Who was the real Pauline Johnson?

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Flint and Feather

By Charlotte Gray

Harper Flamingo Canada

448 pages (hc)

$37.95

In Flint and Feather, Charlotte Gray has woven a rich biographical tapestry, revealing a complex portrait of Pauline Johnson that sheds a bright new light on Canada's most charismatic poet and performer-and yet leaves much of her mystery intact.

Johnson was, after all, a shape-shifter who moved with ease between cultures, identities, times and places, a woman with an amazing talent to reinvent herself.

Was she a poet, an actress, an English lady, a Mohawk princess, a mysterious enchantress, a fun-loving Bohemian or a lyrical orator?

Pauline Johnson, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and English gentlewoman, spent her childhood living in Chiefswood, a large luxurious home set on 200 acres of woodland that boasted two sets of front doors, one facing the Grand River, the other, the road to Brantford. She grew up on the Six Nations Reserve in Upper Canada, taking her great-grandfather's name Tekahionwake or 'Double Wampum.'

Post-colonial history, times and life are deftly braided, as Gray speculates on Johnson's privileged childhood with a neurotic mother and flamboyant father, and her forays into writing, publishing and romance.

Gray's thoughtful insights into Johnson's emotional life are read in a chapter titled Wave Rocked and Passion Tossed, which blends the social history of canoeing with the vision of a healthy young woman pining for the love of her life, and writing some of her finest poetry in the throes of that passion.

Her Bohemian pleasure in canoeing togs and skivvies and deep passion for living in the rough, inspired notable poems such as Under Canvas in Muskoka, The Song My Paddle Sings and Shadow River.

Gray points out that as a writer and a woman, Johnson was "not prepared to adopt the dog-like crouch of the generic Indian Maiden" in social relationships or in the hollow literary cliches of the times. She took on the abysmal ignorance and racial prejudice in fiery oratory and literary works and was not afraid to take hard satirical nips at the heels of critics and racists.

Johnson's turning point in the affirmation of her work came with critical recognition from Quaker poet John Whittier, who was taken with her poems Ojistoh, As Red Men Die and A Cry from an Indian Wife, based on tempestuous themes of love, war and blood-curdling revenge.

Johnson began carving out a career that would bring her national and international celebrity, taking London by storm, and leading to the English publication of her first book, The White Wampum.

She was a born performer with an innate knowledge of stagecraft, a flare for the dramatic and penchant for passionate expression in all its forms, including unabashedly erotic poetry celebrating love, longing and tragic loss.

Gray takes a hard line with Johnson's flare for the dramatic, balancing the poet's well-known hyperbole with more down-to-earth accounts written by her sister Eva.

She also follows the development of Johnson's poetry, the good, the bad and the forgettable within the context of artistic problems faced by all Canadian poets of that time, asking: "How could a Canadian poet steeped in British romantic poetry, reconcile this tradition with the vast, untamed landscape of the Great Dominion of the North?"

Pauline Johnson's mystique as a performer depended as much on elegant London couture as on an exotic Native costume, based on an illustration of Minnehaha, wife of Hiawatha, taken from a copy of Longfellow's epic poem she had read as a child, embellished with Mohawk silverwork, wampum belts, bear claw necklace, scalping knife and scalp.

"She had become a charismatic artiste who had learned how to intrigue and thrill. It was not just that she straddled two worlds, appearing first as an Indian maiden and then as a Mayfair lady. It was also that she combined elements of two different fantasies-earthy and passionate in buckskin for the first half of her program, etherel and unobtainable in silk brocade for the second half. She appealed to instincts both gallant and erotic. Which was the real Pauline? Was she a savage free spirit or a fragile maiden. Did she want animal passion or gentlemanly protection? Or as her many admirers must have wondered with an illicit thrill, both?" asks Gray.

Flint and Feather is an impressive offering from a writer with an uncanny ability to put herself in Johnson's white satin pumps and smoked leather moccasins.