Through ‘My Mother’s’ eyes- settler spatializations & Mohawk masculinity in E. Pauline Johnson’s ‘My Mother’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article intervenes in current scholarship discussing the role of marriage, gender, and law in the writings of Mohawk author and performer E. Pauline Johnson, focusing on her short story ‘My Mother.’ Specifically, it is interested in Johnson’s fictionalized account of her parents’ interracial marriage, paying particular attention to her idealized characterization of her father, George Mansion, in the text. This portrayal of her father as a paragon of a ‘magnificent type of Mohawk manhood’ is filtered through the perception of the ostensible subject of her story, her mother, Lydia Bestman. As this article demonstrates, her mother interprets George Mansion’s individual and familial political power through the lens of settler assumptions, denuding them of their cultural import as expressions of Mohawk sovereignty. George and Lydia’s relationship is posited as a panacea for cultural and political upheaval, offering a romanticized portrayal of the dueling settler-Canadian and Indigenous spatializations of land, law, and bodies that marked the era.’