Jane Johnston Schoolcraft

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Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (January 31, 1800-May 22, 1842) is the first known American Indian literary writer, although she did not publish her own work. She was Ojibwa and Irish-American, and her Ojibwa name was recorded as Bamewawagezhikaquay or O-bah-bahm-wawa-ge-zhe-go-qua (or Obabaamwewe-giizhigokwe in modern spelling), meaning "Woman of the Sound [that the stars make] Rushing Through the Sky."

Jane Schoolcraft was born in Sault Ste. Marie in what is now the upper peninsula of the state of Michigan. Her mother, Ozhaguscodaywayquay, was the daughter of Waubojeeg, a prominent Ojibwe war chief and civil leader from what is now northern Wisconsin. Her father, John Johnston, was an Irish fur trader. The Johnston family is famous in the Sault Ste. Marie area, but Jane herself was little known until recently. She wrote poetry and traditional Ojibwa stories, and she translated Ojibwa songs into English. She mostly wrote in English, but she wrote several poems in the Ojibwe language, as she lived her daily life in both Ojibwe and English.

She married the famous ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a founding figure of American cultural anthropology. Henry Schoolcraft won fame for his publications about Indian people, especially Ojibwe people and the Ojibwe language (also known as Chippewa and Anishinaabemowin), but he depended heavily on Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and the Johnston family for his information. Henry Schoolcraft’s publications, including materials written by Jane Schoolcraft, were the main source for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855).

Jane Schoolcraft and Henry Schoolcraft moved to Mackinac Island in 1833 and to New York City in 1841. Jane suffered from frequent illnesses and died in 1842 while visiting her sister in Canada.

In 1962 Philip P. Mason published a hand-written magazine put together by Henry Schoolcraft in 1826-1827, which included a small number of Jane Schoolcraft’s writings. Her writings gradually began to attract notice in the 1990s. In 2007, Robert Dale Parker published a complete edition of Jane Schoolcraft’s extensive writings, based mostly on previously unpublished manuscripts and including a cultural history and biography. Schoolcraft’s writings are now beginning to attract considerable interest from literary scholars and students and from scholars and students of American Indian literature and history.

[edit] References

• Schoolcraft: The Literary Voyager or Muzzeniegun. Ed. Philip P. Mason. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1962.

• The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Ed. Robert Dale Parker. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.