by Zitkala-S̈a
Why would the Atlantic Monthly publish fiction by a Native American that seems, to contemporary eyes, so overtly to condemn white middle-class American culture? Literary scholar Patricia Okker notes that Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical stories appeared in the very same 1900 volume of the magazine in which Mary Johnston’s historical novel To Have and to Hold was serialized. To Have and to Hold indulges in all the possible stereotypes of evil and devilish “savages.” Americans were fascinated by Native Americans, and may not have worried all that much about the reliability, accuracy, racism, or even skill of popular authors bent on reproducing racial stereotypes. One reason for the publication of Zitkala-Ša, then, may be that the Atlantic Monthly editors deemed her and her material exotic, and of interest to their readers. Turn-of-the-century readers were able to hold on to both concepts of the Native American—the stereotypical “savage” as well as this individuated young and abused girl-child heading east by train—and the emotion of the stories made their critical politics more palatable. Indeed, Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical fictions, with their double perspectives, depend on her readers giving up their prejudices, at least for the duration of the reading experience, in order to make connections and assumptions that the youthful narrator cannot make for herself.
Kenneth Lincoln uses the term “bicultural play” to describe such techniques. By this, he means a cross-cultural exchange in which the “seers . . . are seeing the seen,” in which the “native ‘seers’ peer back.” As in her story “The Soft-Hearted Sioux,” Zitkala-Ša is quick to turn a trope. In that story, an Indian boy is taught by Christians that it is evil to hunt and kill animals. By the end of the story, the same Indian is being executed by Christians. The turn is an indictment of piety and hypocrisy, especially the Christians’ censorious attitude toward hunting but not when the spoil of the hunt is an Indian charged with killing a white man. Capital punishment is somehow exempt from Christian indictments of killing living creatures—especially when it is an Indian who is executed.
Zitkala-Ša’s stories detail two cultures in struggle, documenting the gaps and fissures separating them. Her fiction is not only about bicultural play but also about the ways that one culture structures the interpretation of another. But her writing is much more than a piece of history or a comparative template between Native and white culture. The expansiveness and varied-ness of her writing, her creativity, and her political commitment might best be understood in the way that scholar, poet, and theorist Gerald Vizenor describes Native American literature: as “unstudied landscapes, wild and comic rather than tragic and representational, storied with narrative wisps and tribal discourse.” By reading Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical fiction or the fictions of her storied life, one understands the costs and consequences of the life she led as well as the triumph of her accomplishments. Her life began the year of the Battle of Little Big Horn and ended the year the opera The Sun Dance was performed on the New York stage. Hers is truly a remarkable story, told best by the writer herself.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Since the 1970s there has been a burgeoning of excellent scholarship on Native American literature and culture. For historical contexts we especially recommend turning to Hazel Hertzberg and Frederick Hoxie; for Native literary studies we suggest the work of Paula Gunn Allen, Arnold Krupat, and Robert Warrior.
For work on Zitkala-Ša, we recommend the biographical essays by Dexter Fisher, P. Jane Hafen, and William Willard; the University of Nebraska Press editions of her writings; and the following examples of scholarship on Zitkala-Ša and relevant cultural and historical contexts.
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
———, ed. Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. Boston: Beacon, 1989.
Bell, Betty Louise. “ ‘If This Is Paganism . . .’: Zitkala-Ša and the Devil’s Language.” In Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods, Jace Weaver, ed. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1998. 61-68.
Bernardin, Susan. “The Lessons of a Sentimental Education: Zitkala- Ša’s Autobiographical Narratives.” Western American Literature 32.3 (November 1997): 212-38.
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1970.
Churchill, Ward. Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 1999.
———. “The Earth Is Our Mother: Struggles for American Indian Land and Liberation in the Contemporary United States.” In The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, M. Annette Jaimes, ed. Boston: South End Press, 1992. 139-88.
Coleman, Michael C. American Indian Children at School, 1850-1930. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
Cutter, Martha J. “Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Writings: The Problems of a Canonical Search for Language and Identity.” MELUS 19.1 (Spring 1994): 31-45.
Diana, Vanessa Holford. “ ‘Hanging in the Heart of Chaos’: BiCultural Limbo, Self-(Re)presentation, and the White Audience in Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories.” Cimarron Review 121 (October 1997): 154-73.
Edmunds, R. David. The New Warriors: Native American Leaders Since 1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Fisher, Dexter. “The Transformation of Tradition: A Study of Zitkala- Ša and Mourning Dove, Two Transitional American Indian Writers.” In Critical Essays on Native American Literature, Andrew Wiget, ed. Boston: Hall, 1985. 202-11.
———. “Zitkala-Ša: The Evolution of a Writer.” American Indian Quarterly 5.3 (1979): 229-38. Reprinted as Foreword to American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Ša. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
Hafen, P. Jane. “A Cultural Duet: Zitkala-Ša and The Sun Dance Opera.” Great Plains Quarterly 18.2 (Spring 1998): 102-11.
———. “Zitkala-Ša: Sentimentality and Sovereignty.” Wicazo Sa Review 12.2 (Fall 1997): 31-42.
Hanson, William F. Sun Dance Land. Provo: J. Grant Stevenson, 1967.
Heflin, Ruth J. “I Remain Alive”: The Sioux Literary Renaissance. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
Hertzberg, Hazel. The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971.
Hoefel, Roseanne. “Writing, Performance, Activism: Zitkala-Ša and Pauline Johnson.” In Native American Women in Literature and Culture, Susan Castillo and Victor M. P. DaRosa, eds. Porto, Portugal: Fernando Pessoa University Press, 1997. 107-18.
Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: A Campaign to Assimilate the Indians. 1880-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Came After: A Study of Native American Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Lincoln, Kenneth. Ind’in Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Lukens, Margaret A. “The American Story of Zitkala-Ša.” In In Her Own Voice: Nineteenth-Century American Women Essayists, Sherry Lee Linkon, ed. New York: Garland, 1997. 141-55.
Okker, Patricia. “Native American Literatures and the Canon: The Case of Zitkala-Ša.” In American Realism and the Canon, Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, eds. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. 87-101.
Rappaport, Doreen. The Flight of Red Bird: The Life of Zitkala-Ša. New York: Puffin, 1999.
Ruoff, A. Lavonne Brown. “Early Native American Women Authors: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sarah Winnemucca, S. Alice Calla- han, E. Pauline Johnson, and Zitkala-Ša.” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader, Karen L. Kilcup, ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998.
Smith, Jeanne. “ ‘A Second Tongue’: The Trickster’s Voice in the Works of Zitkala-Ša.” In Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective, Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks, eds. Ha
nover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994. 46-60.
Smith, Sidonie. “Cheesecake, Nymphs, and ‘We the People’: Un/National Subjects about 1900.” Prose Studies 17.1 (April 1994): 120-40.
Spack, Ruth. “Revisioning American Indian Women: Zitkala-Ša’s Revolutionary American Indian Stories.” Legacy 14.1 (1997): 25-43.
Vizenor, Gerald. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.
———. “Trickster Discourse.” American Indian Quarterly 14 (1990): 277-88.
Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Wexler, Laura. “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, Shirley Samuels, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Wiget, Andrew. Native American Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Willard, William. “The First Amendment, Anglo-Conformity, and American Indian Religious Freedom.” Wicazo Ša Review 7 (Spring 1991): 25-42.
—. “Zitkala-Ša: A Woman Who Would Be Heard.” Wicazo Ša Review 1 (Spring 1985): 11-16.
Zitkala-Ša. American Indian Stories. (1921), Foreword by Dexter Fisher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
———. Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera. P. Jane Hafen, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
———. Old Indian Legends. (1901), Foreword by Agnes Picotte. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Chronology
1868 The Treaty of Laramie establishes the “Great Sioux Reservation” along with measures for its protection—including a stipulation that changes to the treaty require the consent of three-fourths of all men living on the reservation.
1873 Gold is discovered by a nonnative on Sioux land.
1874 The Women’s Christian Temperance Union is formed.
1876 Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons) is born on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota.
1876 The Battle of Little Big Horn: General George Custer leads one famous and unsuccessful leg of a three-pronged offensive to take over Sioux land in Montana, and is killed.
1880s The U.S. government bans the Sun Dance and other tribal religious practices.
1881 The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute is founded by Booker T. Washington.
1883 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show begins touring.
1884 Missionaries come to the Yankton Reservation; Zitkala- Ša attends White’s Manual Technical Institute in Wabash, Indiana, on and off through 1895.
1887 The Dawes Severalty Act or General Allotment Act is passed; the central legislative act inaugurating the assimilative era, it breaks up tribal lands and affiliations by allotting plots of land, in trust, to individuals.
1889 The Indian Territory is opened to white settlement (it will formally become Oklahoma in 1907).
1890 A prophet named Wovoka introduces a new religion based on the Ghost Dance, which sweeps across the Sioux reservation. Sitting Bull is killed on December 15. More than three hundred Sioux are massacred at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29.
1895-1897 Zitkala-Ša attends Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.
1896 Zitkala-Ša wins second prize at the Indiana State Oratorical Contest.
1896 The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson upholds the doctrine of “separate but equal,” thus initiating the age of Jim Crow.
1897 Zitkala-Ša accepts a teaching position at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
1898 The Spanish-American War is waged from mid-April to mid-August. As a result, the United States gains the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands.
1899 Zitkala-Ša goes to study at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
1900 Zitkala-Ša travels with the Carlisle School to play violin at the Paris Exposition.
1901 Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends is published.
1902 Zitkala-Ša marries Raymond Bonnin.
1903 Zitkala-Ša and Raymond Bonnin’s son, Ohiya Bonnin, is born.
1903-1916 Zitkala-Ša and family live on the Uintah Reservation in Utah.
1906 The Burke Act makes it easier for white homesteaders to buy reservation land, while making it much more difficult for Native Americans to acquire American citizenship.
1909 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded.
1911 The Society of American Indians (the first pan-Indian political advocacy group run entirely by Indians) is founded.
1913 Ohiya is enrolled at a Catholic boarding school in Illinois.
1916 Peyote hearings are held in the U.S. Congress.
1916-1920 Zitkala-Ša is elected secretary of the Society of American Indians and becomes editor of American Indian Magazine. Raymond Bonnin enlists in the army and serves stateside. He is honorably discharged in August 1919.
1917 Antipeyote legislation is passed in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. The United States enters the World War in April.
1919 The World War ends. The Eighteenth Amendment is passed, initiating the prohibition of alcohol.
1920 The Nineteenth Amendment is passed, giving women the right to vote. Indian veterans are permitted to apply for citizenship.
1921 Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories is published by Hayworth Publishing House.
1924 The Indian Citizenship Act naturalizes Indians born within U.S. territorial limits. Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians —a study on graft and other abuses against Oklahoma Indians—is published, with Zitkala-Ša as co-author.
1926 Zitkala-Ša founds and presides over the National Council of American Indians, a nonprofit lobbying group for reform and Indian rights.
1929 The stock market crashes on October 19, beginning the Great Depression.
1934 The Indian Reorganization Act, part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policy, ends the allotment policy started with the Dawes Act, repeals bans on the Sun Dance and other spiritual practices, and recognizes tribal governments as sovereign nations.
1938 Zitkala-Ša dies on January 26. The opera The Sun Dance is performed by the New York City Light Opera Guild.
A Note on the Texts
We have tapped a full range of sources to put together this Penguin Classics edition of Zitkala-Ša’s writing. Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. We have let stand the punctuation and grammatical conventions of the day, except in those cases where it might interfere with the reader’s understanding.
Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories are based on facsimiles of the 1901 Ginn & Co. edition and 1921 Hayworth edition respectively.
Zitkala-Ša’s magazine writings have been culled from the original issues of the Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians and the American Indian Magazine.
The sources for the last section are varied. The three pieces from Zitkala-Ša’s Earlham College days (“Side by Side,” “A Ballad,” and “Iris of Life”) are taken from facsimiles from The Earlhamite. “A Protest Against the Abolition of the Indian Dance” appeared first in the August 1902 Red Man and Helper. “The Menace of Peyote” existed as a pamphlet distributed by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, date unknown, which we copied from the original housed at Brigham Young University’s Special Collections. “Americanize the First American” and “Bureaucracy Versus Democracy” have been copied from their original pamphlet form. Some versions of the pamphlet included a stunning pictograph of Zitkala-Ša’s argument in the form of an 11 × 17 handwritten circle chart, which proved too difficult to reproduce here. “A Dakota Ode to Washington” was published as a part of the Congressional Record for the “Proceedings Held in the Washington Monument,” and we extracted this piece from a copy of that record. The four California Indian pieces are copied from a microfilm
version of the California Indian Herald.
Much of Zitkala-Ša’s work that we found in manuscript form was not available for this edition. For some of these works see P. Jane Hafen’s collection of Zitkala-Ša’s stories and a version of The Sun Dance libretto—Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera (University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
I
OLD INDIAN LEGENDS
The selections from Old Indian Legends fit into the category of the “retold tale,” a traditional or oral legend passed down for generations—in this case, among various bands of the Sioux Indians. These retold tales feature a range of important figures common to the shared Sioux cosmology. Iktomi the shape-shifting trickster (who most often took the form of a spider), Iya the glutton, muskrats and badgers—all the “people,” as the animals-spirits-tricksters are often called, of a traditional world of Native storytelling. Many of these legends center around Iktomi, who is as often a wily pest as a brave hero and, through his shape-shifting, teaches a lesson about social responsibility and behavior. In the first decades of the twentieth century, many important American Indian writers of Zitkala- Ša’s generation were retelling and committing these stories to written text. Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux, published a number of books of legends, including Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), Old Indian Days (1906), and Wigwam Evenings—Sioux Tales Retold (1909); Chief Luther Standing Bear, a Teton Lakota, wrote a number of volumes of legends; and Ella Deloria, a Yankton Sioux, published Dakota Texts (1932). There is much to learn from a comparative approach: studying the changes among stories reveals the ways in which “retold” tales repeat and, in their repetition, profoundly alter understandings of historically embedded narratives.
