Jane Johnston Schoolcraft

1800—1842

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, also known by her Anishinaabemowin name, Bamewawagezhikaquay (approximately translated Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky) was born in 1800 in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The daughter of a Scots-Irish fur trader, John Johnston, and Susan Johnston, who was the daughter of an Ojibwe leader and whose Anishinaabemowin name was Ozhaguscodaywayquay, Schoolcraft is widely considered to be the first known Indigenous woman writer, the first known Indigenous poet to write in English, and the first poet to write in an Indigenous language in the United States.

Though Schoolcraft often wrote in English and translated traditional, oral Ojibwe stories and songs, she was raised speaking English, French, and Anishinaabemowin. She was homeschooled with her father and received formal schooling at a mission school in Sault Ste. Marie. In 1823, she married Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnologist and federal agent assigned to the Michigan Territory in 1822. Henry Schoolcraft published a great deal about Indigenous cultures in the United States, especially the Ojibwe communities and traditions he gained access to as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s husband. These books acted as a source for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his writing of The Song of Hiawatha (1855).

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s literary output totaled around 50 poems and a number of translated versions of Ojibwe stories and songs, but she published little in her lifetime. A few poems appeared in the handwritten magazine The Literary Voyager; or, Muzzeniegun, a publication compiled by her husband in 1826 and 1827.

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died in 1842 while visiting her sister in Canada. She was buried at St. John’s Anglican Church, Ancaster, Ontario.

In 2007, Robert Dale Parker compiled and edited a collection of her poetry, much of it from Schoolcraft’s unpublished manuscripts and letters, titled The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (University of Pennsylvania Press). In 2008, Schoolcraft was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.