by Zitkala-S̈a
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Layli Long Soldier
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Modern Library and the Torchbearer colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN 9781984854216
Ebook ISBN 9781984854421
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Cover design: Rachel Ake
Cover photograph: Gertrude Käsebier
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Impressions of an Indian Childhood
The School Days of an Indian Girl
An Indian Teacher Among Indians
The Great Spirit
The Soft-Hearted Sioux
The Trial Path
A Warrior’s Daughter
A Dream of Her Grandfather
The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman
America’s Indian Problem
Selected Poetry
A Ballad
Iris of Life
The Indian’s Awakening
The Red Man’s America
A Sioux Woman’s Love for Her Grandchild
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
LAYLI LONG SOLDIER
Entering Zitkála-Šá’s work is a piercing experience. She was born into, educated by, and lived through some of the most dramatic—one would say genocidal—changes for our people. At times while reading I have to swallow, stop, and close the book. I must let her work rest, let my body rest, and enter again slowly. As a Lakota and as a woman, I feel a personal connection and literary lineage to Zitkála-Šá. Likewise, we share tribal kinship through the Očeti Šakowin, so her writing often stirs in me an unexplainable vulnerability and empathy. Yet to the thoughtful reader of any heritage her work offers testament to the power of language, documentation, resistance, and maintaining a tenacious hold on cultural values.
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To feel deeply the import of Zitkála-Šá’s writing, one should engage in a spectral reading, a movement through and fluid flipping back and forth from her short stories and poems to her nonfiction. Doing this, we get a sense, a fragrance, of her spirit. By spirit is meant her intent. Her drive and motivations. In “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkála-Šá’s autobiographical account of her boarding school experience, she writes, “I ventured upon a college career against my mother’s will. I had written for her approval, but in her reply I found no encouragement….Her few words hinted that I had better give up my slow attempt to learn the white man’s ways, and be content to roam over the prairies and find my living upon wild roots. I silenced her by deliberate disobedience.” From this we can cross-thread a kind of discourse into “The Soft-Hearted Sioux.” As the protagonist, a young Sioux man converted to Christianity through mission school, sits at an open fire with his parents, his grandmother fills her stone pipe and asks, “My grandchild, when are you going to bring here a handsome young woman?” His response is that tense and familiar thread of silence: “I stared into the fire rather than meet her gaze….I said nothing in reply.” And to his father’s urging that he assume his role as a warrior, the soft-hearted Sioux admits, “Not a word had I to give in answer.” It’s here that we sense the primary and most ruinous conflict of Zitkála-Šá’s time: the unsettling inside the homes, families, and communities of Native people. The most gruesome conflict, make no mistake, was within the self, in the individual heart that was, at one time, culturally defined by connection to others. Native people of Zitkála-Šá’s era had to dig, search, and come to terms with what they were capable of, which was sometimes unspeakable. What would we say to one another, in our families—what words would ever surface from our throats—to explain the choices Zitkála-Šá’s generation had to make? We may wish to consider that in moments of rupture and devastation (e.g., earthquake, volcanic eruption, heartbreak, settler invasion) there are often no words, only the sudden and unimaginable upheaval. Then a violent tearing and breaking. Then silence. All is still. This silence hangs in the air, in the body, until the senses snap alive. And we find ourselves spinning around, frantically, to survey what remains. It’s an echo of what the soft-hearted Sioux cried: “The moon and stars began to move. Now the white prairie was sky, and the stars lay under my feet. Now again they were turning. At last the starry blue rose up into place. The noise in my ears was still. A great quiet filled the air. In my hand I found my long knife dripping with blood.”
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We ponder the essential grit and wound of Zitkála-Šá’s time to understand that her writing was never a fanciful, privileged exploration of an imagined Other. Rather, her work was a coal bed, searing with embers of experience, and has become documentation for future generations of the fires she walked through. In her own breaking—namely, her separation from Dakota homelife into boarding school—Zitkála-Šá explains that “the melancholy of those black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years that have since gone by.” We think about this wound not to permanently fix her work in grief, but to understand that it was essential to her writing, her activism, and her life’s purpose. She took up the physical pen and paper, the objects of the “white man’s ways,” and embraced the very education that came from those black days. Yet hers was not a naïve and grinning acceptance of these tools. In accounts of her childhood, we know that Zitkála-Šá displayed a prodigious sense of how and when to enact subversion and revenge. Tormented by Christian doctrine that seeped into dreams about the devil, for example, she took a pencil from her apron pocket one morning and pulled a copy of The Stories of the Bible down from a shelf. In her words, “I began by scratching out his wicked eyes. A few moments later…there was a ragged hole in the page where the picture of the devil had once been.” Here we see subversion. As in, who would find the ragged hole? Or when would this page be discovered? And who knows if the book, tucked into a shelf, would ever be opened to that page again anyway? But more important, she responded to the dream. She excised its power over her by taking action. Zitkála-Šá herself names this as revenge. While some may reject or shy away from notions of revenge, we must also remember that when enacted with a certain poetic sensibility and strength, revenge can be a teacher. For us, Zitkála-Šá has dug a hole into the page. She has scratched the eyes out of the devil. When we hold her page, thus, a light streams through.
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Let’s also consider the tone and language that Zitkála-Šá employed. In her approach there is, at times, a gentleness and a conscious, nonthreatening invitation to the non-Native reader that could alternately be interpreted as appeasing, submissive kowtowing, or, worse, a diminishment of the importance of her truth-telling. In “The Great Spirit,” for example, she muses about her walks in the green hills along the Missouri River, immersed in the natural beauty of Creation itself. She writes with wonder, gazing “with a child’s eager eye.” Here the perspective is deeply reflective, intimately told through the personal I. However, as she recounts a traditional Dakota story about Stone-Boy, she shifts into the explanatory mode, clearly narrating for non-Native readers. Her word choice could be viewed as teetering toward othering the Native perspective, in moments such as “Here the Stone-Boy, of whom the American aborigine
tells…” Or “…with the thread of this Indian legend of the rock, I fain would trace a subtle knowledge of the native folk…” And so on. In contemporary conversations, this approach may be viewed as unnecessary, or perhaps, in the most severe discussions, as a kind of pandering. As in, why explain? Why not just say the say?
Yet, given Zitkála-Šá’s background, I am prone to credit her with an exacting intelligence. I’m inclined to think that she knew precisely what she was doing and the effect of each word; that she wielded her tools purposefully; and that her driving intent was not to appease but, consistent with her larger body of work, to make a statement aimed directly at the forehead of colonialism.
Because in “The Great Spirit,” as much as in her other stories, Zitkála-Šá braids together a theology for the Dakota belief system, while also exposing the gaping split between Christian and Dakota spiritual philosophies. About “the wild prairie flowers” she writes, “Their quaint round faces of varied hue convince the heart which leaps with glad surprise that they, too, are living symbols of omnipotent thought.” Inspired by this, she concedes, “I feel in keen sympathy with my fellow-creatures, for I seem to see clearly again that all are akin.” Skillful with the narrative line, Zitkála-Šá unfolds for her readers the “omnipotent thought” that structures Dakota existence. Kinship and relationships are the life-pulse, and kinship extends beyond the “mosaic of human beings” to include all of creation equally. Yet she doesn’t allow us to rest there. This is also the stage upon which she directs a heated spotlight on a Native preacher’s attempts to bring her into the church through fear of “torturing flames” and the “after-doom of hell fire,” and a missionary paper in which a “ ‘Christian’ pugilist commented upon a recent article of mine,” she says, “grossly perverting the spirit of my pen.” So we must not miss the spirit of Zitkála-Šá’s pen: her nod to a non-Native audience is not meant to pander, but is a fierce speaking-to. The explanatory mode is arguably necessary, as it is the tool for dead-on clarity. She knew her audience and, thus, harnessed opportunity. She was intrepid and unfaltering in her hold on cultural values and Dakota worldview. For us, Zitkála-Šá has set an example. And for us, she carved out her rightful space to say, “I drink in the myriad star shapes wrought in luxuriant color upon the green. Beautiful is the spiritual essence they embody.”
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We must understand that for Zitkála-Šá, her spiritual truths and political truths inhabited the same spaces; they functioned synchronistically. Zitkála-Šá has mournfully written, “For the white man’s papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks. On account of my mother’s simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also.” Yet we must also know by now that this is not purely confessional, solely for personal mourning. We know that Zitkála-Šá used the material of her own life to speak to the greater collective losses and strengths of her people. Even in her astonishingly personal admissions, she would bravely pivot to statements like “Few there are who have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization.” In the aftermath of the devastation, rupture, silence, and spinning of her generation, we can see this. Yes, because of Zitkála-Šá, thankfully we do.
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LAYLI LONG SOLDIER holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The New York Times, American Poets, The American Reader, KROnline, BOMB, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. Most recently, she received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017). She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
IMPRESSIONS OF AN INDIAN CHILDHOOD
I
MY MOTHER
A wigwam of weather-stained canvas stood at the base of some irregularly ascending hills. A footpath wound its way gently down the sloping land till it reached the broad river bottom; creeping through the long swamp grasses that bent over it on either side, it came out on the edge of the Missouri.
Here, morning, noon, and evening, my mother came to draw water from the muddy stream for our household use. Always, when my mother started for the river, I stopped my play to run along with her. She was only of medium height. Often she was sad and silent, at which times her full arched lips were compressed into hard and bitter lines, and shadows fell under her black eyes. Then I clung to her hand and begged to know what made the tears fall.
“Hush; my little daughter must never talk about my tears”; and smiling through them, she patted my head and said, “Now let me see how fast you can run today.” Whereupon I tore away at my highest possible speed, with my long black hair blowing in the breeze.
I was a wild little girl of seven. Loosely clad in a slip of brown buckskin, and light-footed with a pair of soft moccasins on my feet, I was as free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer. These were my mother’s pride,—my wild freedom and overflowing spirits. She taught me no fear save that of intruding myself upon others.
Having gone many paces ahead I stopped, panting for breath, and laughing with glee as my mother watched my every movement. I was not wholly conscious of myself, but was more keenly alive to the fire within. It was as if I were the activity, and my hands and feet were only experiments for my spirit to work upon.
Returning from the river, I tugged beside my mother, with my hand upon the bucket I believed I was carrying. One time, on such a return, I remember a bit of conversation we had. My grown-up cousin, Warca-Ziwin (Sunflower), who was then seventeen, always went to the river alone for water for her mother. Their wigwam was not far from ours; and I saw her daily going to and from the river. I admired my cousin greatly. So I said: “Mother, when I am tall as my cousin Warca-Ziwin, you shall not have to come for water. I will do it for you.”
With a strange tremor in her voice which I could not understand, she answered, “If the paleface does not take away from us the river we drink.”
“Mother, who is this bad paleface?” I asked.
“My little daughter, he is a sham,—a sickly sham! The bronzed Dakota is the only real man.”
I looked up into my mother’s face while she spoke; and seeing her bite her lips, I knew she was unhappy. This aroused revenge in my small soul. Stamping my foot on the earth, I cried aloud, “I hate the paleface that makes my mother cry!”
Setting the pail of water on the ground, my mother stooped, and stretching her left hand out on the level with my eyes, she placed her other arm about me; she pointed to the hill where my uncle and my only sister lay buried.
“There is what the paleface has done! Since then your father too has been buried in a hill nearer the rising sun. We were once very happy. But the paleface has stolen our lands and driven us hither. Having defrauded us of our land, the paleface forced us away.
“Well, it happened on the day we moved camp that your sister and uncle were both very sick. Many others were ailing, but there seemed to be no help. We traveled many days and nights; not in the grand, happy way that we moved camp when I was a little girl, but we were driven, my child, driven like a herd of buffalo. With every step, your sister, who was not as large as you are now, shrieked with the painful jar until she was hoarse with crying. She grew more and more feverish. Her little hands and cheeks were burning hot. Her little lips were parched and dry, but she would not drink the water I gave her. Then I discovered that her throat was swollen and red. My poor child, how I cried with her because the Great Spirit had forgotten us!
“At last, when we reached this western country, on the first weary night your si
ster died. And soon your uncle died also, leaving a widow and an orphan daughter, your cousin Warca-Ziwin. Both your sister and uncle might have been happy with us today, had it not been for the heartless paleface.”
My mother was silent the rest of the way to our wigwam. Though I saw no tears in her eyes, I knew that was because I was with her. She seldom wept before me.
II
THE LEGENDS
During the summer days my mother built her fire in the shadow of our wigwam.
In the early morning our simple breakfast was spread upon the grass west of our tepee. At the farthest point of the shade my mother sat beside her fire, toasting a savory piece of dried meat. Near her, I sat upon my feet, eating my dried meat with unleavened bread, and drinking strong black coffee.
The morning meal was our quiet hour, when we two were entirely alone. At noon, several who chanced to be passing by stopped to rest, and to share our luncheon with us, for they were sure of our hospitality.
My uncle, whose death my mother ever lamented, was one of our nation’s bravest warriors. His name was on the lips of old men when talking of the proud feats of valor; and it was mentioned by younger men, too, in connection with deeds of gallantry. Old women praised him for his kindness toward them; young women held him up as an ideal to their sweet-hearts. Every one loved him, and my mother worshiped his memory. Thus it happened that even strangers were sure of welcome in our lodge, if they but asked a favor in my uncle’s name.