by Zitkala-S̈a
Zitkala-Ša attended White’s Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker boarding school for Indians in Wabash, Indiana, until 1887 when she returned to the reservation and lived with her mother for a difficult year and a half. For the first time she felt alienated from life at the reservation and especially from her own mother, who had been against her traveling east for school in the first place. For a brief period in 1889-90 Zitkala-Ša attended the Santee Technical School, which was nearby in Nebraska. Soon after that she went back to White’s Manual, staying until 1895, when she enrolled at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. There she frequently published poems and articles in the school paper, The Earlhamite, and the next year went to the Indiana State Oratorical Contest as Earlham’s representative to compete in a public debate. The audience was mostly white, and when it was her turn to speak, a few of them held up a “a large white flag, with a drawing of a most forlorn Indian girl on it,” with the word “squaw” written underneath. In “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkala-Ša describes this behavior as “worse than barbarian rudeness.” Shaken but determined, she persevered and took second place in the contest. Though gratified to see the flag fall from sight, and “the hands which hurled it hung limp in defeat,” she realized later in the night: “The little taste of victory did not satisfy a hunger in my heart.” The experience was to be a formative one for Zitkala-Ša and echoed that of some of her contemporaries who also were grappling with what it meant to excel in a largely white institution of higher education. In the opening paragraphs of The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois recalls, “That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads.”
Leaving Earlham due to poor health in 1897, Zitkala-Ša went to teach at the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Carlisle, under the leadership of retired army general Richard Henry Pratt, was a Pennsylvania boarding school founded with the express purpose of separating Indians from their reservation and tribal contexts in order to assimilate them into white society. Famously, Pratt’s slogan while running the Carlisle school was “Kill the Indian and save the man!” The methods employed by Pratt and his contemporaries ranged from forced and prolonged separation from family, beatings, and food deprivation to less overtly violent tactics, including a forced work system which farmed out students to area families to be immersed in everyday white culture and “labor.” To qualify for federal funding, boarding schools were required to practice a strict English-only policy. Pratt wrote in the January-March 1915 issue of the Quarterly Journal of the American Indians of his educational policy: “Do not feed America to the Indian, which is tribalizing and not an Americanizing process, but feed the Indian to America, and America will do the assimilating and annihilate the problem.”
During her first year as a teacher at Carlisle, Zitkala-Ša was sent west by Pratt to attract new Indian students—bringing upon others the same disruptive separation she herself had experienced thirteen years earlier. This paradox did not go unnoticed by Zitkala-Ša who, after teaching at Carlisle for two years, wrote: “In the process of my education I had lost all consciousness of the nature world about me. Thus, when a hidden rage took me to the small white-walled prison which I then called my room, I unknowingly turned away from my one salvation.” In 1899, Zitkala-Ša left behind the restrictive white walls of the boarding school. She resigned from her teaching post in order to study music and violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Playing and studying music, writing an opera libretto and score, as well as working with various other performing musicians, would be a lifelong preoccupation and avocation.
1900-1902 : “LITTLE LITERARY SKY ROCKET”
While Zitkala-Ša was enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music she experienced a flurry of literary publicity and recognition. Between 1900 and 1902, her writings appeared in the most prestigious publications, such as Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly. Her fiction and autobiographical stories ran alongside the work of such notable writers as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Edith Wharton, W.E.B. DuBois, and Kate Chopin. Her stories were illustrated by Frederick Remington, one of the most renowned illustrators of his day, famous for his depictions of stereotypically lean and muscular Indian warriors. At the same time, her 1901 book, Old Indian Legends, was illustrated by Angel De Cora, a well-known Winnebago artist who also taught at the Carlisle School and who sketched scenes of Indian families in everyday life.
Zitkala-Ša’s series of three autobiographical short stories (moving from childhood to student to teacher) appeared in the Atlantic Monthly over a course of three months in 1900. In 1901 Harper’s Monthly Magazine ran “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” and “The Trial Path,” and her collection of retold Sioux tales, Old Indian Legends, was published by Ginn & Co., a literary and textbook publisher. In 1902 “A Warrior’s Daughter” appeared in Everybody’s Magazine, “Why I Am a Pagan” in Atlantic Monthly, and “Iya, the Camp-Eater” in Twin Territories. In 1904 she published the story “Shooting of the Red Eagle” in Indian Leader. During this period she also published essays arguing for the importance of Indian dance in Carlisle’s Red Man and the Helper and the Santee School’s paper, the Word Carrier.
Not only was Zitkala-Ša’s fiction fueled by her desire to depict and document American Indian culture and its mytholo gies, but it also displayed a political savvy that was as serious as it was playful. Writing in 1901 to her then-fiancé, Carlos Montezuma, an Apache doctor and renowned radical activist against the reservation system and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (who would ultimately align himself with Pratt-style rapid assimilation), Zitkala-Ša says in her typical wry fashion: “By the way, the Atlantic Monthly has just accepted a little scribble of mine—‘Why I Am a Pagan.’ I imagine Carlisle will rear up on its haunches at sight of the little sky rocket! ha ha!” She predicted correctly. The conservative General Pratt wrote in Red Man and Helper that the story was “trash” and its author “worse than a pagan.”
It was one of the ironies of her career that Zitkala-Ša was vilified by the Indian school where she taught at the same time she was being lionized by high literary society. In another letter to Montezuma, in March of 1901, she writes:
In contrast with Carlisle’s opinion of my work—Boston pats me with no little pride. The “Atlantic Monthly” wrote me a note in praise of the story. An intelligent literary critic says my writing has a distinguished air about it—. Others say I am concerning myself with glory! Ah—but so many words! What do I care—I knew that all the world could not take a liberal view of my work—But in spite of other varied opinions I am bound to live my own life.
Here again we see the way she performed different cultural roles and won friends or enemies depending upon how closely she did or did not ascribe to certain ideologies about what might or might not be “good for the Indians.”
1902-1919 : DANCING, PEYOTE WARS, AND THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN INDIANS
In August 1902, after juggling at least a couple of tragic and tempestuous relationships (one boyfriend died, her engagement to Carlos Montezuma exploded in a bitter lovers’ quarrel), Zitkala-Ša married Raymond T. Bonnin, a childhood friend from the Yankton Reservation. Raymond Bonnin was anything but a fiery radical. Rather than protest the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he obtained a post in Utah working among the Ute Indians. In 1902, Zitkala-Ša moved to Utah with her husband, and shortly after reaching there she gave birth to her only son, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin.
Some scholars mark this move as the putative end of Zitkala Ša’s literary career. She never again published in Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s. However, she continued to write and publish a wide variety of works—fiction and legends, poetry, political essays, sketches, an opera, and numerous letters—until the end of her life. In Utah, Zitkala-Ša taught school and developed a community center, significantly shifting the style of her teaching from General Pratt’s coercive assimilation to a grass-roots, communitarian practice. She started a sewin
g club, began a hot lunch program, and opened a free arts and crafts space for children. At the same time, she collaborated on The Sun Dance, an opera that melded Native American ritual with the standard European operatic tradition.
During most of Zitkala-Ša’s life the federal government had tried repeatedly to quash the Sun Dance ritual. Missionaries and government officials opposed the ceremony, claiming it was “barbaric, wild and heathenish” and “torturous.” As the ceremonies would attract as many as nine to fifteen thousand people, it was also, and perhaps primarily, seen as too great a threat to “allow” so many Indians to congregate in one place. In 1881, the Sioux Sun Dance was banned by authorities on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The commissioner of Indian affairs declared the ritual illegal in 1883. In 1884 a federal regulation made the practice of any Native American Indian religion illegal and the Department of Interior again banned the Sun Dance in 1904. The dance continued to be practiced covertly until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which, in addition to providing for self-government of the reservations by the Indian residents, allowed the open practice of dance.
Despite the repeated attempts to eradicate the practice, in Zitkala-Ša’s experience the Sun Dance was alive and flourishing among Plains tribes, from Utah to the Dakotas. The Sun Dance was a celebration that lasted as long as a week and was, in at least some of its forms, a highly organized and ritualized set of practices involving dancers and supporters gathered around a circular space, in the center of which stood a pole made of a sacred tree. Stages of the celebration included, but were not limited to, a capture, torture, and escape sequence that attracted the most attention from missionary and Christian groups who ultimately rallied for the ban. Zitkala-Ša became an advocate for the ritual and through the opera, which she wrote with William Hanson, translated its power for predominantly white audiences.
Hanson was a white Mormon music teacher living in Vernal, Utah, whom she met while working among the Utes. The two shared an interest in literature and music, and Hanson’s own body of work reflects a pointed interest in Native customs and culture. Over the course of a couple of years, Zitkala-Ša and William Hanson composed a libretto that centered on the entanglements of a love triangle played out during the week-long Sun Dance ritual. They spent much time on the musical score, which incorporated oral musical Indian traditions into a highly organized and acculturated Western musical form.
The story of The Sun Dance could easily have come from the pages of Old Indian Legends. A Shoshone brave named Sweet Singer gets into some trouble with his home tribe: he foolishly has taken the medicine man’s “love-leaves,” causing a “Shoshone virgin whom he does not love” to fall in love with him. To extricate himself he follows an invitation from the chief of the Dakota Sioux to officiate as leader of their Sun Dance singers. As it happens, he also has a crush on the chieftain’s daughter, Winona. A more upright young brave named Ohiya (the name also of Zitkala-Ša’s son) has already pledged his love to Winona and must now prove himself in the annual Sun Dance ceremony—where the tricky Sweet Singer is master of ceremonies.
The Sun Dance was performed around Utah in 1913 and 1914 to enthusiastic response and rave reviews. One reviewer noted in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News in March 1913: “There was more color and variety of movement, more vivid stage effects” than he had witnessed in an opera before, and it paid homage to “the inner spiritual life of this much wronged and misunderstood people.” A critic writing in Musical American on April 26, 1913, admitted to “skepticism as to the success of this attempt to weld the various customs of Indian life into an opera, but the enthusiasm became so general that the following evenings the audience was augmented by persons from various reservation towns, some of whom had to travel over 40 miles.” It was about twenty years before The Sun Dance was revived, brought to Broadway as the New York Light Opera Guild’s “Opera of the Year” in 1938. This time, Hanson’s name appeared by itself on most publicity and programs, while Zitkala Ša was listed as a “collaborator,” if at all, and the production’s sensational exoticism was emphasized: one handbill promised a “tuneful and scintillating light opera” that depicted “the love-life, tenderness and nobility of a once savage tribe.”
On the heels of this opera celebrating an embattled religion, Zitkala-Ša embarked on a campaign that may seem to some contemporary eyes as her most fraught, complicated, and at times reactionary. While working at the community center among the Utes, Zitkala-Ša started to see an increase of ceremonial peyote use and she denounced it. For Zitkala-Ša, there was a world of difference between peyote rituals and other Native spiritual practices. She saw the peyote use as nothing more than “debilitating and degenerating” drug use. Like the many nineteenth-century feminists who became strong temperance activists in response to what they perceived as a danger to both social and family welfare, Zitkala-Ša became an outspoken critic of peyote, especially as used by men. In some of her letters, she expresses her concern for public safety, particularly of women and children, but also for the moral and spiritual state of Native Americans. Yet her concerns put her in an uncomfortable alliance with some reactionary whites with whom she disagreed passionately about other Native American issues, including the Sun Dance ritual. Most notably, her anti-peyote stand in the years 1913-1918 drew both the admiration of her old Carlisle School critic, General Pratt, and the ire of a white, politically liberal ethnologist, James Mooney, who was employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology and had spent his career in the field, studying first the Ghost Dance religion and then religious practices involving peyote.
In one of the most oddly symbolic and confused moments in white-Indian relations of the time, Mooney stood before Congress and denounced Zitkala-Ša as a fraud, disparaging her as someone who “claims to be a Sioux woman.” In his testimony before the Senate subcommittee on peyote, Mooney not only disagreed with Zitkala-Ša’s stance on peyote use, but at length derided the Indian dress Zitkala-Ša wore for a photograph that ran in the February 17, 1918, issue of the Washington Times: “She wore a fringed dress whose style identified its provenance as a southern Plains tribe; her belt was that of a Navajo man; and the fan she carried was, itself, a type used by men in the peyote ceremony.” In an attempt to discredit her politics about peyote regulation, he employed an old trick typically used against women: he overemphasized her physical appearance and thus drew attention away from the seriousness of her interest in the political issues at hand. In doing so, he also discredited her racial authenticity, insinuating her lack of knowledge of Indian culture and her haphazard affiliation with different tribes.
Like a number of more recent critics, Mooney fell into the logic of “racial purity” in judging Zitkala-Ša. All evidence suggests, however, that she was well aware that her “Indian costume” (as she called it) was a tribal mélange but wore it nonetheless because she felt it would help further the cause of Indian rights. While raising support for her anti-peyote movement, Zitkala-Ša turned to the Women’s Temperance Society, and in a letter written to Arthur Parker, then president of the Society of American Indians, on March 2, 1917, Zitkala-Ša mentions she had been asked to give a piano solo “all in Indian dress.” She explained, “I have agreed, for in this case the use of Indian dress for a drawing card is for a good cause. No doubt, there may be some, who may not wholly approve of the Indian dress. I hope it does not displease you. Even a clown has to dress differently from his usual citizen’s suit. In News papers, italics are resorted to, with good effect.” Whether or not, from a contemporary viewpoint, we agree with Zitkala-Ša’s choice, what is clear is that she made it with political consciousness, understanding her identity as both deeply cultural and performative.
Like many other public intellectuals, Zitkala-Ša has been accused of “selling out” largely because of the difficult balancing act she attempted as a mediator between tribal, bureaucratic, and activist contexts. To speak her mind and her principles meant occasionally sharing beliefs with those whose other ide
as she found repugnant. It also required alliances that were imperfect and unstable. Not only does politics make for the proverbial strange bedfellows, but different people, with different political affiliations, can oppose the same practice for very different reasons. In the slapdash world of actual political legislation, this can result in one being branded reactionary or radical when one is trying to voice a highly individualized (and thoughtful) opposition to a practice. Zitkala-Ša, with her characteristic wry humor, sums up her ambiguous and often uncomfortable status in another letter written to Arthur Parker after he expressed sympathy at the “horror” of continuing to live and work on a reservation:
Every Indian who has attempted to do real uplift work for the tribes gets stung. No wonder that he quits trying, goes back to the blanket, and sits in the teepee like a boiled owl. I have not sense enough to stop. Wouldn’t know until I was killed; and the chances are I wouldn’t know then, being dead.
She understood the criticism and scrutiny that more often than not accompanied political work, but she did not let that modify her beliefs. Among Zitkala-Ša’s papers, housed at Brigham Young University, is a scrap of paper on which she repeatedly scrawled the following quote by Abraham Lincoln: “I must stand with anybody that stands right; stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.”