Scholars have had difficulty identifying Johnson's complete works, as much was published in periodicals. Her first volume of poetry, The White Wampum, was published in London in 1895. It was followed by Canadian Born in 1903. The contents of these volumes, together with additional poems, were published as the collection Flint and Feather in 1912. Reprinted many times, this book has been one of the best-selling titles of Canadian poetry. Since the 1917 edition, Flint and Feather has been misleadingly subtitled The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson.
But in 2002, professors Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag produced an edition, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, that contains all of Johnson's poems found up to that date. A number of biographers and literary critics have downplayed her literary contributions, as they contend that her performances contributed most to her literary reputation during her lifetime.[10][20] W. J. Keith wrote: "Pauline Johnson's life was more interesting than her writing ... with ambitions as a poet, she produced little or nothing of value in the eyes of critics who emphasize style rather than content."[21]
Despite the acclaim she received from contemporaries, Johnson had a decline in reputation in the decades after her death.[14] It was not until 1961, with commemoration of the centenary of her birth, that Johnson began to be recognized as an important Canadian cultural figure. This was also the beginning of a period when the writing of women and First Nations people began to be re-evaluated and recognized.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood admitted that she did not study literature by Native authors when preparing Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), her seminal work. At its publication, she had said she could not find Native works. She mused, "Why did I overlook Pauline Johnson? Perhaps because, being half-white, she somehow didn't rate as the real thing, even among Natives; although she is undergoing reclamation today." Atwood's comments indicated that Johnson's multicultural identity contributed to her neglect by critics.[22]
As Atwood noted, since the late 20th century, Johnson's writings and performance career have been reevaluated by literary, feminist, and postcolonial critics. They have appreciated her importance as a New Woman and a figure of resistance to dominant ideas about race, gender, Native Rights, and Canada.[12] The growth in literature written by First Nations people during the 1980s and 1990s has also prompted writers and scholars to investigate Native oral and written literary history, to which Johnson made a significant contribution.[12]
E. Pauline Johnson has received much less attention than one might expect for an accomplished and controversial literary figure. Older critics often dismissed Johnson's work; in 1988 critic Charles Lillard characterized her readers dismissively as "tourists, grandmothers ... and the curious".[12] In 1992, a Specialized Catalogue of Canadian Stamps, issued by Canada Post misrepresented Johnson as a "Mohawk Princess", ignoring her scholarly accomplishments. And in 1999 Patrick Watson introduced the History Channel's biography of Johnson by deprecating "The Song My Paddle Sings". Even in regard to scholarship, Johnson was often overlooked in the 1980s in favour of Duncan Campbell Scott for writing about indigenous life, although he was Euro-Canadian.[12] But a new generation of feminist scholars has begun to counter narratives of Canadian literary history and Johnson is being recognised for her literary efforts.
An examination of the reception of Johnson's writing over the course of a century provides an opportunity to study changing notions of literary value, and the shifting demarcation between high and popular culture. During her lifetime, this line scarcely existed in Canada, where nationalism prevailed as the primary evaluative criterion. The Vancouver Province headline on the day of her funeral in March 1913 simply stated, "Canada's poetess is laid to rest".[12] During the following decade, an "elegiac quality often imbued references to Pauline Johnson".[12] To Euro-Canadians, she was considered the last spokesperson for a people destined to disappear: "The time must come for us to go down, and when it comes may we have the strength to meet our fate with such fortitude and silent dignity as did the Red Man his."[12]
Johnson is capable of remarkably clear dissections of the racist habits of the time, a clarity that comes out of her standpoint as a privileged Mohawk educated in both Haudenosaunee society and white Anglo-Canadian culture.[7] Her deft use of analogues between Iroquois traditions of government and religion and those of the dominant culture, works to show the Six Nations to be as politically responsible as, and far less sexist than, the British; the one God of the Longhouse to be more benign than the Christian God; and Iroquois traditions to be more time-tested, healthy, and virtuous than those of a corrupted urban modernity.[7] However, her patriotic enthusiasm for Canada and the Crown, as expressed in "Canadian Born" and elsewhere, seems at odds with her Indigenous advocacy.[7]
In the 21st century, some have questioned the moral ambiguity of Johnson's work and whether she herself was racist. In 2017 school administrators at the High Park Alternative Public School in Toronto characterized the song "Land of the Silver Birch" as racist, mistakenly asserting that Johnson wrote the poem on which the song is based. In a letter to parents, they said, "While its lyrics are not overtly racist ... the historical context of the song is racist." Some experts disagreed with this assertion, and the music teacher, who arranged for the song to be performed at a school concert, sued the administration for defamation.[23]
