Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston (1800-1842), whose name in Ojibwe was Bamewawagezhikaquay (Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky), a writer and translator, was born in Sault Ste. Marie in what is now the state of Michigan. She was the daughter of John Johnston, an Irish-born fur trader, and Susan Johnston, née Ozhaguscodaywayquay (she used both names after her marriage) who came from a leading Ojibwe family, worked with her husband in the fur trade, and ran the business herself after he died in 1828. Raised in both the Ojibwe and English languages, Jane was educated by her mother in Ojibwe traditions, including traditional oral storytelling, and educated by her father in English and European literature, theology, and history. In 1809-1810 she visited Ireland and England with her father, and in 1814, while her father fought with the British, she witnessed the American attack on Fort Mackinac during the War of 1812. She wrote poetry in English as early as 1815.

Sault Ste. Marie was a mostly Ojibwe community during Jane's childhood. It also included a small number of Frenchmen who worked in the fur trade and usually married Ojibwe women. There were no English speakers besides Jane's father and siblings and the occasional British fur trader passing through. There were also many mixed Indian and white or métis like Jane and her siblings, so that Jane's world included not only Indian and Euroamerican culture but also a distinctly métis culture.

In 1822 Jane's life changed with the arrival of federal troops and a federal Indian agent. The next year she married the agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. They had four children, of which two survived to adulthood. Jane's parents built an addition to their house for Jane and Henry, an addition that still stands and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Meanwhile, Henry published many articles about Ojibwe Indians and the Ojibwe language, relying on the linguistic and cultural knowledge of Jane, her mother, and her siblings. He often traveled on official business, and Jane found the ensuing loneliness a burden. They traveled together to New York for the winter of 1824-1825, and sometimes they wintered in Detroit. In 1827 they built Elmwood, an imposing official residence, which also remains today in Sault Ste. Marie and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That same year, their two-year-old son William Henry died suddenly. Devastated, Jane wrote at least five poems in William's memory. "Sweet Willy," for example, begins with these lines:

An hundred moons and more have past,
Since erst upon this day,
They bore thee from my anguished sight,
And from my home away.
(Parker, ed., The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky, p. 138)

To Jane's disappointment, Henry moved the family to Mackinac Island, Michigan Territory, in 1833. Like Sault Ste. Marie, Mackinac had a large Ojibwe and métis population, but it was more cosmopolitan, with many métis, Indian, and Euroamerican travelers from across the region and beyond. Always sickly, Jane missed her home and mother at the Sault. She was prescribed laudanum, an opiate, and she likely grew addicted, compounding her poor health.

In 1838 Henry sent their children to eastern boarding schools. Jane strenuously objected, but she gave in to Henry's wishes. She wrote a poem in Ojibwe expressing her sadness at leaving the children far away and far from their mutual homeland:

Ne dau nis ainse e
Ne gwis is ainse e
Ishe nau gun ug wau
Waus sa wa kop eg
My little daughter
My little son
I leave them behind
Far away land
(Parker, ed., The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky, p. 141-3)

Though she mostly wrote in English and there was no precedent for writing poems in an Indian language, she occasionally wrote poetry in Ojibwe, and she translated Ojibwe songs into English.

Building on Jane's stories and on stories from her family and others, Henry assembled the first large-scale collection of traditional American Indian oral stories. Published in 1839 under the title Algic Researches, it is a landmark in the history of American Indian storytelling and American cultural anthropology. But Henry gave little credit to Jane or the other individual Indian storytellers. Thus when the stories won fame, no recognition went to Jane or the other Indians who told or wrote the tales that Henry then revised for publication. Indeed, Jane showed no interest in publishing her poems, stories, or translations under her own name. A literary career would have been hard for her to imagine as a woman, as an Indian, and as someone who grew up on and lived most of her life on what Euroamericans thought of as the frontier. She wrote simply because she enjoyed writing and had things that she wanted to say, as in her "Invocation" to her grandfather, which begins:

Rise bravest chief! of the mark of the noble deer,
With eagle glance,
Resume thy lance,
And wield again thy warlike spear!
(Parker, ed., The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky, p. 99)

She even wrote poems as part of the letters that she sent Henry during his travels. Many of her manuscripts survived only because Henry saved them among his papers.

When Henry was fired from his job as Indian agent in 1841, the change was troubling for Jane as well. They left her familiar homeland on Mackinac and in the Sault and moved to New York City. The next year, when Henry traveled to Europe, Jane decided to visit her sister Charlotte in Dundas (in what is now Ontario), Canada, where, with no particular warning, Jane suddenly died.

Jane Schoolcraft's poetry and fiction ranges from the patterns of romantic poetry to the patterns of traditional Ojibwe oral storytelling, and they often combine Ojibwe and Euroamerican ways of thinking. She typically wrote about particular outdoor settings, about sadness, and--in her stories--about children's transition into adulthood. The most famous English-language poem of the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855), draws on Jane's stories from Algic Researches and on the information that she and her family provided for Henry's publications.

For many years, Jane Schoolcraft's life and writings were overlooked, buried in the shadow of her famous husband and the broader lack of interest in early women's writing. Then, as American Indian writing attracted increasing attention in the 1990s and later, scholars of Indian literature, including James W. Parins and LaVonne Brown Ruoff, began to notice Jane Schoolcraft's writings. With the publication of her poems, stories, and translated songs, based mostly on surviving manuscripts, Schoolcraft's literary legacy has emerged as a landmark in the history of early American Indian writing while also emerging as a landmark in the history of American women's writing and American literature at large.

Most of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft's known surviving manuscripts are scattered among the Papers of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Some of her poems, copied by her husband, are in a manuscript in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill. Many related materials appear in two memoirs: Mrs. [Anna] Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838); and Henry R. Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers (1851).

For an edition of all Jane Schoolcraft's known writings with a biography and cultural history, see Robert Dale Parker, ed., The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (2007).