101. Ozhagusodaywayquay

She was an Ojibwe woman of many names. And one choice she made helped result in the first poetry anyone knows of to be written in a Native language.

Ozhagusodaywayquay (also known as Susan Johnston, Woman of the Green Glade, and Neengay) was the mother of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800–1842), the pioneering Ojibwe/Irish poet whose three surviving poems in the Ojibwe language set a template for all who followed her.

How did Ozhagusodaywayquay help usher these first Native language poems into the world? Besides nurturing Jane, this mother also made the choice not to speak the English she heard (and understood) each day from business associates and guests of her Irish husband, John Johnston, a prominent fur trader.

Because of that choice, Jane (Bamewawagezhikaquay) grew up a Native speaker who thought of the Ojibwe language as she wrote her long-neglected but now celebrated poetry (she wrote many English language poems as well), collected in 2007 in The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky, by Robert Dale Parker.