In 1883 Johnson published her first full-length poem, "My Little Jean", in the New York Gems of Poetry.[12][16] She began to increase the pace of her writing and publishing afterwards.
In 1885, poet Charles G. D. Roberts published Johnson's "A Cry from an Indian Wife" in The Week, Goldwin Smith's Toronto magazine. She based it on events of the battle of Cut Knife Creek during the Riel Rebellion. Roberts and Johnson became lifelong friends.[17] Johnson promoted her identity as a Mohawk, but as an adult spent little time with people of that culture.[5] In 1885, Johnson travelled to Buffalo, New York, to attend a ceremony honouring the Haudenosaunee leader Sagoyewatha, also known as Red Jacket. She wrote a poem expressing admiration for him and a plea for reconciliation between British and Native peoples.[8]
In 1886, Johnson was commissioned to write a poem to mark the unveiling in Brantford of a statue honouring Joseph Brant, the important Mohawk leader who was allied with the British during and after the American Revolutionary War. Her "Ode to Brant" was read at a 13 October ceremony before "the largest crowd the little city had ever seen".[13] It called for brotherhood between Native and white Canadians under British imperial authority.[8] The poem sparked a long article in the Toronto Globe, and increased interest in Johnson's poetry and heritage. The Brantford businessman William Foster Cockshutt read the poem at the ceremony, as Johnson was reportedly too shy.[17][13]
During the 1880s, Johnson built her reputation as a Canadian writer, regularly publishing in periodicals such as Globe, The Week, and Saturday Night. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, she published nearly every month, mostly in Saturday Night. Johnson is considered among a group of Canadian authors who were contributing to a distinct national literature.[18][14] The inclusion of two of her poems in W. D. Lighthall's anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), signalled her recognition.[12] Theodore Watts-Dunton noted her for praise in his review of the book; he quoted her entire poem "In the Shadows" and called her "the most interesting poetess now living". In her early works, Johnson wrote mostly about Canadian life, landscapes, and love in a post-Romantic mode, reflective of literary interests shared with her mother, rather than her Mohawk heritage.[12]
After retiring from the stage in August 1909, Johnson moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she continued writing. Her pieces included a series of articles for the Daily Province, based on stories related by her friend Chief Joe Capilano of the Squamish people of North Vancouver. In 1911, to help support Johnson, who was ill and poor, a group of friends organized the publication of these stories under the title Legends of Vancouver. They remain classics of that city's literature.
One of the stories was a Squamish legend of shape shifting: how a man was transformed into Siwash Rock "as an indestructible monument to Clean Fatherhood".[19] In another, Johnson told the history of Deadman's Island, a small islet off Stanley Park. In a poem in the collection, she named one of her favourite areas "Lost Lagoon", as the inlet seemed to disappear when the water emptied at low tide. The body of water has since been transformed into a permanent, fresh-water lake at Stanley Park, but it is still called Lost Lagoon.
Johnson drew on her mixed ethnic background and cultural heritages as a major theme in her work. The heroine of her short story "The De Lisle Affair" (1897), was disguised. Readers were discomforted due to the uncertainty of appearances, particularly amongst women.[12] Due to their subordinated social, economic, and political positions, women often had to play the roles as mediators for men, practising ambiguity and disloyalty for the sake of their safety and sanctity. The notion of shifting identity is seen in "The Ballad of Yaada" (1913), where a female character explains "not to friend – but unto foeman I belong ... though you hate, / I still must love him," which suggests the potential for communities to understand one another through love and kindness.[12] But she also explores the risk of the coming together of communities and cultures. Johnson's mixed-race heroine Esther, in "As It Was in the Beginning", kills her unfaithful White lover. With the words "I am a Redskin, but I am something else, too – I am a woman", Esther is demanding recognition of multiple subjectivities. Johnson was trying to convey that the real world consists of much more than oppressive ideologies and artificial divisions of race and nation enforced by authoritative figures such as the racist Protestant minister in this story, revealingly nicknamed "St Paul" after the biblical misogynist.[12]
The posthumous Shagganappi (1913) and The Moccasin Maker (1913) are collections of selected stories first published in periodicals. Johnson wrote on a variety of sentimental, didactic, and biographical topics. Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson provided a provisional chronological list of Johnson's writings in their book Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (2000).
