198 Author Introduction: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800-1842)
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
Excerpted from Barbara Bair, “She Could Look Into the Heaves”: Ojibwe Poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft,” Library of Congress, November 8, 2021, https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2021/11/she-could-look-into-the-heavens-ojibwe-poet-jane-johnston-schoolcraft/.
Bilingual Anishinaabe poet and writer Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800-1842) is known as the first major Native American woman writer in English. 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.
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft was born to a prominent family in the largely Ojibwe fur trading village of Sault Ste. Marie, by the St. Mary’s River and Lake Superior, in Michigan’s northern Upper Peninsula. The Library of Congress Manuscript Division is home to the papers of her husband—the writer, ethnographer, and Indian Affairs administrator Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who married Jane Johnston in 1823, soon after he became a boarder in her family’s home when he worked as an Indian agent in Michigan Territory.
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Jane Johnston Schoolcraft moved within overlapping linguistic and cultural worlds—that of her mother’s Ojibwe (Ojibwa, Ojibway, Chippewa) culture and language and kinship network, and that of her father’s Scots-Irish heritage, and of the English-Ojibwe-French Canadian polyglot of their region, where First Nations and Native American, Canadian and United States territories intersected and entwined.
Her mother Ozhaguscodaywayquay (Susan Johnston) was from what is now northern Wisconsin; she was the daughter of the eloquent story-telling Chippewa leader Waubojeeg (Wabojeeg). Through her mother, Schoolcraft gained a deep spoken/heard knowledge of Ojibwe vocabulary and stories.
From her fur-trading father John Johnson’s lifelong-learning library and the brief time she spent studying as a girl in his native Ireland in 1809, Schoolcraft gained book learning and a love of Shakespeare and the English poets. And from both parents came an immersion in the settler colonial legacy of the Christian faith and the Bible, and piety as a thread in her poems.
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Jane and Henry courted like soulmates with ecstasy and affection, and sentiments of romantic love are reflected in her writing of the period (see “To Henry”). But once married and a young mother, she found herself occupying a different gendered world from her husband: Her confinement to a private domestic sphere of house, village, crib, and garden while he traveled in his territorial duties and moved freely through the public sphere of administration and politics soon began to chafe.
Schoolcraft made frequent use of loneliness, alienation, and longing as tropes in her poems (see “Pensive Hours”: “The sun had sunk like a glowing ball,/ As lonely I sat in my father’s hall,” Schoolcraft Papers, Container 70). But she also wrote with wit and humor, faith and joy. She is among our first nature writers, linking her at times in style or theme with poets such as Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver. She created poems of female friendship (see “Lines to a Friend Asleep” and “By an Ojibwa Female Pen”—“Come sisters come! The shower’s past,/ The garden walks are drying fast,’ Schoolcraft Papers, Container 70) and sang in her poems of the glory of the natural world (“On Meditation,” “Sweet meditation now be mine—/ The sun has sunk—the stars do shine,” Schoolcraft Papers, Container 70).
Personal grief entered her poetry upon the death of her beloved toddler son Willie (William Henry Schoolcraft), who succumbed swiftly to a sudden illness in March 1827 (see “Elegy,” “Sweet Willy,” “To My Ever Beloved Lamented Son William Henry”). Such sorrow was a feeling shared by many other women in an era of high child mortality, but death due to illnesses for which there was no developed immunity was historically devastating to Native communities. Depression, grief, and loss as well as happiness and hope became the chiaroscuro of her poetry.
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Bamewawagezhikaquay stands, with Phillis Wheatley and Anne Bradstreet, at the foundation of American women’s poetry. Schoolcraft was “rediscovered” (for those who had forgotten or never knew) as a woman writer during the renaissance of feminist literary revivalism of the 1980s. Thanks to heightened advocacy for and inclusion of Native voices, her work is increasingly read in classrooms and included in poetry anthologies, and she is part of the ever-growing recognition of Native American poets of all Native nations and regions of the country.