Zitkala-Sa and the Problem of Regionalism: Nations, Narratives, and Critical Traditions

Although Yankton Sioux writer Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin, 1876–1938) was, as P. Jane Hafen notes, "virtually unknown for many decades" (Dreams 165), much critical work has appeared since Dexter Fisher's 1979 article, "Zitkala-Ša: Evolution of a Writer." Some critics desiring to bring Zitkala-Ša into the conversation about turn-of-the-century American women writers have done so recently under the auspices of literary regionalism. Martha Cutter has demonstrated Zitkala-Ša's problematic relationship to autobiographical conventions, concluding that Zitkala-Ša's life-writing "violates" traditional patterns of autobiography because "it does not put forth a model of triumph and integration, nor does it emphasize the importance of language in the overall process of self-authentication" (31). If, as Cutter argues, we cannot, in the context of autobiography criticism, "expect her writing to legitimate the very institutions (the English language, writing, culture, and 'civilization') which have suppressed her" (31), then how can we expect her texts to conform to traditional expectations for regionalist texts?

Critics approaching Zitkala-Ša as a regionalist fall into two camps: those reading her work within a regionalist framework and those reading her work in terms of how it expands our conception of regionalism and the regionalist canon. Including Indigenous texts in the canon is crucial, but without a change in critical paradigms, such an effort ignores the dissonance between Indigenous texts and traditional critical categories and, ultimately, fails to transform the study of American literature. In her analysis of American realism and canon change, Elizabeth Ammons argues that critical terminology must transform to reflect the pluralism of American literature and argues against relying on "preconceived inherited theories about American literature" (103) in criticism. While critical work on regionalism has moved toward a discussion of cultural difference (for example, recent articles by Sandra Zagarell and Cynthia Davis on otherness in Jewett or Stephanie Foote's Regional Fictions), white writers and texts often remain at the center of such analyses. Even when writers from outside the dominant culture are included in the regionalist canon, this inclusion is often accomplished through the "inherited theories" Ammons mentions, rather than with critical approaches appropriate to Indigenous literatures.¹

Various critics have responded to the need for appropriate critical approaches to Indigenous literatures.² In The Voice in the Margins, Arnold Krupat observes, similar to Ammons, that critical poetics must be reformulated to account for American Indian literature and that "[t]o urge the inclusion of Indian literature in the canon of American literature . . . is not only to propose an addition but a reevaluation of what 'Ameri-can literature' means" (98). Unfortunately, as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn observes, characterizing Indigenous texts as the voice "at the margin" or at the "center of the margin," as John Beverley does in his essay, "The Margin at the Center," further negates "what it is that natives have had to say" (Cook-Lynn, "How Scholarship Defames the Native Voice" 81). Cook-Lynn further concludes that

[c]ontemporary American Indian Fiction is sustained as such by non-Indian publishers and editors, critics and scholars for Euro-Anglo canonical reasons (some might even suggest imperialistic reasons) rather than for either the continuation of indigenous literary traditions and development of nationalistic critical apparatuses or for the sake of simple intellectual curiosity.

("The American Indian Fiction Writer" 35)

To counter such imperialistic literary practices, Paula Gunn Allen envisions a "critical system that is founded . . . on actual human society and relationships rather than on textual relations alone" (309), suggesting that critics cannot simply look for overlaps between canonical texts and the themes and concerns of Indigenous texts. Craig Womack, who views the Native and American literary canons as separate (7), further resists such an overlap and argues that Indigenous peoples should have an "increasingly important role in evaluating tribal literatures" (1), emphasizing, as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues, that "the right to speak for oneself [End Page...