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Authors
Sarah Winnemucca and Zitkala Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonin) (1876-1938)
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Dexter Fisher’s 1986 edition of Zitkala Sa’s American Indian Stories (1921) includes an expert and insightful introduction to this collection of autobiography, fiction, and nonfiction prose. P. Jane Hafen helpfully edited a number of Zitkala Sa’s works in Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems and “The Sun Dance Opera” (2001). Also of great interest is Zitkala Sa’s “Why I Am a Pagan” (Atlantic Monthly 90 [102]: 801–03). Material on Zitkala Sa is still scarce, though articles and chapters in part or whole devoted to her are appearing more frequently; Dexter Fisher’s Zitkala Sa: The Evolution of a Writer (1979) and Dorothea M. Susag’s Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin): A Power(full) Literary Voice (1993) are among the few critical and biographical studies. Two excellent articles published in books are D. K. Meisenheimer’s “Regionalist Bodies/ Embodied Regions: Sarah Orne Jewett and Zitkala-Sa,” in Sherrie A. Innis and Diana Royer’s collection Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (1997), and Patricia Okker’s “Native American Literatures and the Canon” in Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhost’s collection American Realism and the Canon (1995). Two excellent articles published in journals are P. Jane Hafen’s “Zitkala Sa: Sentimentality and Sovereignty” (Wicazo Sa Review 12 [1997]: 31–34) and Dexter Fisher’s “Zitkala Sa: The Evolution of a Writer” (American Indian Quarterly 5 [1979]: 229–38). The best discursive bibliography of Native American literature is A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff’s American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (1990), a comprehensive and judicious survey of the field. Two other titles may be recommended to anyone interested in Native American autobiography: A. David Brumble III’s American Indian Autobiography (1988) and Arnold Krupat’s “Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self” in Paul John Eakin’s American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect (1991).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
A few years ago, scholastic literary criticism went through a phase of regarding all modern narratives as varieties of mourning, as tinged or charged with elegy for something lost – youth, bygone families and friends, lost times and ways of life. Some works in our literary history have responded better than others to that kind of reading. These two Native American writers were working at a time when the survival of their respective cultures seemed less certain than ever before; the West was filling up with European Americans and the frontier was declared “closed” by historical observers. Whom were Winnemucca and Sitkala Sa writing to – and with what deep intentions in mind?
1. How can you tell a story about the past without being relegated to it yourself, by your readers or the people who listen to you? What do these authors do, in telling their stories, to resist that kind of relegation?
2. Broaden your thinking to consider the situation of Native American nations and peoples in contemporary North America: what are the consequences of thinking about them and portraying them as a people who “were” rather than “are”? As we create museums and galleries to conserve their culture and traditions, what can be done to bring the present and the future into that contemplation? Have a look at the web site of the new National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington, D.C., at http://www.nmai.si.edu/, and consider how that museum, in its special exhibitions and online resources, addresses that question.
