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Re-visioning Sioux Women: Zitkala-Sa's Revolutionary American Indian Stories
Now, as I look back upon the recent past, I see it from a distance, as whole. I remember how, from morning till evening, many specimens of civilized peoples visited the Indian school. The city folks with canes and eyeglasses, the countrymen with sunburnt cheeks and clumsy feet, forgot their relative social ranks in an ignorant curiosity. Both sorts of these Christian palefaces were alike astounded at seeing the children of savage warriors so docile and industrious.(1)
In these lines from "An Indian Teacher Among Indians" (1900), Zitkala-Sa turns the field of anthropology on its head. Once an object of study as an American Indian child whose "savage" identity was constructed by white social scientists, she has gained the power to "see," and under her gaze the "civilized peoples" become the "specimens" to be studied. Zitkala-Sa's literary ethnography is thus a form of what Kenneth Lincoln calls "bicultural play": an intercultural exchange in which "the seeers...are seeing the seen...and...on the other side native `seers' peer back" (20). Truly a seer, Zitkala-Sa anticipates the remaking of social analysis at the turn into the next century. Almost one hundred years after she first published her work, anthropologist Renato Rosaldo would write, "social analysis must now grapple with the realization that its objects of analysis are also analyzing subjects who critically interrogate ethnographers -- their writings, their ethics, and their politics" (21). Zitkala-Sa's education in English enabled her to speak for herself, to represent herself, and to render her (bi)cultural experience in all its complexity.
Zitkala-Sa became literate in English in an educational system designed explicitly to indoctrinate and control its students. In 1884, at age eight, she left the Yankton Sioux reservation to attend White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker-run boarding school that apparently followed the regulations of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to provide all instruction in English "under threat of loss of government funding" (Reyhner and Eder 41).(2) A major goal of these English-only schools, according to J. D. C. Atkins, commissioner of Indian affairs from 1885 to 1888, was to rid American Indians of their "ignorance" and "abominable superstitions" (Reyhner and Eder 45). Promoted as humanitarian vehicles for assimilating American Indian children into the dominant...