Flint and Feather Read online

“Wreck of the Julie Plante” (Drummond), 283–84

  Wuerz, Charles H., 271–72, 274, 277

  Yeigh, Frank

  “Evening with Canadian Authors,” 139, 140, 142, 144–45

  as manager, 150–52, 161, 163, 166, 198

  relationship with Pauline, 124, 223–24, 278

  Young Canadian, 118

  Young Men’s Liberal Club of Canada, 139

  YWCA, 300

  P.S.

  Ideas, interviews & features

  About the author

  Author Biography

  CHARLOTTE GRAY is most recently the author of Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell. Her previous five books of popular history have all been bestsellers. The Museum Called Canada: 25 Rooms of Wonder won the 2005 Canadian Authors Association Lela Common Award for History. The previous year, she published Canada: A Portrait in Letters, 1800–2000.

  Flint & Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake won the University of British Columbia Medal for Biography for 2002, the Drummer General’s Award for Non-fiction for 2002 and was nominated for the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill won the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for the best non-fiction book of 2000 and the Floyd S. Chalmers Award in Ontario History. Gray’s first book, Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King, won the 1998 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the Canadian Authors Association/Birks Foundation Award for Non-fiction, and was nominated for both a Governor General’s Award and a Viacom Award.

  One of Canada’s best-known and most highly respected writers, Gray has contributed to many of Canada’s prestigious magazines and newspapers, won several magazine awards and had a regular politics column in Saturday Night magazine for eight years. She frequently appears as a commentator on CBC (Radio and Television) and TVOntario. In 2004, she completed a CBC documentary on Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, and appeared as his celebrity advocate for the CBC series The Greatest Canadian.

  Gray was born in England and came to Canada in 1979. She holds a B.A. in Modern History from Oxford University, did post-graduate work at the London School of Economics and has honorary doctorates from Mount Saint Vincent University, Nova Scotia, and the University of Ottawa. An Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, she is the 2003 recipient of the Pierre Berton Award for distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian history. She sits on the boards of both the Dominion Institute and the Canadian National History Society.

  Charlotte Gray and her husband, George Anderson, live in Ottawa and have three sons.

  About the book

  A Conversation with Charlotte Gray

  You’ve lived in Canada for nearly thirty years now. Can you speak, as a historian, about your transition from England to Canada? How did it feel to take on the stories of a nation that is, by comparison to England and other European countries, so young?

  Growing up in Britain, I was so immersed in history that I was barely aware of it. Old buildings, old customs, old aunts—a sense of the continuity between past and present was tangible. I remember my grandmother telling me that, as a child, she sat on the knee of a man who had fought at the Battle of Waterloo. My parents were enthusiastic visitors to sites of significant historical events, such as the place where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, or the site of the 1645 Battle of Naseby, which determined the outcome of the English Civil War. Crumbling walls and castle gift shops are inextricably tangled in my mind with family picnics and windswept hikes. In Derbyshire, where we lived, there was the annual spring ritual of “well-dressings,” a medieval ceremony of thanksgiving in which village wells were decorated with flowers.

  Then I crossed the Atlantic. Canada was a shock—and I’m not talking about the extremes of climate. All the buildings seemed too new. There were no national traditions that everybody followed. People tiptoed around the sites of significant historical events, such as the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec City, because bloody confrontations are not part of the Canadian self-image. And everybody I met seemed to have come from somewhere else, whether within Canada or beyond its borders. After studying history at university, I knew that a country’s past not only shapes its present and future but is also a key to its leaders’ assumptions and ambitions. But where was Canada’s history?

  “A country’s past not only shapes its present and future but is also a key to its leaders’ assumptions and ambitions.”

  I spent my first fifteen years in Canada writing about contemporary politics. My total ignorance of the Canadian political landscape was useful: it meant that I had no fear of asking the kind of dumb questions that often produce intriguing, unscripted answers. And Ottawa, where I live, is a marvellous place to learn about the country, because it draws men and women of every political stripe, and from every region.

  However, during my years of writing magazine articles about personalities and issues that dominated headlines, I found that there was one question I always wanted to ask when conducting interviews: “How did you get here?” And the answers, whether from a Conservative finance minister from Alberta’s Ukrainian community or the first woman to win the leadership of a major Canadian political party or the Quebecer struggling with his embrace of federalism, were invariably fascinating—often more fascinating to me than the particulars of a hot news story. I listened to tales of forebears who had arrived from Poland with a handful of threadbare possessions. I heard about the misery of prairie farmers during the Depression. I laughed at the more extreme antics of student activists in Toronto in the 1960s. I started studying maps and saw how a transcontinental railroad in the 1880s had shaped the development of Canada in the same way that the Norman invasion in 1066 had shaped Britain.

  I discovered that there is plenty of history in Canada—that tangible past I initially could not feel—once I knew where to look. Canada cannot boast the crumbling castles or medieval rituals of Europe, but its past is rich with the stories of incidents, movements, individuals and decisions that shape our todays and tomorrows.

  “I discovered that there is plenty of history in Canada—that tangible past I initially could not feel—once I knew where to look.”

  When did you first hear of Pauline Johnson? What was it about Pauline that piqued your interest enough to write a biography?

  As soon as I switched from magazine journalism to nineteenth-century social history, I began to stumble over Pauline Johnson. She seemed to be everywhere in the period 1892–1910. I saw reviews of her performances in newspapers. When I thumbed through old letters, I found mentions of meetings with her. Collections of archival photographs of the period almost invariably included a picture of her. Clad in either her Indian costume of buckskin and bear claws or her elegant Edwardian silk gown, she stood out. Chin thrust forward and shoulders back, she exuded beauty and self-assurance. I found a volume of her poetry. The nature verses, featuring sunsets and bird calls, are pretty dated, but the Indian ballads about fierce warriors and bloody battles still stir the imagination. She intrigued me. I read the biography of her by Betty Keller, published in 1981, and was even more fascinated. The details of Pauline’s life were so exotic. Her father was a Mohawk chief, but her mother, like me, was born in England. She grew up on an Indian reserve, but she was steeped in English romantic poetry. She was Canada’s first national celebrity, yet she died penniless. For about twenty years after her death, her memory was revered, and her poetry was in every school reader. By the 1980s, however, she had been almost forgotten.

  “The details of Pauline’s life were so exotic. Her father was a Mohawk chief, but her mother, like me, was born in England.”

  Every biography not only tells the story of a life but also reflects the period in which it is written. Keller wrote her biography of Pauline Johnson in a period when a great deal of attention was being paid to women breaking through
various glass ceilings. Journalists were writing about the first woman to be minister of foreign affairs or to head a large corporation or to become a judge on the Supreme Court. Feminist historians were trying to rediscover the achievements of women who had slipped noiselessly into the mists of history. Betty Keller wrote about the first Canadian woman to become a star coast to coast.

  I realized that I wanted to look at Pauline in a different context and tell a different story—the story of a woman of mixed heritage who more than 100 years ago argued for a multicultural society (although she would never have used that word). A crucial component of Pauline Johnson’s literary output was her use of her Mohawk heritage. That is why, for her thousands of performances across Canada, she had those two different costumes. I wanted to examine how she straddled her two worlds and what problems her hybrid status created for this powerful, gifted woman.

  You have said that one of the best pieces of advice you received while researching this book was from the historian Olive Dickason who told you, “Don’t trust anything written more than twenty years ago about Canada’s First Nations.” How did this advice affect your research process?

  “I strove to avoid the kind of generalizations about First Nations that Pauline herself found objectionable.”

  Dr. Dickason was right: until recently most of the material on Canada’s First Nations was written by non-native historians or analysts. Often the writers consciously or unconsciously held assumptions about First Nations that were a product of their times. In the early twentieth century, for instance, when First Nations populations were in drastic decline, Canadians of European origin believed that the few remaining native people would be effortlessly absorbed into non-native society. Later on, as native population figures started to climb again and activist Indian leaders emerged, writers addressing First Nations issues often had very different ideas about how native communities should be developed. As I researched the background to the increasingly corrosive relations between native and non-native Canadians, I had to be cautious about statements made in most texts.

  I also wanted to be respectful of people who have too frequently been pushed to the margins of public life. I strove to avoid the kind of generalizations about First Nations that Pauline herself found objectionable. I always named the particular people (Mohawks, Cree, Blackfoot) rather than using the generic term “Indians” (or, worse, “Redskins”) that Pauline’s contemporaries used.

  Evelyn Johnson, Pauline’s sister, articulated the fundamental problem in an interview published some years after Pauline’s death. “People can write anything they like about our people,” she told a Brantford newspaper, “because we haven’t written down our own history ourselves.” Many stories about Pauline are carried within the oral culture of the Six Nations reserve. One such story is that she once returned to the reserve to give a performance there but was booed by her audience because she couldn’t speak Mohawk, her father’s language. If the story is true, it is a valuable insight into how the Iroquois viewed this woman who, for many Canadians in that period, epitomized Indian people. But I could never find a reliable written source for the anecdote, so decided I could not include it.

  “People can write anything they like about our people, because we haven’t written down our own history ourselves.’”

  You create very accurate portraits of historical periods. How do you accomplish this? What is your biographical technique, and how do you see your role as a biographer?

  Research, research, research. The first round of research is to discover everything I can about my subject: to read everything written by and about her. The second round involves widening the circle to include everybody she was involved with and all the places she lived in or wrote about. And the third round is contextual research. What was Canada like in this period? What were the major events during her lifetime, and how does her life illuminate the larger national story (or stories)?

  I love it when people say to me, “Your book read like a novel, but I learned so much.” I am not a fiction writer; I don’t make things up. But I do use my imagination, and a lot of fictional techniques, to bring the material alive. And I always want readers to come away from a book knowing more about Canada.

  Can you speak about what it was like to promote this book? Is it true that many people claimed someone in their family had been in love with Pauline?

  “I always want readers to come away from a book knowing more about Canada.”

  One of the most tantalizing aspects of writing about Pauline was that her sister Evelyn burned so much of her correspondence. I think Evelyn wanted to hide evidence of Pauline’s love affairs. I knew that Pauline was a real heartbreaker: her first biographer, Mrs. W. Garland Foster, spoke to several of those admirers when she was writing The Mohawk Princess, published in 1931. But I didn’t get a real taste of Pauline’s magic until I started promoting the book after its publication. An elderly lady came up to me in my local bookstore and said, “Pauline was part of my childhood. My father saw her perform in Vancouver in the early 1900s, and he never forgot her. He was a sailor and travelled all over the world, but whenever he returned to Vancouver we had to go to Pauline’s grave in Stanley Park and put a red rose on it.”

  My speaking tour took me through many of the cities that Pauline herself had visited. I was surprised by the number of people, especially among older readers or young First Nations women, who felt a visceral connection with the long-dead poet. Sometimes it was because an individual had been presented with a copy of the original Flint and Feather, the collection of Pauline’s poetry published in 1912, as a prize at school. Sometimes it was because Pauline Johnson had challenged not only stereotypes of Indian people but also the sexism of her era. And often it was because a father or grandfather had recited “The Song My Paddle Sings” with a tell-tale tear in his eye.

  I finally reached Vancouver and made a pilgrimage to Pauline’s grave in Stanley Park. It is not easy to find. The elaborate statue, behind a restaurant car park, is almost hidden by trees. Nevertheless, it had obviously enjoyed another visitor within the past few days. A bunch of wilting flowers lay on it. Pauline still has her admirers.

  “I…made a pilgrimage to Pauline’s grave in Stanley Park…A bunch of wilting flowers lay on it. Pauline still has her admirers.”

  Did your impression of or feelings about Pauline change in the course of researching and writing Flint & Feather?

  Yes. I started with a mental image of Pauline as the beautiful, talented, sensitive poet surrounded by admirers. She made her success look effortless. But I began to see the flaws in this larger-than-life personality. By the end of her life, Pauline was a bit of a diva. She would sweep into rooms with an imperious air, and she expected the adoration of young men. So my sympathy for this vibrant woman was tempered with amusement. She was a great performer—the Madonna of her day.

  At the same time, my admiration for her grew. I learned how hard she had worked

  “It was her stamina and perseverance that I admired.”

  to win that success in a period when there were no movie houses, radio or television stations to broadcast an artist’s work. I tracked her journeys criss-crossing Canada by train, giving a recital in every small town on the rail line night after night. I read letters full of cheerful bravado in which she laughed off the constant gnaw of poverty. I realized she had a breakdown in 1900 and had been often afflicted by loneliness. By the time I finished writing, it was her stamina and perseverance that I admired.

  Read on

  Further Reading, Recommended by Charlotte Gray

  Buckskin & Broadcloth: A Celebration of E. Pauline Johnson—Tekahionwake, 1861–1913, by Sheila Johnston.

  A lively compilation of illustrations, photos, contemporary comment and verse.

  Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) by Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson. Two academics discuss Pauline’s role within literature and feminist thought.

  M
rs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King by Charlotte Gray. The story of a conventional middle-class woman (whose son became Canada’s longest-serving prime minister) in the era when Pauline was pushing the boundaries of “respectable” behaviour.

  Aspiring Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, 1880–1900, by Lorraine McMullen and Sandra Campbell, eds.

  An anthology that includes work by Pauline Johnson and other women writers of the period, and discusses their impact.

  The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture by Daniel Francis. The author explores the stereotypes of Indians that Pauline tried to combat.

  Bark, Skin and Cedar: Exploring the Canoe in Canadian Experience by James Raffan. Pauline’s celebration of the paddle, it turns out, was just one more chapter in the Canadian love affair with the canoe.

  Excerpt from Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell

  Nantucket Passion, 1875

  “[Bell] would be arriving any minute, anxious to hear Gertrude’s reaction to his declaration of love…”

  Gertrude Hubbard sat down and reread Alec’s untidy scrawl, her eyes wide with astonishment. Then she stared out of the library window at the foxgloves, larkspur, and bleeding hearts in her Brattle Street garden, and considered her response. She had suspected that Alec was sweet on Mabel, but she had no idea that he harbored feelings of such intensity, such passion. She was suffused by a wave of protective feelings towards her seventeen-year-old daughter: Mabel might have the demeanor of a sophisticated Brahmin debutante, but Gertrude knew she was still young for her age and very dependent on her family. Although she had never been allowed to feel marginalized by her hearing loss, she was rarely alone amongst strangers. Away from Cambridge’s familiar turf, she was at risk—of runaway street vehicles, because she could not hear shouts of warning; of house fires, because she could not hear alarms.