A truly superior lake
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft's poem is a lyrical exploration of a body of water that is bigger than Austria (and almost as big as Portugal!)
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, “Lines Written at Castle Island, Lake Superior”
Originally written in the Ojibwe language by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and translated by her.
Here in my native inland sea
From pain and sickness would I flee
And from its shores and island bright
Gather a store of sweet delight.
Lone island of the saltless sea!
How wide, how sweet, how fresh and free
How all transporting—is the view
Of rocks and skies and waters blue
Uniting, as a song’s sweet strains
To tell, here nature only reigns.
Ah, nature! here forever sway
Far from the haunts of men away
For here, there are no sordid fears,
No crimes, no misery, no tears
No pride of wealth; the heart to fill,
No laws to treat my people ill. 
What we love about this poem…
Inspired by an excursion on Lake Superior, the poem rapturously conveys the speaker’s immersive experience of natural beauty as well as giving us a deep sense of history. The region of the Great Lakes, and in particular Lake Superior, is one of the ancestral homelands of the Ojibwe, one of the largest Indigenous North American groups.
We also love the way Schoolcraft gives a sense of the future in the poem’s political message, which arrives at the end and creates a strong contrast between the injustice of the settler societies and the unadulterated bounty of nature.
About the Author
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay in Ojibwe; 1800-1842) was of Ojibwe and Scots-Irish heritage. She was born in Sault Ste. Marie, which was then in the Michigan Territory. Her writing appeared in her husband Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s handwritten magazine The Literary Voyager, and she collected Ojibwe stories for Henry’s book Algic Researches (1839).
Her work and legacy have been overlooked by scholars, even though the stories she collected in Algic Researches were drawn on by better-known writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow whose poem Song of Hiawatha (1855) is also set around Lake Superior.
Robert Dale Parker’s The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (2007) provides an extensive look at, as he puts it, ‘The World and Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft.’
To read alongside…
You might also enjoy our past newsletter featuring a Native American Thanksgiving grace that addresses the beauty of nature and suggests the oneness of all living things.
Phillis Wheatley was another woman writer from the Early American period who wrote under extraordinary circumstances. See one of our newsletters on her below.
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