Pauline Johnson, of both Mohawk and Euro-Canadian ancestry, was a musical performer, champion of first nations’ rights, and an independent, self-supporting woman as well as a writer. For decades after her death in 1913, she was not only denied serious literary attention but singled out for derision. The ridicule makes chilling reading, as the racist and misogynist sneers persist long after they might be partially explained as the contagion of an unenlightened time. As late as 1988, Charles Lillard dismisses Johnson’s readers as “tourists, grandmothers and the curious.”

In contrast, Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson bring to their task a commitment to exploring the role of women in Canadian literature and history, as well as the perspective of different academic disciplines (literature, women’s studies, education studies). They make a careful distinction between the analytical mode of “speaking about” and the appropriative mode of “speaking for.” Their project is to recuperate Johnson in the light of scholarship on race, gender, and native rights. Accordingly, they have produced a book that honours its subject’s complexity and its readers’ intelligence.

The authors explore the atmosphere of the times, in which Johnson manipulated a persona and voice that blended both sides of her heritage in order to challenge social and cultural politics. Besides having mixed ancestry, she forged a public career at a time of highly conflicted attitudes toward female performers. As part of her strategy she wore native dress for the first half of her program and formal evening attire for the second. Unlike most of her audiences, she was fully aware that both forms of apparel were contrived “costumes.”

As the authors admit, they have not provided an easy reading of Johnson’s life and work. Nor is their account leavened by speculation about her sexual partners – a subject on which they spend little time, preferring to concentrate on Johnson’s work. The book is aimed at scholars and serious readers (there is a useful chronology, and a valuable appendix listing Johnson’s publications), but may be less welcoming to the general reader.