American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings Read online

  In 1916, at roughly the same time that she was campaigning against peyote, Zitkala-Ša was elected secretary and treasurer of the Society of American Indians (SAI), the first national pan-Indian political organization run entirely by Native people. By some accounts, Zitkala-Ša’s understated, behind-the-scenes husband was a bit jealous of her literary activities, and possibly to salve this rift as well as to make a change from the difficult routine of life in Utah, they decided to move east to SAI’s Washington, D.C., office and send their son to Catholic boarding school—an ironic decision considering Zitkala-Ša’s own history with boarding schools.

  While SAI was concerned with tribal self-determination and the abuses of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in terms of land allotment, the organization focused a lot of its energy on issues of education, assimilation, and citizenship. Often tagged as “red progressives” working in the “assimilative era” of American Indian politics, SAI struggled with the impossible task of attending to many different tribal interests while dealing with an increasingly punitive federal education and social welfare system. Initially, SAI was a progressive and experimental political force that worked on both local and national levels—for example, it initiated a community center movement, aimed at improving reservation life. Zitkala-Ša’s center at Fort Duchesne among the Utes was the inaugural site. SAI hoped the centers would provide social services to poor Indians living on reservations, and focused its efforts on better health and nutrition as well as education. But SAI’s relationship with reservation life was unstable. Among the many conflicts that emerged were disagreements over peyote and the position on the BIA, the government agency in charge of Indian and reservation policy. Some wanted to cut all ties with the BIA, believing it turned Indians into dependent wards of the state. Others believed in preserving the space fostered by the reservation system.

  The Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians changed its name to American Indian Magazine in 1916 so it might broaden its readership base and gain some autonomy from the organization it represented. Zitkala-Ša joined the contributing editors in the last issue of 1915 (the final issue before the name change). The new magazine announced its mission to make the publication “the medium of communication between students and friends of the American Indian, especially between those engaged in the uplift and advancement of the race.” Articles about the “Perils of Peyote Poison,” debates on assimilation and citizenship, essays about Indian support of the World War, along with poetry, drawings, public letters, memoirs, and historical pieces like “The Truth About the Massacre at Wounded Knee” were all published while Zitkala-Ša was involved with the magazine. There was also a range of regular columns such as “The Editorial Sanctum,” “Men and Women Whose Lives Count,” and “What the Papers Say About Indians,” which effectively established new links between the editors and SAI, their readers, and the popular press more generally. In the 1916 edition, a photograph of Zitkala-Ša was featured as the magazine’s frontispiece to mark her election as secretary of SAI; she was described as “a fountain of energy. . . . She lives for one great ideal, the complete liberty of her race and for this end she devotes every minute of her life without compensation. We believe that she is the most remarkable Indian woman living, and yet she is the most unassuming.”

  With the Autumn 1918 issue of the American Indian Magazine, Zitkala-Ša became its editor. She continued to write articles and stories in addition to regular editorials. Under her editorship, the magazine began publishing new columns like “The Funny Side of War Work” and “Chatter” (which ranged from news about increased circulation of the magazine to in spirational quotes like “Genius is two per cent talent and ninety-eight percent application”), as well as “Under the Sun,” which expanded the scope of the magazine to include news from around the world.

  1919-1938 : THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF AMERICAN INDIANS

  Although the SAI dissolved under the pressures of internal disagreement in 1919, Zitkala-Ša and her husband continued to act as advocates and mediators for various tribal interests. As a part of her work for the “Indian cause,” Zitkala-Ša collected her previously published fiction as well as some new material into American Indian Stories, brought out by Hayworth Publishing House in 1921. In personal letters from the time, she calls her new book the “blanket book” (the cover image was an image of a Navajo blanket). The significance of this cover and the references to it surely weren’t accidental. For one thing, they demonstrate how she continued to pick and choose among tribal representations. For another, they stand in stark contrast to the assimilative efforts of Indian boarding schools’ regulations—regulations which figure centrally in these stories—requiring all students to disavow their tribal customs (colloquially, students who rejected their boarding school education and returned to their reservation were said to be going “back to the blanket”).

  In the 1920s, Zitkala-Ša became involved with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), an umbrella organization for mostly white women’s advocacy and suffrage groups. In 1921 she urged the GFWC to establish an Indian Welfare Committee. And in 1924, in her capacity as a GFWC representative, she investigated land and oil abuses in Oklahoma (most of which had been Indian Territory until 1907) for a report commissioned by the Indian Rights Association. This report, Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery, called for immediate government action and redress, and would lead to the formation of the Meriam Commission, a group of government officials brought together to attend to a range of problems on reservations. The Meriam Report of 1928 laid the groundwork for fundamental changes in Indian policy.

  During the same period, Zitkala-Ša also spent time in California and wrote a series of articles about the California Indians to increase their political voice in the state. Published in the San Francisco Bulletin and in the California Indian Herald, these reflective pieces brought together poetics and politics in what was a new style of writing for Zitkala-Ša. The elements found in all her work come together in these short pieces: her love for nature mingles with retold tales and the call for political change. The three “chapters” and a final piece entitled “Heart to Heart” were to Zitkala-Ša as much a literary endeavor as a political mission. In a familiar and engaging first-person voice, she weaves together fragments touching on violated treaties, the state of affairs for Indians in California and elsewhere in the United States, and the otherwise silent histories of Indian life held within the sacred redwood forests.

  In 1926 Zitkala-Ša founded and was elected president of the National Council of American Indians (NCAI)—for which her husband, Raymond, served as secretary—an organization that she would continue to run until her death in 1938. Their motto was “Help Indians Help Themselves in Protecting Their Rights and Properties.” The group would become a major presence and advocate for redressing tribal inequities and abuses. NCAI came to represent at least forty-nine tribes, as letters and briefs written by and to them affirm. During this period Zitkala-Ša handled an impressive range of work. She routinely went to congressional meetings and sessions where she addressed issues such as Ute land and monetary claims, specific land allotment settlements for Navajos, distribution of rations and supplies to Yankton Sioux, and benefits for Native American World War I veterans. She continually publicized her work, wrote letters informing people of upcoming legislation, stumped for candidates, raised funds, and educated tribal communities about their civic rights.

  At sixty-one years old, and in failing health, Zitkala-Ša fell into a coma on January 25, 1938, and died the following day. In perhaps the greatest misrepresentation in a life often misrepresented, she was described in the hospital’s postmortem report as “Gertrude Bonnin from South Dakota—Housewife.” Because of Raymond Bonnin’s service as a captain with the U.S. Army, she was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, with a headstone that reads “Gertrude Simmons Bonnin—‘Zitkala-Ša’ of the Sioux Indians—1876-1938.”
Memorial services were held at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. One of those who talked was John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who me morialized her as the “last of the great Indian Orators.”

  READING AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES TODAY

  This volume presents a selection of Zitkala-Ša’s writings that are as urgent, variable, and fascinating as her dedicated and multifaceted life. Because her writing is powerful and her subject early childhood, American Indian Stories, in particular, resonates with contemporary readers. In their acuity and complexity, this volume’s stories provide both intellectual substance and emotional power.

  Thematically, the stories explore the ways young people grow up and are educated into the values of a culture. Zitkala Ša takes some basic autobiographical material, melds it with stories of other Native Americans who have been sent away to boarding school, then shapes it into a narrative that reverses the assumptions of some of the most popular and esteemed forms of nineteenth-century American and European literature. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter looks different when it is read alongside Zitkala-Ša, who approaches similar issues of sexuality, sin, and freedom from subtly or sometimes radically opposite points of view. The Indians in The Scarlet Letter are portrayed as shadowy background figures, representing mysterious powers, magic, and the unbridled and potentially sinister world of nature. They bear little resemblance to the Indians we see in Zitkala-Ša’s rendering of a boarding school in “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” or of a girl at home with her mother on the Yankton reservation.

  “The School Days of an Indian Girl” and “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” make real and vivid the pain of cultural dislocation enacted on a young girl who is not only vulnerable to change but initially welcomes it. Despite her mother’s opposition, the young narrator insists on going to an Eastern government boarding school, miles from home, because she is sure that this school represents the promise of the future. Or at least she believes the missionaries, who arrive at the reservation to recruit young Indian children by promising them delicious red apples. Zitkala-Ša gives this potent symbol of Western mythology new resonance. The apple is, of course, the instrument of seduction in the book of Genesis. In “School Days” it is the catalyst of the child’s fall from prelapsarian grace (the unsullied reservation) to the harsh world of the boarding school. The apple also links her tale of temptation and seduction with the lure of assimilationism: the apple is red on the outside, white on the inside. Through this symbol, the young girl becomes the innocent exemplar of the myth of assimilation that is key to the ideology of America, the great “melting pot.” Zitkala-Ša’s journey from reservation to boarding school reverses geographically the European immigrant’s journey from Europe to New England and then west across America that was happening at the same time. It echoes and yet differentiates itself from the impulse of the world’s diverse (primarily white) populations to assimilate into a heterogeneous—but also homogenized—American culture.

  The effectiveness of “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” and “The School Days of an Indian Girl” lies in their point of view. Zitkala-Ša lends the maturity of the adult author to the terrified perspective of the small child. After the seemingly interminable trip across the prairies, the eight-year-old girl is thrown into a new world where all of the rules are different. Zitkala-Ša shows us this new world through the child’s fearful eyes, maintaining this perspective so skillfully that she defamil iarizes the reader’s world. Having to sit in a chair is a kind of torture. The squeak of leather-soled shoes is harsh and jarring to the ears. The way white people stand close to the person to whom they are speaking is a form of trespass. And the school’s mandatory cutting of her long braid is an assault akin to rape. With an anthropologist’s acuity in dissecting a foreign culture, Zitkala-Ša documents the aberrations of white culture, putting her reader into the position of having to judge harshly the very culture of which the reader is a part. Our empathy is with the child, not the child’s “educators.” The violence of this initiation rite into white life is so primitive that we are forced to reconsider the norms not of Native American society but of white society. “Normal” behaviors become practices, rituals, or customs that, from a Sioux point of view, range from the inexplicable to the unsightly to the barbaric. In other words, the initiation this Indian child undergoes is more violent than the initiation rituals of the Sun Dance that white Americans reacted so strongly against.

  What makes Zitkala-Ša such a unique and masterful writer is her ability to portray the perceptions, assumptions, experiences, and customs of the Sioux while also making the reader rethink the perceptions, assumptions, experiences, and customs of white, middle-class Americans. This double edge comes from her manipulation of one of the most important forms of nineteenth-century European and American literature, the bildungsroman. A bildungsroman charts the “building” or education of a main character counseled by others into more understanding and sophistication in the ways of the world. What is rarely questioned in the bildungsroman is the validity of that world.

  In her stories, Zitkala-Ša introduces a familiar figure, the child, limited in experience and full of expectations, many of which will be proven false. Where Zitkala-Ša subverts the form is in showing that the ways of the world are the problem, not the solution. The boarding school is a place of disrespect, degradation, and violence. Although the child thinks she is resisting the worst lessons of this dehumanized and dehumanizing environment, she succumbs little by little to its values. Each time she accepts something of the white ways taught at the boarding school, she is renouncing some quintessential part of her Sioux upbringing. Zitkala-Ša puts the reader (putatively white and middle-class) in the position of knowledge: we see, long before the child herself, that she is failing to preserve her Sioux identity. Zitkala-Ša sets up a plot whereby the adult reader distinguishes herself or himself from the innocent, ignorant child basically by indicting a white system of values. That is, we understand that the child has been despoiled, even while the child feels herself to be brave, independent, and triumphant.

  The reader’s point of view and the child’s come together in the scene in which she returns, after three years’ absence, to her mother’s house. There are few scenes more emotionally harrowing or perspicacious than the encounter of the mother and her unhappy daughter. Home again, the daughter vehemently renounces the white ways she has learned—exchanging her shoes for soft moccasins, refusing to read in the Indian Bible her mother (who cannot read) proffers her. Scornful of the Anglicized Indians who pass by, tearful to be in the “heart of chaos,” neither “a wild Indian nor a tame one,” the narrator feels close to her mother. Yet, as readers, we recognize the mother’s hopeless attempt to do something—anything—to console her inconsolable child, and the despair that prompts her to throw a shawl over her head and shoulders, step into the night, and howl to her brothers’ spirits, asking for support in her “helpless misery.” The conclusion is shattering: “My fingers grew icy cold, as I realized that my unrestrained tears had betrayed my suffering to her, and she was grieving for me.”

  The mother dries her tears before returning to the house, lest she cause the troubled daughter more pain. The daughter, understanding now, pretends to be asleep to avoid another confrontation. Inevitably, the daughter succumbs to her fate—a white man’s fate. “A few more moons of such a turmoil drove me away to the Eastern school. I rode on the white man’s iron steed, thinking it would bring me back to my mother in a few winters, when I should be grown tall, and there would be congenial friends awaiting me.”

  The familiar transliterations of Indian language—many moons, the white man’s iron steed—remind one of the stock Indian phrases and characters found in any number of typical Westerns of the time, especially those of popular writers such as Owen Wister and Zane Grey. Again, though, the reader knows clearly what the despairing child cannot: that another trip east will only seal her ali
enation. In going east to school again, the girl is fleeing from her own sense of failure and betrayal, her profound sense not only of alienation but of alienation from her own self and values. The terrible subjunctive in the sentence (“would . . . should . . . would”) is less a promise of what might happen than a taunting reminder of the distance between desire and fulfillment, fantasy and reality.

  The politics of this story reside in its affective register. It is impossible not to empathize with this child and her mother and the disenfranchisement each feels. Yet, to experience empathy requires that the reader be critical of the system of Indian education. It requires the reader to be suspicious of the lessons in white culture this child has mastered. “My mother had never gone inside of a schoolhouse,” the child narrator says at one point, “and so she was not capable of comforting her daughter who could read and write.” This is not the logic of the loving, if defiant, little girl before her schooling in Indiana. It is the logic of a child who has been miseducated to the pernicious principle that book learning counts more than the deepest emotional bond between mother and daughter. This bildungsroman, in other words, is designed not to show the reader how much this child has grown and developed, but rather to show how her education into the seductive norms of white culture has left her desolate.

  Another powerful level is added to the story when we remember that it depicts the years when Zitkala-Ša was away at Indian school and then returned to South Dakota. Where the author is reticent is on one of the most horrific and shameful incidents in white-Indian relations: the massacre at Wounded Knee. Nowhere in these stories is there a reference to this historical act of genocide. And yet these stories, first published a decade after Wounded Knee, carry within them an unspoken history of devastation. They are an allegory of the powerful meting out judgment on the powerless—teachers to children, whites to Indians. Such elliptical political commentary makes for haunting and powerful literature.