Brought up in a strict and sheltered household, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and a non-native woman, Pauline Johnson struggled to make an independent life for herself. She found it as a poet and performer whose dramatic recitals skirted the boundaries of what was acceptable to "respectable" Canadian society. Her performances took her from the backwoods of British Columbia's gold country to the drawing rooms of England. Onstage she assumed the role of an Indian princess, while in her personal life she observed Victorian moral strictures, all the while falling regularly and desperately into unrequited love. .