Finding Lost Voices: The poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Baamewaawaagizhigokwe) and what she gave Longfellow
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
Many years ago, when I published my first chapbook of poems, my mother and I visited my grandmother at her home in Sequim, Washington. My grandmother had fled from the heat of the Central Valley in California, a place where she and her family had settled after having to flee from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. My grandmother had many good years on the Olympic Penisula before she was diagnosed with dementia and began to decline. By the time I visited, she’d sunk into a state where she spoke little, sat in her chair, and looked out at the far-off sea. And that’s how I found her that day, her eyes seabound as I began to read my poems to her. Almost immediately after I’d begun, she turned to face me, looked straight at me, and began to recite Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha”. I was shocked. First, that my grandmother was even speaking to me. Second, that she, who’d only received an 8th-grade education, knew a poem, had memorized a poem of this length, and kept it in her mind for so many years. Her pocket of memory was a trick of Alzheimer’s. But her knowledge of the poem reminded me just how many young school children (even in rural Oklahoma) were taught the poem during the early part of the last century. The poem and the origin of its sources are what I’d like to share with you today.
To find these origins we have to travel back to Sault Ste. Marie in the northern Great Lakes region of what is now Michigan where the bilingual poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft lived from 1800-1842.
“Throughout her life she bridged worlds—or moved within one complex world—in culture, language, and heritage; oral and written expression; and in orientation to Earth and Sky. At her birth, she was given the Ojibwe name Bamewawagezhikaquay (woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky), and she developed as a girl the ability to “read” and interpret ancestral stories from the constellations.” —Barbara Bair
Schoolcraft was the granddaughter of the revered Ojibwe chief Waubojeeg. Her mother, who went by the names Susan Johnston and Ozhaguscodaywayquay, was a respected Ojibwe leader, and her father, John Johnston, was a Scotch-Irish fur trader who’d brought with him a library.
Schoolcraft grew up speaking both English and Anishinaabe. She read extensively from her father’s library, but she was equally versed in the history and stories of her Ojibwe heritage.
When she was nine years old her father took her to visit Ireland and England. Upon her return she was inspired to write one of her first poems, “To the Pine Tree” — first in Anishinaabe and then she translated the poem into English. Schoolcraft’s Anishinaabe poems are considered the first-known poems written in an American Indigenous language, in this case, a language that centers on the distinctions between animate and inanimate. The Anishinaabe word “Zhingwaak” (Schoolcraft’s “shing wauk”) is animate, and even in Schoolcraft’s English, the pine tree that appears in her poem welcoming her home from her travels abroad is personified. It “greets” her and “hails” her.
“ Mes ah nah, shi egwuh tah gwish en
aung Sin da mik ke aum baun Kag
ait suh, ne meen wain dum Me nah
wau, wau bun dah maun Gi yut wi
au, wau bun dah maun een Shing
wauk, shing wauk nosa Shi e gwuh
ke do dis an naun.”
“Ah beauteous tree! ah happy sight!
That greets me on my native strand
And hails me, with a friend’s delight,
To my own dear bright mother land
Oh ’tis to me a heart-sweet scene,
The pine— the pine! that’s ever green.
Read the full poem here.
Schoolcraft wrote at least fifty poems in English and Anishinaabe, as well as versions of Anishinaabe stories, songs, and other traditionally oral texts. Schoolcrafts’s essays can be found in “Literary Voyager” also known as “Muzzeniegun”. But, you must be wondering by now, what does Schoolcraft have to do with Longfellow? Enter Jane’s husband.
In 1822, the writer, ethnographer, and Indian Affairs administrator Henry Rowe Schoolcraft became a boarder in Schoolcraft’s family home when he worked as an Indian agent in Michigan Territory. The two fell in love and were married in 1823. He supported her work and they collaborated on efforts to document indigenous cultures; however, soon Schoolcraft became swallowed up by the domestic sphere while her husband continued to move freely in the world.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft used his wife’s knowledge of Ojibwe stories to populate his book, Algic Researches (1839); a book that Longfellow would rely heavily on as he wrote his famous poem based on Ojibwe culture and traditions which features an Ojibwe supernatural hero (son of the West Wind, Mudjekeewis, and of Wenonah, whose mother, Nokomis, had fallen from the heavens). Hiawatha introduced agriculture, transportation, writing, and the arts to his community (all based on Ojibwe tales such as “Mon-daw-min, The Origin of Indian Corn; or Corn Story”). However, the story ends with Hiawatha journeying westward, encouraging his people to welcome the Europeans who will (like Longfellow himself) steal their land and reappropriate their identities and culture. Hiawatha sold 50,000 copies by 1860, earned 7,000 dollars in royalties in its first decade, and went on to be the standard curriculum in schools for over a century. Jane Johnston suffered loneliness and depression, as her children died young, or were sent away to Eastern boarding school and as her husband continued to travel. She was prescribed laudanum and died at age 42 on May 22, 1842.
I can still hear the beat of Longfellow’s poem in my grandmother’s voice. It’s one of the last memories I have of her. But, now, I also hear another voice speaking between Longfellow’s words, one I hope you will hear, too. The voice of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft.
P.S. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft figures as a principal character in the documentary historical novel The Invasion by Janet Lewis. Stay tuned for an upcoming post about Janet Lewis!
Upcoming Reading
2/17 5:00 PM at Jessel Gallery, Napa, CA with LENORE HIRSCH, MARY HOLMAN TUTEUR, IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE, PAUL WAGNER
Thank you for this beautifully rich & moving piece. Super good!
Fascinating! Wonderful work, Iris. Really enjoyed reading this story.