American Indian Writings, Legends, and Other Writings by Zitkala-Sa

The melancholy of those black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years that have since gone by.  These sad memories rise above those of smoothly grinding school days.  Perhaps my Indian nature is the moaning wind which stirs them now for their present record.  But, however tempestuous this is within me, it comes out as the low voice of a curiously colored seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear it.

We all saw it: the kid from a Kentucky Catholic school smirking at and staring down a Native activist of the Omaha tribe.  I won't link to it or post the picture; I'm sure you can bring it to mind.  It was one of those small moments that in and of themselves mean very little, but become targets of nationwide scrutiny because they capture so well the central conflicts of our current era.  And of course they bring out whiteness' committed defenders, armed with excuses and rationalizations: It's the Native who started it; it was the Black Israelites who started it; it's not a smirk; he's just a kid.

The he's-just-a-kid brigade especially fails to see that the kid's youth is exactly what disturbs those of us who are disturbed; what we see is the perpetuation of oppression, mockery, and racism into new generations.  That perception was subsequently confirmed by the kid's manufactured apology and his talk show tour and the predictable dissecting of every mistake Phillips ever made.  But despite the spin the image remains.  The smirk that puts a man in his place, draws him out of political invisibility only to isolate and reduce him, to turn him into a joke, something like a cigar store Indian or the crying Indian of the old "Keep America Beautiful" campaign.  The Indigenous People's March, the Native American's claim for a political and cultural voice, recedes, superseded again by the narrative that whiteness wants to tell.

Anyway that was the context in which I read this collection of the writings of Zitkala-Sa, a Sioux activist from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who was one of the first Native Americans to claim a cultural voice in American culture.  Zitkala-Sa was born as the United States was completing its long and bloody campaign to remove Native tribes from their land and place them on reservations; she was fourteen when hundred of men, women, and children were killed at Wounded Knee.  She grew up in the era of assimilationist boarding schools; she attended and later taught at the infamous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.  (Overlapping with football legend Pop Warner, but not Jim Thorpe, who came a little later.)  Leaving Carlisle behind, she became an activist and writer whose work appeared in The Atlantic and who later founded the National Council of American Indians.  This collection brings together several of her works: a series of traditional Dakota stories, poetry, political speeches and polemic, and pieces of memoir and fiction.

There were three sections here that I really loved.  First, the traditional Dakota stories.  They focus mostly on the figure of Iktomi, a "spider fairy" and trickster god who actually seems to spend most of his time getting tricked by other people.  Iktomi gets bested by the avenger, a brave with a magic arrow born out of a clot of buffalo blood.  Other stories tell about Iya, the camp eater, who appears as an abandoned baby, then waits until his rescuers are asleep to devour the entire village.  Native American myths like these--if I can generalize here--have an irregular, discursive quality that make them continually surprising and fresh.  And these tales are where Zitkala-Sa's skill as a writer shien most:

"To ride on one's own feet is tiresome, but to be carried like a warrior from a brave fight is great fun!" said the coyote in his heart.  He had never been borne on any one's back before and the new experience delighted him.  He lay there lazily on Iktomi's shoulders, now and then blinking blue winks.  Did you never see a birdie blink a blue wink?  This is how it first became a saying among the plains people.  When a bird stands aloof watching your strange ways, a thin bluish white tissue slips quickly over his eyes and as quickly off again; so quick that you think it was only a mysterious blue wink.  Sometimes when children grow drowsy they blink blue winks, while others who are too proud to look with friendly eyes upon people blink in this cold bird manner.

The next is a three-part memoir that details Zitkala-Sa's childhood on the plains, her departure to Carlisle on the "iron horse" (the railroad, that is), her abortive attempt at teaching and her eventual return.  The cycle of leaving and return is literal and symbolic; the stories are structured to show the progression from enthusiasm about white civilization to disillusionment and psychological return, a process sometimes derisively called going "back to the blanket."  Zitkala-Sa presents boarding school as bewildering and humiliating for the young Native: her language is disallowed, though she knows no English; her symbolic hair is cut.  "During this time," she writes, "I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos."  And yet only partial return is possible, even Zitkala-Sa's mother, skeptical from the beginning of the motives and methods of white schooling, has moved from her wigwam to a log cabin by the time that Zitkala-Sa comes back home.  The memoir illustrates how Dubois' idea of double consciousness applies to the Native American as well as to black Americans, and how strange it is to feel alienated from your ancestral home.

The final piece that stood out to me is a story called "The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman."  It has something of the strange discursiveness of the Dakota myths; it doesn't quite fit traditional Western notions of story and conflict and climax.  Blue-Star Woman is a Sioux woman who has been unable to prove her membership in the Sioux tribe, and has been dispossessed from her share of tribal land.  Two schemers, both also Sioux, come to help her be added to the tribal rolls in exchange for half the land she receives.  But the tribe, who doesn't know Blue-Star Woman, feels once again dispossessed of their land.  The chief, High Flier, writes a letter, thinks better of it, burns it, and is arrested for arson--and while in prison has a dream in which an animated Statue of Liberty finally turns her lamp toward the tribal lands.  It's weird and complex: couldn't it suggest American power turning its vision toward the land it wants to take, rather than providing liberty to Native Americans (most of whom weren't even American citizens)?

The dream is emblematic of Zitkala-Sa's ambivalent attitude toward the U.S. government: even while her memoir rejects the assimilationist attitudes of the Indian schools, elsewhere in her polemical work she appeals to traditional American notions of greatness, even in ways which seem strangely nationalist to my ears.  One piece, appealing for citizenship, is called "Americanize the First American."  "It is a tragedy to the American Indian and the fair name of America," she writes, "that the good intentions of a benevolent Government are turned into channels of inefficiency and criminal neglect."  That seems like a wildly generous characterization of the government who killed Sitting Bull and perpetrated the massacre at Wounded Knee.  Is it a sign of a woman who knows her audience, or a sincere vestige of her assimilationist schooling?

Either way, while this incredibly dumb and infuriating news cycle played itself out, it felt necessary and gratifying to turn to a Native voice speaking for itself.  If Zitkala-Sa's polemical writings are spin, at least they're her spin and nobody else's.