Reviewed by: E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose Sandra Campbell E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Introduced and edited by Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Pp. xliv, 343, illus. $65.00 Since the mid-1990s, there has been a flurry of interest in the poet and performer Pauline Johnson (1861-1913), who used the name Tekahionwake, a tribute to her paternal Mohawk heritage. Books include Flint and Feather (2002), a superb popular biography by Charlotte Gray, Buckskin & Broadcloth (1997), an illustrated life by Sheila M.F. Johnston, as well as Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (2000), a scholarly study by two respected British Columbia academics, literary critic Carole Gerson and historian Veronica Strong-Boag. At a recent literary symposium at the University of Ottawa, scholars lamented what is still a deplorable lack of scholarly editions of the collected work of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writers. In their welcome latest offering on Johnson, Gerson and Strong-Boag present an authoritative collected poems and selected prose for Pauline Johnson, a figure of interest to literary scholars, Aboriginal and women's historians, anthropologists, and others. The editors present source notes for each work, and the prose selected is an impressive sampling of Johnson's adult and juvenile fiction, essays on Native life, legends, culture, and popular image, and travel writing. In a solid introduction that covers Johnson's publication history and fluctuations in reputation since her recital career began in the 1880s, Gerson and Strong-Boag tell us that they have provided the complete poems as well as a sampling of prose, 'aiming at a balance of the obviously excellent and the clearly representative, while reflecting our own sensibilities as feminists' (xxix). The editors have assembled a central scholarly collection for the study of Johnson. Occasionally, a few more facts might have been included in the notes. It would have been helpful if the entry on Johnson's 1893 story 'A Red Girl's Reasoning' had mentioned that it won the Dominion Illustrated's fiction prize and that Johnson also adapted it for performance as a playlet in her cross-Canadian recital tours between 1892 and 1909. Both facts show the centrality of the work's themes to Johnson, seen in the story's assertion of the value of Native heritage, which even overrides a wife's duties to her husband, when he asserts white hegemony. [End Page 618] But such quibbles are rare. This is a sound, essential text in which the editors have fulfilled a key need in feminist scholarship - recovering and making accessible important texts in the field. In Paddling Her Own Canoe, Gerson and Strong-Boag analysed the meaning of Johnson's marginalization as woman, performer, and person of mixed race in Victorian and Edwardian Canada. The two looked at her as poet, as Aboriginal advocate and as New Woman, among other roles, and how her poetry and prose 'writes back' in the face of racism and patriarchy, making a case for the value, complexity, and validity of Native culture and the need for its broader acceptance in the culture of both Canada and the empire. Johnson spoke out against the clichéd 'regulation Indian maiden' of nineteenth-century literature to present more autonomous, individualized Native characters. The works in this Johnson/Tekahionwake collection suggest how difficult Johnson's attempt was to blend and valorize elements of her own mixed-race heritage, selecting complementary strands of both her Mohawk heritage and her British/Canadian white heritage. Johnson's vision of the white treatment of those of mixed race in love relationships darkens in her fiction. Looking at her collected poetry in chronological order, now possible for the first time, one also sees that her image of the lost love is often that of a lover who is clearly white, with 'yellow' or 'golden' hair: such white/gold/blonde imagery is found in 'Unguessed' and 'In April,' as well as in two stories. By contrast, in essays made available here, 'A Pagan in St Paul's' and 'The Lodge of the Lawmakers,' Johnson subtly challenged her white readership...