Description
Tekahionwake (1861-1913) was a Mohawk author whose works ranged from essays such as “A Pagan in St. Paul’s” to volumes of poetry. She made two trips to London during her lifetime; on both visits, she was something of a sensation, performing her work in both private homes and public venues. During her 1906 trip, she stayed in St. James’s Square. “London,” she wrote, “looks a strange place to the Red Indian whose eyes still see the myriad forest trees, even as they gaze across the Strand, and whose feet still feel the clinging moccasin even among the scores of clicking heels that hurry along the thoroughfares of this camping ground of the paleface.” She also cast the city in specifically Indigenous terms: she linked London’s tall stone buildings with skyward-stretching Saskatchewan tipi poles; she compared the stone of those buildings to the ceremonial stone pipes and corn-pounders of her people; she described the singing of a boys’ choir in relation to the singing of Mohawk priests; and she imagined the fires of the longhouse as she gazed at altar candles. And she could be quite critical of the city, describing it as “fetid” and smothering. She was especially appalled by the poverty she saw in London. “With slums like this in the heart of London, they’ll dare to send missionaries to our Indians in Canada!” It was also in 1906 that Tekahionwake would meet a future collaborator: S7aplek, also known as Joe Capilano, a Squamish leader from British Columbia who was in the city with three colleagues in pursuit of a conversation with the King over land rights. Not long after the meeting in London, Tekahionwake would move to Vancouver and write the still-in-print Legends of Vancouver with S7aplek and his wife LÃxwelut. She spent the rest of her life in Vancouver, her path as a writer forever changed by her encounter in London.
Bibliographic sources
Thrush, Indigenous London, 17-19