The Sartorial Indian: Zitkala-Ša, Clothing, and Resistance to Colonization

Abstract

The Sartorial IndianZitkala-Ša, Clothing, and Resistance to Colonization C. Daniel Redmond (bio) In 1919 Zitkala-Ša ended her five-year association with the Society of American Indians (sai). Two years later, American Indian Stories was published. These writings, most of which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly between 1900 and 1902, included three new additions: two short stories, “A Dream of Her Grandfather” and “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” and a closing commentary about the impact of U.S. Indian reform policy on Native Americans, “America’s Indian Problem.” This essay begins its analysis of this collection by suggesting that Zitkala-Ša’s departure from the sai and the 1921 publication of American Indian Stories is no coincidence. As Lucy Maddox observes, the decision to republish older material “alongside [newer] reform stories suggests” that Zitkala-Ša viewed the earlier pieces “as relevant to the efforts of organizations like the sai and the Women’s Clubs to secure rights for American Indians, especially the rights of citizenship.” Consequently, Maddox recommends that American Indian Stories be read “as a 1921 publication intended to address a particular set of issues . . . crucial to Indian intellectuals and reformers of the post–World War I period” (142). Building on Maddox’s observation, I interrogate how American Indian Stories advances the reformist agenda that Zitkala-Ša developed and refined during her work with the sai from 1914 to 1919, in particular through her use of clothing. Recent scholarship has done much to enlighten us as to the motives behind the sai’s push for citizenship for all Native Americans. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, in “The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherit America,” sees this effort as a struggle against a nation that legitimated its existence on American soil by “[m]aintaining American Indians as wards, in circumstances [End Page 52] that denied or destroyed economic development.” This “Indianness,” as she calls it, which was “marked by selectively maintained cultural differences, economic incapacity, and communal property” (335), was made possible by the U.S. construction of “a distinctive citizen-but-ward status for American Indians” along with the parallel policy of treating tribal governments as little more than “sovereign–but–domestic dependent” nations subject to federal control.1 In essence, the “ambiguous status of Native individuals and nations” (343) under the law was intentional, despite the stated assimilationist goals of U.S. Indian policy, and it was this cultivated difference that members of the sai targeted in their reform efforts calling for full citizenship for all indigenous peoples. But, as Lomawaima makes clear, while the members of this organization may have shared the same goal, their individual efforts to articulate “the possibilities of coexistence of indigeneity and modernity, of life as a tribal member and an American individual varied dramatically,” revealing a “powerful legacy of layers” through which each tried to imagine what “an equitable, respected place in modern American society that descended from and remained connected to their indigeneity” would look like in practice (335, emphasis in original).2 Situating Zitkala-Ša’s reform work and American Indian Stories within these layers involves considering how she differed from her contemporaries in the sai. While she too targeted the Indian Bureau as an ineffective bureaucracy, her approach to Indian reform sets her apart from thinkers like Carlos Montezuma: “Unlike many of her sai colleagues—certainly including Montezuma—Bonnin continued to put the reservations and a traditional Sioux ethos at the center of her philosophy as a reformer and a thinker” (Maddox 150). Similarly, P. Jane Hafen adds that whereas sai founder Arthur C. Parker and others like him preferred “to foreground progressive and educated Indians” in their reform efforts on behalf of all Native Americans, “Bonnin remained immersed in tribal work” (201). As Hafen notes, “Bonnin’s rhetorical themes reveal a consistency of resistance, tribal nationalism, and call for civil rights” that display an awareness “of her audience,” allowing her to “presen[t] her ideas in a pattern that affirmed tribalism while paradoxically utilizing ideologies of the colonizer” (199, emphasis added). Yet, as I will show, this paradox unravels if one reads...