fight and begging him to stay home. But she also hesitates because she can see both sides of the conflict. She thinks of the settler wives in cities like Toronto who were worried about their own husbands heading off to fight on the other side of the same battles.
Yet stay, my heart is not the only one
That grieves the loss of husband and of
son;
Think of the mothers o’er the inland seas;
Think of the pale-faced maiden on her
knees;
One pleads her God to guard some sweet-
faced child
That marches on toward the North-West
wild.
The other prays to shield her love from
harm,
To strengthen his young, proud uplifted
arm.
Ah, how her white face quivers thus to
think,
Your tomahawk his life’s best blood will
drink.
When the Globe reviewed the event, they reserved their greatest praise for Johnson — though they couldn’t resist including some condescending racism: “Miss E. Pauline Johnson’s may be said to have been the pleasantest contribution of the evening. It was like the voice of the nations that once possessed this country, who have wasted away before our civilization, speaking through this cultured, gifted, soft-faced descendant.”
Soon, she would be famous. She toured across the country, and was a hit in England, too. Today, she’s remembered as one of the greatest of all Canadian poets. Her work is taught in schools across the country; her “The Song My Paddle Sings” is one of the most famous Canadian poems ever written. Her childhood home on the banks of the Grand River, Chiefswood, is a National Historical Site.
And that night in Toronto, as Johnson reached the final stanzas of her poem, the audience was hanging on every word, drawn in by her dramatic performance. It was a rare moment: a crowd of Victorian Torontonians paying rapt attention to an Indigenous voice reminding them of the pain and suffering caused by their colonial exploits, asking them to see things from the other side.
She never thinks of my wild aching
breast,
Nor prays for your dark face and eagle
crest
Endangered by a thousand rifle balls,
My heart the target if my warrior falls.
But hers wasn’t the only vision presented onstage that night. Douglas Campbell Scott was on the bill, too. He was already hailed as one of the country’s greatest writers — one of the “Confederation Poets,” whose work helped to establish a national identity at the time when the country was being stitched together through politics and railroads.
But he was also a government bureaucrat, destined to become one of the most notorious civil servants in Canadian history. A decade after that night in Toronto, he would become the leading architect of the residential school system. He was responsible for Indigenous children being torn away from their parents, forcing them to be educated far from home in an attempt to erase their culture and forcibly indoctrinate them as English-speaking, god-fearing “Canadians.” Scott made no secret of the fact that he wanted to wipe out Indigenous society entirely — just like the missionaries who’d first arrived in the Great Lakes centuries before. “I want to get rid of the Indian problem,” he once explained. “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”
It was Douglas Campbell Scott’s vision of Canada that would dominate the century to come. By the time Johnson spoke on that stage, the rebellions on the Prairies had already been crushed. Louis Riel had been hanged. Manitoba had been brought into Confederation. The Indian Act had been passed. The first residential schools had been opened. Indigenous traditions like potlatches and the sun dance had been banned. There wasn’t a single plains bison left anywhere in Canada. Vast numbers of Indigenous people were dying of starvation and tuberculosis.
In the end, Johnson’s “Indian wife” chooses resistance.
O! coward self I hesitate no more;
Go forth, and win the glories of the war.
Go forth, nor bend to greed of white
men’s hands,
By right, by birth we Indians own these
lands,
Though starved, crushed, plundered,
lies our nation low …
Perhaps the white man’s God has willed
it so.
She was done. The poem was finished; the performance was over. For a moment, the crowd was stunned into silence. And then, as Johnson’s final words hung in the air and she turned to leave the stage, they erupted into a roar of applause, calling for an encore, demanding more.