
Pauline Johnson’s Costume
Research by Alexandra (Sasha) Kovacs
Introduction
History
Reactivations
Media
Discussion
Bibliography
Introduction
E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake’s Performance Costume: In and Beyond the Museum of Vancouver
Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake (1861-1913) is now recognized as a “central figure in the intellectual history of Indigenous women in Canada and the United States” (Fee and Nason, 27). However, the focus of much historical discourse still privileges Johnson’s rich literary contributions, overlooking the dynamic sophistication of this multifaceted artist’s performance innovations.
Though a vast array of materials related to Johnson’s career as a writer and performer are housed in the McMaster University Pauline Johnson Archive (located in Hamilton, Ontario), Johnson herself desired that her “Indian costume”, arguably the most significant material object related to her performance career, remain in the Museum of Vancouver.
The essay below introduces the complex history of this costume, its dynamic function in its original performance context, and its recirculations in and beyond the museum within which it is now stored.
History
Johnson’s dress, donated to the Museum of Vancouver in 1913, is one of the most celebrated costumes in Canadian history: in 2017, National Geographic and The Walrus magazine’s centennial issue featured the dress as a representation of, “the Canada we’ve known, the Canada we know and the Canada we want to know” (5); it is also featured in Charlotte Gray’s The Museum Called Canada. The object also stands as one of the most significant materials of pre-twentieth century Indigenous professional performance.
Who is Pauline Johnson?
E. Pauline Johnson was a Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka )-English poet performer from the Six Nations (near what is now Brantford, Ontario). Born in 1861 on the cusp of Confederation, Pauline was the daughter to Onwanonsyshon George Henry Martin Johnson (a Mohawk member of the Iroquois Confederacy Council), and an English woman, Emily Howells (Fee and Nason, 13; Darby, Mohler, Stanlake, 33).
At twenty-three years old, after the death of her father in 1884, Johnson began writing to support her mother financially (Darby et al, 33). She would soon publish in Toronto periodicals and “joined a critical mass of writers who were constructing a national identity for former colonies struggling towards collective consciousness” (Strong-Boag and Gerson 101). Celebrated as “one of Native North America’s first authors, as well as one of Canada’s first authors” (Darby et al., 32), she was also a revered performer in her time, and is now regarded as a “culture bearer” and “Grandmother” of “Native theatre and performance” (Darby, Mohler, Stanlake, 42).
Johnson’s “Costume Recitals”
Johnson’s passion for performance was cultivated early on in her adolescence, through training and experience in amateur theatre societies like the Garrick Club in Hamilton but also likely inspired by her own family’s interest in theatrical costuming and portraiture (Kovacs, 43). Her breakthrough performance came on January 16th 1892, when she recited her poem “A Cry from an Indian Wife” at the Young Men’s Liberal Club Canadian Literature Evening in Toronto, Ontario, alongside selections of songs, sketches and readings from other Confederation poets and key figures in Liberal politics (including Duncan Campbell Scott, one-time deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs, the overseer of a residential school system). Johnson’s recitation at this meeting was a great success, greeted with an encore.
On the heels of this successful debut, Johnson booked engagements across southwestern Ontario from January to September 1892, billed as a “Canadian Indian poet”, delivering a repertoire of characters drawn from her works such as “Beyond the Blue”, “A Cry from an Indian Wife”, “The Song My Paddle Sings”, “The Death Cry”, and “Pilot of the Plains” (see Kovacs, 70).
But by the end of that first season across Ontario, Johnson had an idea to increase the theatrical complexity of her performances. While she already distinguished herself by memorising her pieces for recitals, she knew she needed something more to engage audiences. In September, she wrote to a friend, Willian Lighthall, asking for his assistance in obtaining a “Indian dress to recite in” (Lighthall in Strong-Boag and Gerson, 110). Just a month later, by October 18 1892, Johnson had acquired that costume: her performance in “Indian dress” was noted as an added attraction for a special evening in St. John’s Hall in Ottawa. Newspaper previews indicate that in this first costumed performance, Johnson opened her act with a recitation of “The Old Lumberman’s Christmas” while wearing a Victorian dress, stayed in this costume for a dramatic rendition of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning”, and then changed into her “Indian buckskin suit with dangling fandangos and an effective display of Fringe to recite ‘Redwing’ and several other selections [records indicate these included Pilot of the Plains, Cry from an Indian Wife, As Red Men Die, and The Song My Paddle Sings]” (“The Indian Maiden at St. John’s Hall”). A preview of this performance provides insight into the features of Johnson’s “Indian costume”, by 1892, the early point in her career:
[Johnson] very kindly showed the reporter her Indian dress, which is made of doeskin patterned after the dress supposed to have been worn by Minnehaha a long ago. The front of it bears a number of silver brooches of many shapes which were given her by an old Indian pagan woman, aged 90, who lived on the reserve and had worn them on her costume and who in turn received them from her mother. Thus these ornaments have been worn for over one hundred years. The back of the skirt is adorned by a ‘fire bag’ manufactured by the Blackfeet Indians. She has various samples of Wampum, some of which are very rare and of great value, the art of making beads of which they are composed of being lost. One is an Iroquois Wampum and the Indians of that particular branch of Indians can trace by the Wampum the history of every treaty entered into between the Six nations and the British Government. The red blanket which she will wear around her shoulders to-night is the identical one on which Prince Arthur stood when he was made a chief of the Six Nations when he visited Canada in 1870. (“The Mohawk Poetess”)
It is not clear from where she obtained the two piece buckskin skirt and top: biographer Charlotte Gray suggests that Johnson bought her costume from the Hudson’s Bay Company, and that, unsatisfied with its drab appearance, she altered it with the help of her sister (Gray 157-158). Competing and inconsistent descriptions of the costume’s origins and assemblage circulate across the many biographies devoted to Johnson. These inconsistencies reveal how Johnson’s “Indian” costume, throughout her career, and perhaps even within each of her individual performances, was constantly undergoing revision, development, modification, and substitution.
Modifying the Costume
Tracking how newspaper reviews describe her costume, over the course of her career, suggests that modifications and changes to it were numerous. For instance, by March 1893 for her performance in Boston, Johnson’s “Indian costume” had added jewellery, featuring “bear claws and panther teeth for bracelets and necklaces” (“Talk of the Day”). Johnson’s will indicates that these materials were given to her by Ernest Thompson Seaton, while biographer Charlotte Gray notes that poet and dramatist Charles Mair also contributed to additional elements of Johnson’s costume (158).
As early as 1896, various reviews noted the addition of a knife and various scalps in her performances. For instance, for a performance in Chicago in 1897, a newspaper review describes her costume as follows:
Miss Johnson has a collection of Indian relics which would almost cause an ethnologist to turn green with envy. Her native costume […] glitters with silver ornaments and beads hundreds of years old. Dangling at her girdle there is an American Sioux scalp, taken at Fort McCloud by a Canadian Blood Indian, while the necklace of bears’ claws which encircles her brown throat has a history almost as thrilling (“Womans World”)
By 1898, Johnson added another scalp to this costume, allegedly “taken by her people” and attaching it to her costume’s waist (“This Young Indian Woman”).
Throughout her career, Johnson also performed with various wampum belts–some dentalium shell belts, and others from the Six Nations wampum collection. Wampum was key to her performance poetics: her adopted stage name–Tekahionwake–translates to “double wampum,” she “interpreted” wampum in performance, and she also included it in her costume. For more knowledge regarding the important ceremonial and political function of wampum, review the talk from Six Nations historian Richard Hill, below:
Some of the wampum belts Johnson used in performance she also sold–to Canadian Institute curator David Boyle in 1898 (see Hamilton 110; Boyle), and in 1906 to George Gustav Heye, a collector who went on to create the Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation. The market of exchange for Indigenous artefacts and “relics”–as they are described across so many reviews of Johnson’s performances–certainly shaped the shifting approach to costuming that Johnson deployed in her performative approaches.
This discussion of Johnson’s use (and misuse) of wampum opens up further questions about what no longer remained of her costume by the time of its donation in 1913. Her will, drawn up nine days before her death from breast cancer, describes the constitution of her costume by the late stage of her career:
I bequeath to the Museum of the City of Vancouver…my Indian costume intact and comprising the scalps, silver brooches and all other decorations including the skirt and bodice, moccasins, bear-claw necklace, eagle crest and the pair of bead and tooth bracelets given to me by Ernest Thompson Seaton, also the scarlet broadcloth ‘blanket’ used in the ceremony of making His Royal Highness, the Duke of Connaught, chief of the Sixth Nation Indians […]. (in Howarth, Jean located in Vancouver City Archives File 4)
Not Her Only Costume
It is also important to note that this “Indian” costume was only one of the many costumes Johnson wore in performance. The museum does not store the variety of other frocks Johnson wore in her recitals, such as those pictured within a 1893 photogravure within The Globe that featured Johnson “in a number of her platform representations” (see Media).
This photograuvre brings together a number of portraits of Johnson taken by C.S. Cochrane, photography studio local to Brantford, Ontario, near Johnson’s home (Enns, 37). Such material reinforces the power of Johnson’s other performance costumes, including: a dress with a feather boa, another with a large bow, as well as a boating costume. Newspaper reviews also describe how the sequencing of Johnson’s quick changes from one costume to another in a single performance were varied, depending on her repertoire selections for each event. Many biographies erroneously suggest Johnson began her performance in her “Indian” costume and then changed into her Victorian gown–arguing that such a creative decision implicates Johnson in a poetics that endorsed assimilative policy (Gray, Francis). However, programs which document her repertoire, and audience accounts published in newspapers and private papers, suggest decidedly more variability and flexibility in approach.
Reactivations
The resources below offer examples of scholarly and/or artistic engagements with the artifact and/or its associated histories. These materials are also valuable to consult for classroom discussion and further research.
Scholarly Assessments of the Costume
Since Johnson’s donation of her one costume to the Museum of Vancouver in 1913, many scholars and critics have worked to articulate its function in relation to Johnson’s poetics and politics. Cherokee scholar Daniel Heather Justice, in his book Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, notes that this costume has “fascinated white observers and commentators for over a century”; its “hyper-romanticized ‘Indian’ beads and buckskin,” have prompted “telling” “questions” at the site of Johnson’s historiography. Justice outlines the propensity of white scholars to ask: “What was she doing in these performances? Was she Mohawk or white? Was she just ‘playing Indian’ for the white folks? Was she celebrating assimilation? Demonstrating subversive resistance as a Mohawk woman of light skin trying to make a living in a white-supremacist society? Was she selling out, settling scores, torn between two worlds?” (Justice, 61). In calling these “telling” questions, Justice surfaces biases that have informed existing historical interpretations of Johnson’s pasts.
Likewise, researcher Mishuana Goeman suggests the necessity for new pathways of engagement with Johnson’s history, noting that “the responsibility to excavate [this writer and performer] from the mire of racial trappings and approach her work in a new light” (85) falls on individual researchers. More recent work published by Manina Jones and Neal Ferris has begun this work, complicating previous assessments of Johnson’s costume, arguing that it “has been subject to considerable scrutiny regarding its ‘authenticity,’ especially as representative of traditional Mohawk garb, though Johnson’s recitals portrayed characters from a number of different Indigenous cultures” (Jones and Ferris 146). They also consider Johnson’s performances as “neither a singular and fixed transhistorical Indigenous authenticity nor a capitulation to encroaching European modernity; instead, they emerge from a heritage of creatively performed polyphonic identities in progress […], extend[ing] back to Mohawk and Iroquoian-speaking peoples’ first engagements with the developing colonialism of the eighteenth century and continues, arguably, to the present day (126). This approach aligns with new perspectives developed by scholars such as Colleen Kim Daniher, who situates Johnson’s gestural performance approaches in relation to the tradition of Delsartism with the aim to “intervene[] in a primitivist critical tendency to interpret Indigenous performance gestures as natural and therefore outside the domains of the rhetorical, the theatrical, and the aesthetic.” These perspectives remind researchers, students, scholars and artists to resist interpretation of Johnson’s “Indian costume” as a fixed signifier of imagined authenticity, and instead to attend to the complex mutability of this object within a dynamic and transnational performance history.
Artistic Engagements
A range of artists contribute in important ways to reactivating the performance history of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake. Johnson appears as a central character in the work of the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble’s 2007 workshop production The Only Good Indian. This ensemble was founded in 1999 by Jani Lauzon (Métis), Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations), and Michelle St. John (Wampanoag Nation), with later members Cheri Maracle (Mohawk/Irish, Six Nations of the Grand River) and Falen Johnson (Mohawk and Tuscarora, Six Nations of the Grand River) (“Turtle Gals”). In her book “Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, scholar Christine Bold considers The Only Good Indian as a work which “points to one way in which materials held by colonial archives can be recovered, revived, and re-membered through contemporary Indigenous artistic embodiment” (15). Bold notes that “[t]his show was dedicated to recovering and reembodying turn-of-the-twentieth- century Native entertainers—particularly Indigenous women performers” (6). Though the script is unpublished, you can learn more about this important reactivation of Johnson’s history through Yvette Nolan’s Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture, Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Commentary from this production’s costume designer, Erica Isherhoff (Cree), and photos from the production, are included in the Canadian Theatre Review article “Negotiating Tensions betwixt Presence and Absence amidst a Big Sadness: Cultural Reclamation, Reinvention, and Costume Design” (see Carter).
Following her performance as Pauline Johnson within The Only Good Indian, Cheri Maracle performed in the one-woman musical Paddle Song. Written by Dinah Christie and Tom Hill, this performance has toured festivals, theatre and academic stages across Turtle Island and internationally as a celebration of Johnson’s matriarchal power and spirit. In this video on the Aboriginal People’s Television Network news, Cheri Maracle discusses her work on this performance.
Janet Rogers’ (Mohawk/Tuscacora, Six Nations of the Grand River), has also engaged in decades of research and artistic work addressing the legacy and memory of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake. Janet Neigh’s book Recalling Recitation in the Americas addresses the range of Rogers’ artistic reactivations of Johnson’s archive which reflect upon Johnson’s possessions in museum collections. Rogers’ reflection of her research process within the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is also available online, documented and shared through video, see here:
Rogers’ essay about Johnon, titled “Pauline Passed Here” notes that Johnson was a “pioneering” woman of the arts that “left in [her] wake great inspiration” (41). Rogers writes, of Pauline and Emily Carr: “in my mind, leaving a void where these women stood can never be an option, so I write and read and teach others coming up to fill her space, my space, with greatness” (41). Rogers here points to the ways in which Johnson’s history reverberates through the reactivations of her spirit and greatness by a range of artists that came after her.
Media
Discussion
Question 1
Read one or more of Johnson’s published works that were performed during her tours (choose from “A Red Girl’s Reasoning”, “Cry from an Indian Wife” or “A Cattle Thief”, available through CanLitGuides.
Consider how Johnson’s costumes might alter or enhance the performance of these texts:
How do you think Johnson might have assembled her costume for the performance of a range of her works?
What materials might she have added/taken away to perform the character(s) she plays within her poetry and prose?
How might different costuming decisions and approaches generate different engagements with and understandings of Johnson’s poetry and prose?
Question 2
Navigate to the Museum of Vancouver Open MoV collections and type “Pauline Johnson costume” in the search bar. Explore the various items that are linked to those search terms and assess the various descriptions of these materials.
Why do you think the Museum describes the costume as a “dress”? What do you think is the difference between a “dress” and a “costume”?
Do you think the descriptive terms used by the MoV to describe this costume matter? What kind of interpretive approach to Johnson does this description promote? What alternative descriptions might be developed to better represent Johnson’s costume?
How does the museum construct her dress in the photographs of the costume? What alternative approaches to the assemblage of various component parts of the costume can you imagine?
Question 3
As mentioned in the essay, Johnson’s use of wampum was an integral part of her performance poetics, though the belts she used no longer remained in Johnson’s possession by the time of her costume’s donation to the museum.
Learn more about wampum belt teachings from Richard Hill, Six Nations historian. Consider how this knowledge enriches your understanding of the complexity of Johnson’s performance aesthetics and their relationship to wampum teachings.
Bibliography
Bold, Christine. “Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880’s-1930’s.. Yale University Press, 2022.
Boyle, David. Annual Archaeological Report 1897-8 Being Part of APPENDIX to the Report of the Minister of Education Ontario. Toronto: Warwick Bro’s and Rutter, 1898. Print.
Carter, Jill. “Negotiating Tensions betwixt Presence and Absence amidst a Big Sadness: Cultural Reclamation, Reinvention, and Costume Design.” Canadian Theatre Review 152 (2012): 5-12.
Daniher, Colleen Kim. “Looking at Pauline Johnson: Gender, Race and Delsartism’s Legible Body.” Theatre Journal. Vol 72, No. 1, March 2020, 1-20.
Darby, Jaye T, Courtney Elkin Mohler and Christy Stanlake. Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance: Indigenous Spaces. London: Methuen Drama, 2000.
Enns, Florence Ida. “Photographing Pauline Johnson: Publicity Portraits of a Canadian ‘Half Blood’ Identity.” Diss. University of Alberta, 2004.
Fee, Margery and Dory Nason. Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2016.
Goeman, Mishuana. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Gray, Charlotte. Flint and Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake. Harper Collins, 2002.
Gray, Charlotte, et al. The Museum Called Canada: 25 Rooms of Wonder. Created and Produced by Otherwise Editions for Random House Canada, 2004.
Hamilton, Michelle. Collections and Objections: Aboriginal Material Culture in Southern Ontario, 1781-1914. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010.
Howarth, Jean.. “Pauline Johnson—They Defied Her Last Wishes. WILL REVEA LED.” The Province, December 12, 1956. File 4, Pauline Johnson Materials, Vancouver City Archives.
Jones, Manina, and Neal Ferris. “Flint, Feather, and Other Material Selves: Negotiating the Performance Poetics of E. Pauline Johnson.” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 2, 2017, 125-157.
Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018.
Kovacs, Alexandra V. ” ‘I may act till the world grows wild and tense’: The Performances of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake.” University of Toronto (Canada), PhD Dissertation, 2016.
“Miss E. Pauline Johnson.” The Globe. 23 Sept 1893, 2.
Neigh, Janet. Recalling Recitation in the Americas: Borderless Curriculum, Performance Poetry, and Reading. University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Rogers, Janet Marie. “Pauline Passed Here.” Indigenous Poetics in Canada, Ed. Neal McLeod, Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2014, 9–41.
“The Indian Maiden at St. John’s Hall.” The Ottawa Journal. 3 November 1892.
“The Mohawk Poetess.” The Evening Journal (Ottawa). 2 November 1892. 1.
“This Young Indian Woman.” The Indian Sentinel. Tahlequah, I.T. (Oaklahoma). 11 February 1898. Newspapers.com. Aug 2014. Web.
Stong-Boag, Veronica and Carole Gerson. Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
“Woman’s World: An Attractive Amiable Child of the Aborigines.” Logansport Pharos Tribune (Indiana). 6 March 1897. Page 23. Newspapers.com. August 2014. Web.