Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (her English name) or Bamewawagezhikaquay (her Ojibwe name), Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky, was born in 1800 in Sault Ste. Marie in what is now the state of Michigan. By the time she died in 1842, she had produced a large body of literary and other writings. Eclipsed from the historical record by her famous husband, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), Jane Johnston Schoolcraft was nevertheless among the first American Indian writers. She was also the first known American Indian literary writer, the first known Indian woman writer, the first known Indian poet, the first known poet to write poems in a Native American language, and the first known American Indian to write out traditional Indian stories (as opposed to transcribing and translating from someone else’s oral delivery, which she did also). Her stories became a key source for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s sensational bestseller The Song of Hiawatha.
The sound the stars make rushing through the sky : the writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft / edited by Robert Dale Parker. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2007.
For more information, see Introduction to Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Voices from the Gaps.
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft / Robert Dale Parker. An annotated bibliography, part of the American Literature module of Oxford Bibliographies Online.