“I am going to turn you loose to pasture!” Pratt was sending Zitkala-Ša west, home to Yankton, to recruit students for Carlisle.48
She went, eager for a reprieve from her labors at the school and for the opportunity to see her mother. Zitkala-Ša, as Fletcher had been, was now a paid recruiter for Carlisle. When she arrived back at the Yankton Reservation, conditions made her ill at heart. Her brother Dawée, once a government clerk earning good wages, had been replaced by a white man. His education had proven useless, and the family couldn’t afford to purchase food.
While Fletcher’s recruiting trips to the Omaha and Sioux had bolstered her commitment to child removal, Zitkala-Ša returned to Carlisle with a new cynicism. She began to see once more that the Indian education/war machine was the scene of cruelty. A colleague of hers abused a student by telling him he was nothing but “a government pauper,” which appalled her. Meanwhile, Carlisle continued to receive streams of white visitors eager to see the effects of their benevolence, though the trips were no longer organized by Fletcher herself. The publicity visits further aroused Zitkala-Ša’s skepticism: she saw self-satisfied tourists looking to “boast of their charity to the North American Indian. But few,” she cautioned, “have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization.”49
Zitkala-Ša, photographed by Gertrude Käsebeir. (Courtesy of Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution)
Alone in her “white-walled prison” of a room, a new idea came to her. She left Carlisle for Boston in 1899, where she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music to study violin. A year later, she performed a solo at the White House for President William McKinley, and soon leading East Coast photographers sought to take her portrait.50
While in Boston, Zitkala-Ša published semiautobiographical essays about her childhood and teaching years in the Atlantic Monthly, which I have quoted from liberally. The finely tuned pieces made her a literary darling and earned her praise from the likes of Harper’s Bazaar; two decades later, they were anthologized in schoolbooks across the East. Anxious to broadcast a former teacher’s grand success, Carlisle’s newspaper, Red Man and the Helper, reprinted the essays, qualified by a lengthy editorial note. “We regret that she did not once call to mind the happier side of those long school days, or even hint at the friends who did so much to… lead her from poverty and insignificance into the comparatively full and rich existence that she enjoys today,” the editor’s preface announced. Her literary success, the editor claimed, was due to the benevolence of boarding school teachers, while her “underlying bitterness” was a personal failing. Pratt vowed to stay publicly silent on the matter, choosing to vent his anger in a private letter. “But for those she has maligned,” he seethed, “she would be a poor squaw in an Indian camp, probably married to some no-account Indian.”51
Zitkala-Ša had worked for Pratt for two years, but she would have the final say about the boarding school. Writing in response to the Red Man’s editor, Zitkala-Ša clarified: “I give outright the varying moods of my own evolution” to stir political debate about boarding school education. “No one can dispute my own impressions and bitterness!”52
Zitkala-Ša’s efforts to own her experience, in the midst of assimilation machines and well-intentioned white feminists who insisted that Natives were too immature to make their own decisions, can be seen as intersectional feminist acts. For her, agency was not primarily about her status as a woman, nor was gender her singular form of her political work: but her right to testify to her own experience as an Indigenous woman was central to her political struggle. She was the very first Native American woman to tell her story in print in her own voice, free of translation, editing, or other forms of mediation that framed other Indigenous narratives, such as those given by Sarah Winnemucca, Geronimo, and Red Cloud. As she told Carlisle’s readers, she was in charge of her own story and her own feelings—she was not raw material to be transformed by others. In a boarding school system dedicated to ingraining new sensory impressions and habits into the bodies of students, Zitkala-Ša’s resistance was targeted and direct. Her “evolution” and her “impressions” were hers alone.53
Her essays are at once an artistic rendering of her feelings that helped her express and find an authentic self, as well as, in their loose fictionalization, a group autobiography that brought a generation’s worth of Indigenous children’s suffering into the white middle-class eye. Her stories develop a singular voice to bring collective life to the page, as if she were writing the experiences of tens of thousands of unnamed children into narrative existence, rather than conveying her own story alone. Motifs like alluring red apples that cast her out of Eden brought her individual experience into the realm of the mythic—tales that would speak of a community, not just an individual.
Zitkala-Ša continued to use her literary talents to bring a Sioux perspective into settler culture. She spent the summer of 1901 gathering stories from her own Yankton Dakota tribe, published as Old Indian Legends, and wrote several short stories and essays for New York publishers. These pieces reveal a political commitment that intertwined women’s rights with Indigenous self-determination and cultural renewal. In her stories, a warrior Native woman rescues her lover from otherwise certain death, untying him from captivity just prior to his execution by a neighboring tribe. A boarding school–educated son watches helplessly as his father dies of starvation, for he has promised to give up the hunt in favor of civilization. Pratt declared the latter story “trash” and denounced its author as “worse than a pagan.”54
Zitkala-Ša’s response? “Why I Am a Pagan,” published in The Atlantic, articulates a spirituality born of listening to the Great Spirit as he spoke through the “eloquence” of rivers, flowers, and clouds. For Zitkala-Ša, land is family, not property. Native religion enabled her “to recognize a kinship to any and all parts of this vast universe” and to know that “both great and small are so surely enfolded in His [the Great Spirit’s] magnitude that, without a miss, each has his allotted individual ground of opportunities.”55 Given her keen poetic eye, her language is surely deliberate. The Great Spirit, not reformers, allots opportunity, and he allots to all.
Even as she published in prestige venues, Zitkala-Ša situated her emerging voice within a tribal and pan-Indian network. Just before she began writing for national outlets, she had a disagreement with her half brother’s wife, who chastised her for deserting the family by pursuing an education. She chose to drop the name of Simmons in favor of the self-given name Zitkala-Ša. “You can guess how queer I felt—away from my own people—homeless—penniless—and even without a name! That I choose to make a name for myself and I guess I have made Zitkala-Ša known—for even Italy writes in her language!” she exulted to Montezuma during their courtship days. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan had decreed that all boarding school children be assigned the surnames of their fathers, according to settler patriarchal custom. But Zitkala-Ša, as usual, chose to go her own way, confident in her powers of creation. The name means “Red Bird” in Lakota—not in her native Nakota tongue.56 In her name and dress she drew on a mixture of Sioux and other Native languages and customs, an early effort to create a collective pan-Indian position that worked through coalition rather than identity. Collective political work uniting Indigenous people across the country, in fact, would become her central goal.
Alice Fletcher was learning that to the Indigenous, land was not property but was life itself, a manifestation of the Great Spirit with whom it was a blessing to be in coexistence. The Lakota, for example, in this period defined communal territory as “any place where they cultivated relations with plant and animal life,” explains Lower Brule Sioux scholar-activist Nick Estes, and that included great expanses of hunting grounds and arid soils unsuited for crop agriculture.57
Fletcher had some respect for the Native worldview that saw Nature as sacred and humans
as part of its rhythms, but she also found it immature. Natives’ relationship to land is “like the cry of a child rather than the articulate speech of a man,” she wrote in a scientific paper.58 To Fletcher and settler culture in general, a modern relationship to land looked like transformation: plowing the prairies, felling woodlands, damming rivers, and blowing holes right through the middle of mountains for railway tracks. Because Natives sought to live in amicable coexistence with the natural world, rather than to extract, exploit, and capitalize on its resources as individuals, Fletcher and other anthropologists believed that they would remain in barbarism, unable to advance materially, mentally, or emotionally. To evolve as a people, nature must be transformed into property.
The greatest political work of Fletcher’s life was to sever Natives from the lands with which they lived in reciprocal relation. To her, Native land was worse than unproductive: it was a curse and a waste and prevented assimilation. “The landed wealth of the Indian has been his bane,” Fletcher concluded.59 To relieve Indians of their vast lands, just as to remove children from their tribes, was for Fletcher an act of benevolence that would propel Natives into the forward movements of civilization and pacify the bloody relationship between Indians and settlers.
Fletcher, other reformers, and politicians seized upon a new strategy in the mid-1880s: privatizing the reservations. They sought to divide up existing lands into farming plots assigned to heads of individual families and then sell off the vast “surplus” lands to settlers.60 Land division, also called allotment, aimed to eliminate communally held lands, destroying the power of chiefs and Native ways of life. Privatization imposed a settler model of kinship based on the patriarchal couple, modes unrecognized by Native tribes that saw aunts and uncles, cousins, siblings of spouses, multiple lovers, and others as immediate family.61 Rupturing Indigenous gender roles and sexual customs became a prime lever for rupturing Indigenous ways of life.
In 1883, Alice Fletcher became a special agent of the Office of Indian Affairs to survey Native lands across the country and determine their suitability for division; she was also employed to divide the Omaha Reservation, with Francis La Flesche as her interpreter. Fletcher had a characteristically grandiose idea of her mission. She romanticized her return trip to the Omaha as an unprecedented barrier crossing that traversed time itself. “I go to the wild life, and unknown future, where the unknown past may find a voice,” she pronounced.62 The Omaha were to have a future, Fletcher decided, because she was to become their mouthpiece and their guardian.
The Omaha Severalty Act of 1882, which Fletcher had helped modify so that it ensured Omaha would have first dibs on some of their lands, divided up seventy-six thousand acres into 954 distinct parcels. The remaining fifty thousand acres were opened to purchase by white settlers. Some Omaha were eager to hold family-based titles to their land, thereby protecting it from squatting or other theft. But this group, which generally had a positive view of assimilation, comprised only one-quarter of the tribe. A full one-third of the tribe actively resisted allotment, insisting that land should remain legally held by the tribe as a whole, in keeping with their custom. Fletcher enlisted the help of the local police to round up rebellious Omaha and force them to privatize their land.63
Severing communally held land into private parcels assigned to male heads of family or to couples provided a perfect settler feminist opportunity. Fletcher would save the Omaha by imposing settler gender and sexual norms upon them. Omaha society was nonmonogamous; men were permitted to take more than one wife, though Fletcher and La Flesche noted that polygamy wasn’t a common practice.64 Two years prior, Sitting Bull had asked her, according to her own telling, to give Hunkpapa Lakota women a future. Now among the Omaha, she relished enforcing monogamous, patriarchal ways of life.
Allotment gutted collective tribal authority, reducing Native-held land to monogamous marriages and making women, for the first time, economically dependent upon their husbands. Fletcher knew that this would be a serious downgrade in status for many Native women. That same year, she acknowledged that a Native woman told her, “I’m glad I’m not a white woman!” when informed of married women’s lack of rights to own property or custody of their children in Anglo America.65 But Indigenous women’s rights were of secondary importance to settler feminism. Of primary importance was rescuing them from barbarism, a rescue that simultaneously bolstered white women’s authority. A decline in Native women’s rights and agency was merely the price of progress.
Fletcher’s work privatizing Omaha land became a rehearsal for extending the practice nationwide. Allotment became key to the US government’s new approach to the West: now that the military had defeated the tribes, assimilation, rather than conquest, became the goal. Fletcher’s expertise lent her a key voice in shaping this new agenda. Initially, reformers and legislators considered allotting land to tribes, not to individuals. But Fletcher rejected this plan. “Under no circumstances should land be patented to a tribe,” she informed the annual conference of white Indian reformers in 1884, held on a flowery estate at Lake Mohonk in upstate New York. “The principle is wrong.”66 She suspected that tribally held lands would enable communal forms of governance and kinship to continue. Fletcher’s civilizing agenda entailed full assimilation, and eventual citizenship, for Native Americans. That meant collective communities in ongoing relationships with the land must be divided into individual families holding private property.
In keeping with her settler feminist position, this rescue work was to be done for the Indians, not “side by side” with them, as Zitkala-Ša would endorse in her speech at the Indiana Opera House a decade later. Initial drafts of the allotment policy, named the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, as well as an amendment passed by the House of Representatives, gave tribes consent over privatization: two-thirds of a tribe must endorse allotment, or it would not take place. Fletcher pushed back here, too. “The work must be done for them whether they approve or not,” she insisted. “We have inherited the guardianship of the Indians[,] we must therefore act for the benefit of our wards.” But some of her white allies felt that she went too far in imagining her maternal authority over Natives. “She has fallen into a wretched sentimental way of calling the Omahas her children—her babies,” a fellow reformer complained.67
White women did not yet have electoral power, but women like Fletcher were beginning to wield significant political influence.68 In the summer of 1885, Fletcher diligently researched what would become a 693-page report on the history and progress of “Indian education and civilization,” which included updates on treaty obligations that remained unfulfilled by the US government. This research positioned her as an unparalleled authority, and she leveraged her power to convince Senator Dawes to rewrite his act so that allotments would be granted to individual heads of families and not patented to tribes at large. Later that fall, Fletcher lobbied Congress directly in support of her vision.
The Dawes Act was the first major Indian policy in a century, and no single individual had more effect on its final shape, Fletcher’s biographer Joan Mark argues, than Alice Fletcher. Fletcher’s agenda won out: no tribal consent, and land was divided up among individual families and assigned to heads of households rather than allotted to communities or even couples. A pathway to eventual citizenship—a key marker of civilized status—was the reward for privatizing land. All land in excess of the 160-acre family parcels, 80 acres assigned to single people over eighteen, and, in some tribes, 40 acres to children, was opened for sale. This sometimes meant breaking treaties, such as with the Sioux, for communal lands, an agenda Fletcher and other Lake Mohonk reformers eagerly embraced. Fifty percent of the Great Sioux Reservation was sold to white settlers within just twenty years.69
Fletcher carried out a significant portion of land allotments herself. In her ten years of work as special agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she allotted land to 1.5 percent of the national Indigenous population—about forty-four hundred people. Typically, Fletch
er surveyed the lands and chose the plots to be assigned, though she was a newcomer to the territory. Yet she did her work carefully, all too aware that much reservation land was arid and not suitable for dwelling or farming. Some of her most extensive work was among the Nez Perce in northern Idaho, a tribe largely resistant to privatizing land. For several springs beginning in 1889, Fletcher traveled to Idaho with her new domestic partner, the photographer E. Jane Gay. Gay took photographs, wrote, and kept house while Fletcher surveyed and privatized the land to male heads of households, against the majority of the tribe’s wishes. All remaining lands were sold off to white settlers. As a result of Fletcher’s allotment work, the Nez Perce lost 75 percent of their lands, a full half-million acres.70
It was the beginning of a long, most likely romantic, partnership between Fletcher and Gay. It may be tempting to call Fletcher’s situation in Idaho ironic: here she was, imposing compulsory heterosexuality upon a tribe who maintained radically different romantic and kinship relations, all while freeing herself from those very same norms personally and professionally. Yet her situation wasn’t ironic, for it wasn’t the result of unintended consequence: it was by design. To Fletcher and other white feminists, white women were civilized, without question, and same-sex attachments among each other didn’t jeopardize this status. Their moral authority was the backbone of moral progress, whether they lived with husbands or in the so-called “Boston marriages” that united upper-class white women in enduring companionship. Feminist scholar Jasbir K. Puar has named this problematic phenomenon “homonationalism”: the fantasy that white gay life is inherently civilized and good for the nation, whereas Black, brown, and Asian nonheterosexual life is primitive, backward, and a threat to progress.71 Puar was writing about the twenty-first century, but the dynamic reaches back to the late nineteenth and the women like Fletcher and Gay who used their location in the “frontier” to liberate themselves from patriarchal sexual norms while simultaneously imposing them upon others.
The Trouble with White Women Page 13