Several years ago, My Own True Love and I visited the headwaters of the Mississippi at Lake Itasca State Park, in Minnesota, as part of our multi-part road trip along the Great River Road.  There we learned that Henry Rowe Schoolcraft “discovered” and named the headwaters of the Mississippi.* We also learned that Schoolcraft developed a reputation as an expert on Ojibwe language and culture, with the “help” of his wife, Jane Johnston, an educated woman of Ojibwe and Scots-Irish heritage. (Quotation marks are mine, and loaded with opinions.) I tucked that away as something worth looking into later.

Schoolcraft, and consequently Johnston, recently popped up in the context of something I am researching.** Apparently later is now.

Poet and writer Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800-1842) is considered the first major Native American woman writer in English. She was born into a prominent family in Sault Ste Marie in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an area where Native American, Canadian, and American cultures intertwined. She navigated between (at least) three linguistic and cultural worlds long before she met Henry: the Ojibwe culture, language and kinship network of her mother, her father’s Scots-Irish heritage (and love of Shakespeare),*** and the polyglot lingua franca of the region.

Henry arrived in Sault Ste Marie as an Indian Affairs agent in 1822 and boarded with the Johnston family. He and Jane married soon after.

Jane and her family members collected, transcribed, and translated stories from the Ojibwe tradition and those of other Native American peoples, including creation stories and tales about the origins of various plants and animals in the time before man. Henry reused some of these legends in his own writing, earning a reputation as an ethnographer in the process.  One of his poems inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha.

Jane was often separated from Henry while he traveled for his territorial duties and in his role as a literary lion. Lonely, and later anguished when her children were sent away to attend an eastern boarding school, she wrote poetry in both English and Ojibwe, sometimes using both languages in a single poem, that explore themes of loss, loneliness and alienation. Her poetry was never published in her life time, with the exception of a few pieces included in a handwritten magazine she published with her husband.

In time she became addicted to laudanum, which doctors prescribed with a liberal hand to women during the period. She died suddenly at 42 while Henry was away in England.

Her work was published posthumously in 2007, in a collection titled The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky, edited by Robert Dale Parker.

*You can read my rant on the subject of both the “discovery” and the re-naming of the lake as an inherently colonial project in my post on that visit.

**Nope. Still no hints.

***She even spent some time in Ireland.

***

Come back on Monday for three questions and an answer with art historian Sarah Hagglund.