Home “[H]eart-sweet” Homeland

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Domestic Decolonial Literary Methodology

Abstract

Building on Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s argument that Anishinaabe women’s personal experience can constitute a critical methodology (2017), this article contends that nineteenth-century Ojibwe poet and storyteller Jane Johnston Schoolcraft applies domestic experiences related to her Ojibwe culture as a decolonial methodology in her writing. This methodology corresponds with the criticism of contemporary Indigenous feminist scholars who write about the impact of colonialism on Indigenous women, their homes, and their families (see Anderson 2010; Goeman 2009, 2013; Huhndorf and Suzack 2010; and Lajimodiere 2013). By interweaving the home, Ojibwe knowledges, and Euro-Western literatures in writings that speak to her role as a host for European tourists, settler travellers, and government officials, Johnston Schoolcraft engages what Ann Laura Stoler terms colonial hierarchies of credibility (2009) in an Indigenous feminist framework to reconceptualize Indigenous and settler relationships in the Great Lakes region.