"The Lyric Voice of Canada's Indians"

THE Indian woman who Indian woman stood facing the critical Toronto audience that evening in 1892 wore a necklace of bear claws and a handmade dress belted with wampum. She gave her name as Tekahionwake, but most of the Torontonians who had come to hear her original poetry knew she was the daughter of an English-woman and a hereditary Mohawk chief called George Henry Martin Johnson.

"This is a verse I call Cry of an Indian Wife," Emily Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake told her audience. "It is the story of my people's part in the Northwest Rebellion."

The applause after the performance was deafening. This year, as Canada celebrates the centenary of her birth, Pauline Johnson's unique verses of Indian philosophy and life are still appreciated.

On March 10, the anniversary of her birth, a commemorative postage stamp will be issued. It is the first Canadian stamp to honor a Canadian Indian, a Canadian woman, or a Canadian writer. Her prose Legends of Vancouver, first published by friends to raise needed money in the last months of her losing battle with cancer, will be reprinted in April by McClelland and Stewart Ltd. And on the Six Nations Indian Reserve south of Brantford, where Tekahionwake was born, the people she loved and made immortal in lyric verse will devote their annual pageant to the story of her achievements.

This lasting fame came late to Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake. She was in her thirties when Frank Yeigh, president of the Toronto Young Liberal Club and a former Brantford boy, persuaded her to read Cry of an Indian Wife. His select literary group had already drowsed and grumbled through several dull readings when Pauline approached the stage. But before she spoke a word, the room became quiet, and heads snapped up to catch what was to be the most talked-about literary event of the season.

As Yeigh wrote later: "Pauline glided rather than walked to the platform, her dark eyes flashing nervously and her sinewy form, the essence of gracefulness, representing the acme of physical rhythm and motion."

After Pauline's spellbinding performance, awakened critics demanded to know why her work had never been published in book form. Two Toronto newspapers printed editorials about the beautiful Indian poet whose passionate verses cried out against the wrongs suffered by her people.

As a result, Frank Yeigh arranged a second appearance for Pauline, two weeks later at Association Hall. This performance, during which she forgot the words to the poem she had written for the occasion, might have killed her embryo career. But with superb calm and a charming smile for the audience, she said: "I'm sorry. I've completely forgotten the words. I'll give you something else." At the end of her recital she was called back to the stage for two encores.

"I knew I mustn't leave the platform and admit defeat," she told a relieved Frank Yeigh in her dressing room later.

The poem she forgot? It was The Song My Paddle Sings, now probably her best-known work, and a standard in Ontario school books for 30 years.

Tekahionwake's poise on this occasion derived only in part from her Indian heritage. As a lively child, a princess of her tribe, she became used to meeting distinguished visitors at Chiefswood, the spacious rough-cast house built by her father on the banks of the Grand River. One of these visitors was the Duke of Connaught, who unwittingly contributed a colorful addition to Pauline's professional stage wardrobe. The scarlet blanket on which he knelt to be made Head Chief of the Six Nations was presented to Pauline, who later wore it over her shoulders as an important piece of her costume.

Such imposing quests were the first to hear verses recited by the young Tekahionwake, whose name meant "smoky haze of an Indian summer." At 4 years, she could memorize effortlessly; at 6 she was writing odes to her cats and dogs; and before she was 13 she had read all of Scott and Longfellow and was deep in Byron and Shakespeare. Though she loved to live outdoors, and could outrace boys in her canoe, when her mother asked what gift she would like from Brantford, the answer was usually: "Verses, please."

This love for poetry helped her overcome a sketchy education and achieve the delight of her first published work when she was 20 years old. This small triumph appeared in Gems of Poetry, a magazine printed in New York.

Two years after her initial success, Pauline's father died, and the family moved from Chiefswood to Brantford. Refusing to be cut off from the Indian people she loved, she continued to write haunting poetry about them. Her verses were published in Harpers' Weekly, the New York Independent, Boston Transcript, Detroit Free Press, and Toronto's Saturday Night. But it was Charles G. D. Roberts, editor of The Week, who wrote to her:

"You are the original voice of Canada by blood as well as taste, and the special trend of your gifts."

Roberts' interest in the then almost unknown Mohawk poet brought her to the attention of Frank Yeigh, who arranged the two historic performances at Toronto.

While the applause sill echoed in Pauline's ears, Yeigh persuaded her to undertake a series of recitals. The attractive bait he dangled was the possibility of earning enough money to finance a trip to England to seek a publisher for a collection of her Indian poems. By the spring of 1894 - 125 poetry evenings later - Tekahionwake was able to leave Canada and seek international recognition.

Carrying letters of introduction from the Earl of Aberdeen, then Governor-General, and Professor William Clark of the University of Toronto, Pauline met John Lane, manager of Bodley head, a noted publishing firm. Lane recognized her talent as original and fresh, something sorely needed in the stuffiness of that late Victorian era. And when he published Tekahionwake's first book, White Wampum, his judgment was proved correct. Critics were joyful. One summed up the feelings of his fellows when he wrote: "She has given us a new kind of poetry which jars and jangles."

The black-haired poet with the high Indian cheekbones and light English eyes became the darling of London's salon set. Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, daughter of Lord Dufferin, a former Governor-General of canada, took Pauline under her wing. Lady Ripon, wife of Britain's colonial minister, became her friend. Sir Charles Tupper, then Canada's high commissioner, often squired her on tours of the city.

But a restless desire for Canada and the rivers and woods she loved was growing in the Mohawk chief's daughter. It showed itself during a trip with Sir Charles through Whiteley's famous department store, known as the Universal Provider. The high commissioner bet her a new pair of gloves that any item she asked for, no matter how outlandish, would be in stock at Whiteley's.

Thinking of happy days paddling along the Grand River, Pauline approached a dignified sales clerk and asked: "Where can I buy a William English Peterborough canoe, please?"

Even the clerk's unruffled answer, "There are a number of them on the fourth floor, miss," failed to cure her homesickness. She sailed back to Canada toward the end of 1894.

Pauline knew that sales of her verses alone would not be enough to provide for her family in Brantford. (Hector Charlesworth, editor of Saturday Night, paid her $3 for The Song My Paddle Sings.) She joined the vaudevillians then barnstorming across Canada, feeding a hunger for entertainment that existed not only in the cities but in the whistle-stop villages and hamlets, and the lumber and mining camps. Anywhere a group would pay to listen, Tekahionwake would perform, but always as an Indian.

Although her mother was Emily Howells, originally from Bristol, England, Pauline Johnson proudly claimed the blood of her father, the Mohawk chief of the Wolf Clan.

"Some think they pay me a compliment by saying that I am just like a white woman," she told her friend Ernest Thompson Seton, then a naturalist for the Manitoba Government. "But my aim, my job, my pride is to sing of the glories of my own people."

Singing the glories of her people, among the dancers, cartoonists, comedians, lecturers and assorted performers who trouped with her along the way, brought her in 1897 to Winnipeg, and a meeting with the man who was to become her inseparable companion.

Pauline met Walter McRaye of Merrickville, Ontario, at the old Winnipeg Theatre when they appeared on the same program. The stocky, handsome actor, 14 years her junior, was having some small success with the first public success with the first public readings of Dr. Henry Drummond's habitant poems. By now Pauline was a seasoned artist, able to offer advice to a young performer. And McRaye found a stage-wise companion in this vivid woman who wore an eagle feather in her hair and two cured human scalps - one Huron, one Cree - at her belt.

For the next 12 years, Pauline with her Indian lyrics and McRaye with his French-Canadian verse toured as a team. They followed the vaudeville trail to billiard halls, barns, dining rooms, grain elevators, and once to an undertaker's parlor where coffins were used as seats for the audience. After a benefit held in a saloon to raise money for a proposed Methodist church, Pauline remarked: "The end justifies the means."

Playing six nights a week, the pair traveled from Newfoundland to British Columbia, and back again. (During her career, Pauline Johnson crossed the Rockies 19 times.) On their way to Prince Edward Island, they were stranded for six days on an icebound ferry. In Port Aux Basques, Nfld., their playbills were eaten by goats.

Somehow, the woman known across Canada as the Mohawk singer managed to organize her verses during these headlong travels, and had her second book of poems, Canadian Born, published in 1903 by the George Morang Publishing Company, Toronto. The book sold out within a year.

Maturity wrought subtle changes in Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake, now at the height of her fame. She still appeared in her flamboyant Indian costume during the first half of each performance, but wore expensive London - made evening gowns for the second half.

Commenting on the change in her, Dr. Lorne Pierce, editor of Ryerson Press, wrote later: "From being a champion of her race, she became a patriot in a wider sense, her view including not only Canada, but the Empire. And then, finally, breaking through the last barrier, she embraced the world and sang of humanity."

The fame of Tekahionwake carried her once again to England in 1906, this time with her partner McRaye and a letter of introduction from Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier to Lord and Lady Strathcona. Her performance at Steinway Hall, London, under the auspices of the Strathconas, was a great success.

Joining in the critics' applause, the Pall Mall Gazette said of Pauline: "She is like some Indian Boadicea demanding allegiance of her subjects."

Her subjects were many. She was invited to tea on the terrace of the House of Commons. Sir Arthur Pearson, then publisher of the Express, admired her and printed her articles on Indian life, spreading her fame and increasing her circle of influential friends.

Strangely, it was as a journalist, not as a poet, that she met the man who inspired her to write Legends of Vancouver, the book to be reprinted this year.

Three chiefs of the Coastal Indians journeyed to London in 1906 to air their grievances before King Edward VII. The Grand Trunk Railway had run a survey through the graves of their ancestors; their hunting and fishing rights had been restricted.

Tekahionwake, with her fierce sensitivity about Indian problems, was a natural choice to interview the chiefs for the Express. When she met Chief Joseph Capilano with the Siwash greeting, Klahoya Tillicum Scookum, she won a friendship that eventually earned her the most treasured legends of his people.

The meeting with Chief Capilano brought on homesickness again. Pauline wrote a poem on the back of her program between the acts of Somerset Maugham's The Land of Promise at the Haymarket Theatre. It was The Trail to Lillooet, a piece filled with yearning for Canada.

Returning with McRaye to the Canadian tank-town vaudeville circuit, Pauline decided to clear the Mayfair dust from her throat with a 850-mile tour up the Cariboo Trail. At Ashcroft, British Columbia, she and her jaunty partner hired a stagecoach for $250 and engaged the colorful Buckskin Billy Halton to handle the reins. At Barkerville, they rented a hall for $4 and took in $700 in two nights. McRaye spent $67 on whisky treating the audience.

When the stagecoach reached Lac la Hache, Pauline discovered they were not expected. There was no audience. Buckskin Billy sent out couriers and brought in a stream of miners, Indians, farmers and ranchers. Admission was $1 for whites and 50 cents for Indians, and Buckskin Billy let in one halfbreed for 75 cents.

At Lac la Hache Pauline danced until dawn with Premier Richard McBride, who was stopping over during an election campaign.

Of this occasion, Walter McRaye reminisced: "Pauline and the Premier were at the head set of lancers, and she wore a beautiful brocaded silk gown from London. But the dress still had oats on it from changing in an oat bin the night before at Soda Creek."

After the Cariboo Trail tour, Pauline made one more trip to London in 1907, with McRaye, and on her return toured the Chautauqua circuit with him as far west as Boulder, Colorade. She was now in her late forties, and McRaye called her "a well-beloved vagabond who loved any trail, old or new". They played their last evening together in a small opera house at Kamloops, B.C.

In retirement, Pauline decided not to return to Chiefswood. She chose to live in a cheap rooming house in Vancouver, a city she had grown to love. But her verses, nature stories, and tales for boys' magazines brought her hardly enough to live on. Still, she was proud. She sent back a cheque for 75 cents offered by Rod and Gun for her poem Train Dogs with a note that in their poverty the editors would surely need it.

With Chief Joe Capilano, she took long walks during which he spun the tales she shaped into Legends of Vancouver. They appeared in the magazine section of the Vancouver Province, and she was paid $7 for each article. Chief Capilano died in 1910. In 1912, Pauline was admitted to Bute Street Hospital in severe pain with cancer.

Drugged with opiates, knowing that she was dying, Pauline nevertheless retained her flair for showmanship. When the Duke of Connaught visited her in hospital she had her scarlet blanket brought out from her battered Saratoga trunk and draped over his chair. The Duke sat on the same blanket on which he had knelt 40 years earlier when a little Mohawk princess watched him honored as Head Chief of the Six Nations.

When Walter McRaye arrived in Vancouver to be with her at the end, he found that Legends of Vancouver, published in book form by members of the Women's Canadian Club and Pauline's newspaper friends, was not selling well. He bought the unsold copies and mailed them to friends they had made during their many tours together. With the cheques that came in the main by return mail, he helped bolster her pride during her last days. He was with her when she died on March 7, 1913, three days before her 52nd birthday.

Her body was cremated, as she had desired; but no one today can be sure where her ashes are. They may be buried under a cairn in Stanley Park, as many believe. They may be scattered along the shores of the park, or strewn at the foot of Siwash Rock, where she spent many hours with Chief Joe Capilano.

Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake's voluminous will, written nine days before her death, was not made public under 43 years later when it was found, during a check of old files, yellowing in the vault of a legal firm. In it, she wrote: "I desire... that no tombstone or monument be raised in my memory. I prefer to be remembered in the hearts of my people and my public."

Two monuments, one in Stanley Park and one on the Six Nations reserve, deny her first request. But the second, in this centennial year of her birth, will be properly fulfilled.