A Wildflower Goes Native: Recovering Jane Johnston Schoolcraft's Ravaged Indigenous Ecologies

It is easy to dismiss the poem “To the Miscodeed” by the Ojibwe poet Bamewawagezhikaquay, also known as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Her ode to the “sweet pink of northern wood and glen” reads like a disappointing effort... [ view full abstract ]

It is easy to dismiss the poem “To the Miscodeed” by the Ojibwe poet Bamewawagezhikaquay, also known as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Her ode to the “sweet pink of northern wood and glen” reads like a disappointing effort into popular sentimental flower poetry of the period. Yet most of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s, by definition, fiercely idiosyncratic, alluringly raw, and multi-voiced poems, often in her native tongue, are lost and survive only in warped revisions of her husband, the Indian agent Henry Row Schoolcraft. A case in point is “To the Miscodeed” extant only in his palimpsestic reworking eager to bring sanitized English rhyme scheme and meaning to her benighted lines.
This paper seeks to construct experimental narratives of recoveries for Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s mangled poem. While aware that these reconstructions will always remain approximations, I forge hypothetical explorations into her fascination with the Miscodeed by looking, for example, at the rich ethnographic record of the “Eastern Spring Beauty.” In addition, I close read Ojibwe dietary and medicinal practices that utilize the wildflower. Even in the ravaged register of her ode, I show, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft addresses a white-and-red colored perennial to construct environmental counter narratives of contact and nutrition that revise and irritate racial and historic constructs of the period.