Flint, Feather, and Other Material Selves Negotiating the Performance Poetics of E. Pauline Johnson Manina Jones and Neal Ferris Archaeology, Poetry, Performance In her recent work on celebrated Anglo-Mohawk poet-performer E. Pauline Johnson (1861–1913), Mishuana Goeman writes that scholars “have the responsibility to excavate [this writer] from the mire of racial trappings and approach her work in a new light.” 1 In this article we take that advice literally by situating a discussion of Johnson on the borders between literary and material culture studies, including archaeology, in order to read her work as a continuation of the long-standing tradition of performative Indigenous negotiations with the evolving colonialism of the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. We do this to highlight a continuity between material, social, and aesthetic practices in the on- going construction of identity, a process that both informs and exceeds Johnson’s poetic performances. At the heart of this process are family, Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee-centric understandings of self in agential relation to the emergent colonial world of Canada. 2 While Johnson as a cultural fgure has been the subject of consid- erable conversation in literary scholarship, as one of her most prolifc critics observed in 2012, “Nearly a century afer her death, the question of how to read Pauline Johnson’s poetry and prose concerns fewer crit- ics than it should.” 3 Johnson’s renowned public poetry performances be- tween the 1880s and the early twentieth century, along with her pub- lications, made her the most widely known woman poet of her time in Canada. Her work must not, we argue, be read within segregated “aesthetic” or “social” conceptualizations of performance produced by disciplinary silos. Rather, we would like to place these literary oc-