198 Author Introduction: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800-1842)
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 loneline