American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism

3. Ambiguity and Affiliation: The Stories and Essays of Zitkala-Ša

Ambiguity and Affiliation: The Stories and Essays of Zitkala-Ša In the writings of Zitkala-Ša, a rejection of American identity coexists with a sense that a traditional tribal identity is no longer viable once the process of assimilation begins. What emerges is a profound ambivalence: the record of an individual who does not want to become an American but feels that she can no longer claim her ethnic identity once she is separated from her tribe. This is different from the modern concept of a hybrid individual, described by Gloria Anzaldúa as “la consciencia de la mestiza,” which signifies a conscious acceptance and integration of all one’s cultures.1 The protagonists of Zitkala-Ša’s narratives do not embrace the borders; instead, they are portrayed as alienated from both their native communities and the nation in which they live. The stories and essays of Zitkala-Ša suggest that the quality of life is diminished for American Indians who enter into the Americanizing system, both in terms of their spiritual lives and their sense of themselves. Most of her texts employ a sharp realism in order to cut through mainstream romantic notions of American Indian life and to reveal the real toll of government policies and public attitudes. Overall, her works stand as a critique not only of the failures of the assimilating process, but also of the long history of tension between Native Americans and the imperial culture that surrounds them. Zitkala-Ša was born on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota. Though her band never directly engaged in warfare against the U.S. chapter three 55 56 American Narratives government, other Sioux were participants in the last, and one of the bitterest, Indian wars in American history.2 The Great Plains was one of the final areas in the continental United States to be settled by white Americans, and for this reason the conflict that began in 862 and continued for nearly thirty years is still deeply rooted in American cultural memory. The attacks and counterattacks between American Indians and whites on the Plains came to a head with the battle of the Little Bighorn in 876, the year that Zitkala-Ša was born. In this encounter a force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, killed General George Armstrong Custer and over two hundred of his men. The end of open warfare between the United States and Native Americans was the massacre at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in 890. On that day, government troops, sent out to stifle the religious practice of the Ghost Dance among Plains Indians, murdered about three hundred unarmed men, women, and children.3 Perhaps even more demoralizing in the long run than the bloody conflicts on the Plains were the social and psychological changes that were affecting American Indians all over the country. By the late nineteenth century, the American public had certain ideas about what Native Americans were and what their fate should be. The U.S. government , ethnologists, and writers of popular literature all vigorously propagated the idea that American Indians were an anachronistic and dying race, and a majority of Americans embraced this conceit. It was increasingly obvious to many—in particular to Native Americans themselves —that predictions of their ultimate doom were premature at best; nonetheless, it was true that a long history of battling Europeans and the diseases they brought, the loss of traditional means of sustenance due to diminishing resources, and forced removals to inhospitable lands had devastated the American Indian population in the United States. The same events and policies had also served to weaken tribal cultures. By the second half of the nineteenth century, most Native Americans lived on reservations far from the centers of mainstream America. In the early 880s social reformers and government officials began to construct a policy that would profoundly shape the future of Native American peoples. Claiming that reservations and tribal systems led to savagery and dependence, self-proclaimed friends of the Indian developed a comprehensive program that was intended to break up reservations, dissolve tribal loyalties, and indoctrinate American Indians into the American way of life. The General Allotment Act of 887—also called the Dawes Severalty Act after its designer, Senator Henry Dawes—was the federal legislation around which this movement coalesced. The U.S. government reasoned...