In the death of Miss Johnson a poet passed away of undoubted
genius; one who wrote with passion, but without extravagance, and
upon themes foreign, perhaps, to some of her readers, but, to
herself, familiar as the air she breathed.
When her racial poetry first appeared, its effect upon the reader
was as that of something abnormal, something new and strange, and
certainly unexampled in Canadian verse. For here was a girl whose
blood and sympathies were largely drawn from the greatest tribe of
the most advanced nation of Indians on the continent, who spoke
out, "loud and bold," not for it alone, but for the whole red race,
and sang of its glories and its wrongs in strains of poetic fire.
However aloof the sympathies of the ordinary business world may be
from the red man's record, even it is moved at times by his fate,
and stirred by his persistent, his inevitable romance. For the
Indian's record is the background, and not seldom the foreground,
of American history, in which his endless contests with the invader
were but a counterpart of the unwritten, or recorded, struggles of
all primitive time.
In that long strife the bitterest charge against him is his
barbarity, which, if all that is alleged is to be believed--and
much of it is authentic--constitutes in the annals of pioneer
settlement and aggression a chapter of horrors.
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