Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings

10. Mother Times Two: A Double Take n a Gynocentric Justice Song

10 Mother Times Two A Double Take n a Gynocentric Justice Song MARGOT R. REYNOLDS “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—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!” —Zitkala-Sa, “Impressions from an Indian Childhood” Between 1900 and 1902 Yankton Sioux writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, aka Zitkala-Sa, published a series of autobiographical essays in Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly: “Impressions from an Indian Childhood ” (1900a), “School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900c), “An Indian Teacher among Indians” (1900b), and “Why I Am A Pagan” (1902). The essays address her personal experiences with assimilation, especially the loss of traditional ways of living and the forced removal of Native American children from their homes for education and westernization . Throughout her work, and especially in “Impressions from an Indian Childhood,” Zitkala-Sa focuses on the figure of her mother and on woman-centered Sioux traditions. Criticism on these productions address the function of the mother figure from a biographical perspective , and consider only how Zitkala-Sa’s relationship with her mother shaped her acculturation process. Few scholars have considered ZitkalaSa ’s work from a Native American and feminist perspective. I want to 171 o suggest that the mother figure and women-centered focus of her work is what Native American and feminist critic Paula Gunn Allen describes generally as gynocentrism: women’s traditional primacy in Native American tribes and women’s literature (1992). Extending Allen’s observation , I will show that Zitkala-Sa, particularly her “Impressions” essay (1900a), uses a gynocentric framework through which to interrogate and expose the imperialist social practices and policies of the U.S. government . Her attention to Native women’s domesticity represents a powerful gynocentric framework through which she critiques imperial patriarchy, records her people’s history, and preserves traditional values. Drawing on the concept of double consciousness, I contend that her domestic experiences or “impressions” in “Impressions from an Indian Childhood” and the subsequent essays’ treatment of the symbol of the mother construct a justice song that reworks patriarchal images of Native Americans, and particularly Native women. I designate Zitkala-Sa’s revision of imperial patriarchy as a justice song because it fuses both Native American oral and western rhetorical traditions. She offers a Yankton Sioux woman’s perspective on the experience of westernization , while at the same time using this experience to establish how gynocentrism resists colonial invasion. In other words, these domestic “impressions,” like legend-based storytelling, beadwork, coffee making, and preserving food, cyclically repeat a gynocentric refrain that can be read as a song. This refrain refuses western notions of how Native Americans ought to live, preferring instead the way of the mother. Gynocentrism as a framework for understanding cultures, their histories and collective knowledge, composes a powerful song in praise of Native worldviews and life-ways. The gynocentric device of the justice song reconsiders western notions of what constitutes “proper education” for Natives, as Zitkala-Sa demonstrates when sharing her experiences with beadwork. Thus, Zitkala-Sa’s persuasive melodic arrangement of her own experiences illuminates the larger failures of western acculturation practices that equate Native with “savage.” Feminist and Native American literary scholars, such as Paula Gunn Allen, continue to recover women writers, especially those that draw on gynocentric traditions, to shift imperial patriarchal ways of thinking and writing. In the introduction to her book, The Sacred Hoop, Allen discusses this goal in the context of Native American themes and issues that extol the sentiment: “life is a circle, and everything in it has its place in it” (1992, 1). The themes that characterize Native American living are that Indians and spirits are always found 172 CULTURAL SITES OF CRITICAL INSIGHT together, that Indians endure—they are like the daisy in the crack of concrete that persists, and that many...