American Indian Stories Research Articles

Challenging Marginalization: Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories, and the Child of Disruption

Challenging Marginalization: Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories, and the Child of Disruption

Paso a paso se va muy lejos: Traveling the Path with AFS

<i>Paso a paso se va muy lejos</i>: Traveling the Path with AFS

Living Ghosts and Mischievous Monsters: Chilling American Indian Stories by Dan SaSuWeh Jones

Living Ghosts and Mischievous Monsters: Chilling American Indian Stories by Dan SaSuWeh Jones

"Colonizing the Mind: A Dialectic Approach to Education and Language in Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories"

Mind colonization has been a burning issue in the last few decades in the fields of science and humanities. It is argued that mind colonization of the indigenous populations has been conducted via education and language in the mission of ‘civilizing’ since education and language carry culture specific sets of meaning, including knowledge and truth which condition our perception of the world. Zitkala-Ša is one of the earliest Native American authors and activists who sought to subvert the epistemological hierarchy imposed through mind colonization. Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical collection of short stories titled American Indian Stories (1921) documents her boarding school experience and the acquisition of the colonizer’s education and language. The present paper seeks to address mind colonization through language and education on the example of Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories relying on a number of theories and approaches. The paper also reflects on the importance of Zitkala-Ša mastery of the colonizer’s language

De-Constructing the Identity of the Other via Legal and Education Systems: The Squatter and the Don, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta and American Indian Stories

Bu makale, öteki olma durumları 19. yüzyıl Amerika Birleşik Devletleri'nin sömürgeci ve ırksal yasalarına maruz kalmalarından kaynaklanan Meksikalı Amerikalıları ve Yerli Amerikalıları incelemektedir. Ötekileştirilmiş bu iki grup Amerika Birleşik Devletleri'nin sömürgeci gücü tarafından yerlerinden edilen, halihazırda o bölgenin yerlisi insanlar olmasına ve bir zamanlar onlara ait topraklara olan bağları yer değiştirme ve eğitim yasaları ile koparılmasına rağmen Amerikan siyasi sistemi bahsi geçen grupların kültürel kimliğini de bozarak daha fazlasını yapmayı amaçlıyordu. Bu sistemlerin Meksikalı Amerikalıların ve Yerli Amerikalıların edebiyatlarında nasıl temsil edildiğini incelemek için Meksikalı Amerikalı ve Yerli Amerikalı kimliklerine vurgu yapan, hukuk ve eğitim odaklı benzer konular üzerinde duran üç esere bakılacaktır. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton'ın The Squatter and the Don adlı kitabı, John Rollin Ridge'in yazdığı The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta ve Gertrude Bonnin'in (Zitkala-Ša) American Indian Stories adlı eseri hukuk ve eğitim sistemlerinin Meksikalı Amerikalılar ve Yerli Amerikalılar'ın edebiyattaki kimlik oluşumuna olan etkisini görmek üzere incelenecektir. Ayrıca Amerikan yasal prosedürleri Meksika-Amerika Savaşı, Guadalupe Hidalgo Anlaşması, Kızılderili Nakil Yasası ve eğitim reformu gibi olgular aracılığıyla ötekiyi parçalamayı ve beyaz halkın çıkarlarına hizmet etmeyi amaçladığından, bahsedilen bu olgular bu makalenin merkezinde yer almaktadır.

Claims to Native Identity in Children’s Literature

This commentary essay examines several individuals who wrote books for children and made claims to Native identity that are fraudulent, or otherwise problematic. Asa Carter, for example, posed as a Cherokee named “Forrest Carter” and published The Education of Little Tree, put forth as the autobiography of someone who had been on the Trail of Tears. So popular that it was published in Korean, Turkish, Czeck, Slovenian, and Spanish, in 1997 Little Tree became a feature film. Although the author’s fraud was exposed in The New York Times, the book continues to be published. Jamake Highwater, posing as a Blackfoot/Cherokee, won the most prestigious children’s literature award, the Newbery Honor given by the American Library Association, for Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey, in 1978. Paul Goble is a British writer who loved American Indian stories so much that he moved to the United States to live near Plains tribes, where he was given a Native name. Both that name and the ways he spoke of the gift led people to believe that he had been adopted into the Lakota tribe. Like Carter and Highwater, but more prolific, Goble’s books sell well in a market that retains narrow and stereotypical views of Native peoples. The essay concludes by discussing the ways that the works of Carter, Highwater, and Goble impact publishing today.

Zitkala SA’s American Indian Stories A Native American Women Voice

Zitkala SA’s American Indian Stories A Native American Women Voice

Utilizing Talking Circles as a Means of Gathering American Indian Stories for Developing a Nutrition and Physical Activity Curriculum

This qualitative study used a focus group approach (talking circles) to elicit tribal elder insight on important concepts for the purpose of creating a curriculum to teach tribal youth in South Dakota about nutrition and physical activity in culturally appropriate ways. The focus groups were part of a larger project that is exploring mechanisms for creating culturally relevant nutrition and physical activity education for American Indian youth. A series of "Eat Smart, Play Hard" posters, created by South Dakota State University Extension, served as the starting point for talking circle conversations with tribal elders about teaching nutrition and physical activity to children. Data from the talking circles were analyzed using qualitative content analysis for themes in elder dialogs. In open-ended conversations, elders discussed barriers and success in achieving good nutrition and physical activity, important aspects of the Siouan food culture, and historical relationships with food. They shared insights on food ingredients and methods of obtaining and preparing food that were and are currently important to their communities. These data were used to better understand the Native cultural perspectives on nutrition and physical activity and to create effective educational material for Native youth that could be used to teach them in culturally relevant ways.

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

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...

Being Human

Being Human Scott Andrews (bio) The Woman Who Married a Bear Poems Tiffany Midge University of New Mexico Press www.unmpress.com/books.php?ID=20000000006797 80 Pages; Print, $17.95 Each semester I teach a set of American Indian stories about women who marry bears. I like these stories for many reasons, but one special reason is how they resist easy understanding. Like relationships, these stories about relationships can be contradictory, mystifying, and dynamic. Relationships that start off badly can become satisfying. Others can be going well and then suddenly end very badly for all involved. In his commentary on a suite of bear marriage stories, Karl Kroeber praises them for their “intense focus on the central ambiguities of social life” and their portrayal of “human life as a tissue of ambivalences inseparable from pain, error, and suffering.” Some of this can be said about Tiffany Midge’s new collection of poems, The Woman Who Married a Bear. But do not think that all of her poems are about “pain, error, and suffering.” Many are about laughter, sex, and meditations on those “central ambiguities,” especially between lovers. The collection is the result of a thoughtful poet considering the mysteries of being a complicated human relating to other complicated humans (or bears). The first poem in the collection, “The Woman Who Married a Bear,” establishes a pattern that can be found in many of the poems that follow. Five stanzas of varying and concrete images describe the strange nature of sexual attraction. The lover’s eyes are “black hooks” that have “pierced her heart into the darkling of his body,” that have “winched it out, a spent, stained prize.” On the one hand, saying we have won someone’s heart is to suggest that person has fallen in love with us, and we might describe falling in love as having our heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow. Having that heart pierced with black hooks and then removed with a winch? That is saying something else. I will present the final stanza whole to preserve the strength and sound of Midge’s poetry: “She had a lover who spooned her body at night, / who drank from the full cups of her breasts, / who hungered for her shoulders, her mouth, her belly– / who fed on the pounding in her chest.” The erotic language here is paradoxical enough to please the ghost of Cleanth Brooks. The lover desires her, hungers for her, engages her body in ways that we might all enjoy being enjoyed, and the “pounding in her chest” suggests she enjoys it too. However, we might ask how she is being fed in this exchange—the second stanza describes her alone in the woods as she waits out his hibernation; she forages for food and relies upon the “mercy of trees.” Is their passion reciprocal? Perhaps it is. However, the language that describes erotic desire can sound like the language of an attack. Is this a description of lovemaking or a scene from The Revenant? If her lover is a bear, might he be consuming her, eating her alive? I prefer the former possible meanings to the latter because, you know, it’s hot. But the possibility for both meanings exists. This contradictory reaction to desire is made explicit in “Desire: An Inventory.” The speaker says the audience might think desire is “a delicate impulse,” that would be wrong. If desire had a face it “would resemble a troll, or worse, a gargoyle.” The speaker says desire is “the most monstrous emotion since envy, since / hubris.” Desire is “utterly fickle,” coming and going with few reasons that we can understand. We resist our desires even when we give into them, the poem suggests, perhaps protecting ourselves in that most vulnerable encounter between two people. The poem concludes: “Tell me what you want,” he said.“You,” she said. “I want to want you.” “Tell me what you want,” she said.“You,” he said. “I want to not want you.” Several poems observe intimacies between lovers that do not express conflict (like that with a bear eating you alive) but express awareness that our lovers have lives...

American Indian stories of success: new visions of leadership in Indian Country

American Indian stories of success: new visions of leadership in Indian Country

Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience. By Enrique Salmón . ( Tucson : University of Arizona Press , 2012 . ix + 170 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $17.95 , paper.)

<b><i>Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience</i></b>. By Enrique Salmón . ( Tucson : University of Arizona Press , 2012 . ix + 170 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $17.95 , paper.)

Book Review: Eating the landscape: American Indian stories of food, identity, and resilience.

Book Review: Eating the landscape: American Indian stories of food, identity, and resilience.

Gertrude Bonnin's Rhetorical Strategies of Silence

Gertrude Bonnin’s Rhetorical Strategies of Silence Elizabeth Wilkinson (bio) When one powerful group or individual silences another less powerful group or individual, silence can be viewed as a marker of victimhood. A simplistic example: any public protest that is summarily shut down is silenced, the protesters victims of being silenced. Silence as an indicator of victim status presupposes a gaze from outside looking in and describes silence that happens as a result of oppression. In contrast, even from a position of less power, individuals can use silence not as a victim-based reaction to but as a central strategy of action for. For example, Audra Simpson’s discussions with Mohawk peoples on the issue of tribal membership and citizenship show rhetorical deployment of silence with the goal of negotiating an intricate political situation (76–78). Following the idea of silence as purposeful rhetorical strategy, this article explores the less widely acknowledged use of silence(s) by Yankton writer and activist Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša.1 She deploys manifestations of silence, particularly in the report Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians and in her Atlantic Monthly trilogy on Indian boarding school, as an expression of rhetorical agency and discursive power, in both instances primarily addressing an uninformed and predominantly white audience. The goal of this article is to provide another angle from which to evaluate Bonnin’s sophisticated rhetoric; that is, to examine, define, and analyze the multiple iterations of silence and silencing she uses to promote her political purposes. I argue that Gertrude Bonnin uses strategies of silence and of delayed discourse to unsettle her white readers, forcing them to acknowledge the unbalanced relationship between Anglo-America and Native America in the early 1900s. She writes with the obvious goal of urging readers to reform their own and subsequently the US government’s beliefs and actions. [End Page 33] In the 1924 report Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery (opri), Bonnin uses a variety of silences (her own act of being silent) and descriptions of silencing (herself or another silenced by outside forces) as tools for rhetorical advantage when writing for the Euro-American public and political audience. Bonnin coauthored opri, a report destined for Congress and commissioned by the Indian Rights Association (ira), with two white men, Charles H. Fabens and Matthew K. Sniffens. Their hope was to expose and end rampant abuses of Indian peoples by corrupt agents, businessmen, judges, and lawyers in Oklahoma. In the portion of the report that is clearly authored by Bonnin, she provides case studies of victims of Oklahoma’s “legalized robbery,” beginning with the heinous crimes committed against the childlike, eighteen-year-old woman Millie Neharkey. Within the span of a handful of paragraphs in the opri report, and specifically in writing about Millie’s case, Bonnin displays some of her most pointedly effective uses of rhetorical silences. However, a much longer and textually complex deployment of these strategies of silence and silencing appears almost a quarter of a century earlier in what is perhaps her most widely known and anthologized writings, her Atlantic Monthly trilogy originally published in January, February, and March of 1900 (republished in the collection American Indian Stories in 1921). In these semi-autobiographical essays entitled “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” Bonnin’s uses of silence and silencings are more subtle but have transparent rhetorical purpose. The trilogy, published when she was approximately twenty-four years old, was her first major publication, and while it can be read simply as an entertaining bildungsroman of an Indian girl, it is more importantly a scathing polemic criticizing the Indian boarding school system and is an important early example of her use of rhetorical silence. Because Bonnin’s clear and powerful rhetorical strategies of silences and silencings are more easily discernable in the concise paragraphs of opri (1924), I discuss that work first and establish definitions essential to my discussion of silence in the Atlantic Monthly trilogy (1900). By unpacking the terminology in the later piece and then applying it to the earlier, I shed new light...

American Folklore Scholarship, Tales of the North American Indians, and Relational Communities

Abstract This article acknowledges that folklore studies has sometimes overlooked the imperatives of relational communities with the publication of tale collections. By privileging stories as texts and objectifying literacy as a stage of human development, some authors of tale collections have followed long-standing societal norms and ignored the primary imperative of maintaining relations to remain a community. Analyzing the introductions to Tales of the North American Indians (Thompson 1929) and four other collections of American Indian stories published between 1892 and 1929, I show how authors associated literacy, lands, stories, and people to confirm or disrupt assumptions of American Indians as pre-literate, primitive, vanishing, or ongoing peoples. With greater awareness of evolutionary assumptions and relational perspectives at play in a crucial disciplinary genre, folklorists may produce and receive tale collections in ways that better evaluate how stories relate storytellers with lands and communities.

When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (review)

Reviewed by: When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty Lisa Tatonetti Mark Rifkin , When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 436 pp. Mark Rifkin's second book is part of a rise of recent texts marking Queer Native studies' arrival as a full-fledged field. Though Rifkin's title—When Did Indians Become [End Page 339] Straight?—might suggest this is an anthropological text, his subtitle—Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty—better reflects his focus, which is "how native peoples are subjected to the demand that they signify citizenship (whether to the United States or tribal nations) in terms of a heteronormative standard" (276). To illustrate such demands, Rifkin interrogates the heteronormative expectations found in white-authored fiction and public policy along with the ways a number of Native authored texts enact or resist what he calls "the bribe of straightness," a strategy in which non-dominant groups/authors "play aspects or normalcy against each other as part of a counterhegemonic claim to legitimacy, distinguishing themselves from other, more stigmatized modes of deviance" (22-23). Rifkin's theoretical introduction aligns with the work of Jaspir Puar, Andrea Smith, and Scott Morgensen in its recognition of the heteronormative underpinnings of settler colonialism. With a clear nod to Foucault, Rifkin traces how non-dominant configurations of "home, family, and political collectivity are presented as endangering the state" (5). Like Andrea Smith in the award-winning GLQ special issue Rifkin edited with Daniel Heath Justice and Bethany Schneider, Rifkin asks what happens when Indigenous people are centered rather than pushed to the periphery of a U.S.-focused history of sexuality. He answers this question in three sets of paired chapters. Rifkin's first two chapters, "Reproducing the Indian: Racial Birth and Native Geopolitics in Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison and Last of the Mohicans" and "Adoption Nation: Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hendrick Aupaumut, and the Boundaries of Familial Feeling" focus primarily on non-Native texts from the 1920s to expose the way conjugal coupling and the nuclear family function as lynchpins for a racialized national imaginary in the U.S. Rifkin juxtaposes this institutionalized model of "heterocouplehood" with an Indigenous understanding of kinship that instead centers collectivities. At stake, Rifkin argues, is "the consolidation of a familial norm that elides native kinship structures which challenged the jurisdictional imaginary of the incipient settler state" (48). Rifkin's analysis of Jemison's as-told-to narrative is particularly insightful: he demonstrates that the common reading of Jemison as white privileges a racialized biology over Native adoption and kinship networks. Such readings, Rifkin shows, ignore Jemison's position as clan mother and her subsequent relation to Seneca sovereignty thereby "render[ing] subaltern Seneca modes of political self-representation . . . [and] displacing them as a legally meaningful way of conceptualizing jurisdiction and land claims" (61). Rifkin next reads Sedgwick's Hope Leslie as a challenge to the "emergent heteronormativity" mapped in his first chapter. He shows that Sedgwick rejects conjugal couplehood and the privatized space of the marital home in favor of an affective web of associations she terms "the natural," in which Native kinship systems serve as the model for a productive collectivity based in emotional connection [End Page 340] rather than biology. Rifkin concludes his chapter by examining a Mahican narrative from 1792, Hendrick Aupaumut's account of his time as a U.S. envoy, as an example of a text that employs Indigenous kinship networks as contextualized geopolitical reality rather than detribalized rhetorical strategy. Rifkin's next paired chapters—"Romancing Kinship: Indian Education, the Allotment Program, and Zitkala-Ša's American Indian Stories" and "Allotment Subjectivities and the Administration of 'Culture': Ella Deloria, Pine Ridge, and the Indian Reorganization Act"—look at the work of these two Dakota authors in light of the major Indian policies of their eras: U.S. government boarding schools, the 1887 General Allotment Act (or Dawes Act), and the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Rifkin uses these texts and policies as examples of how, by the late nineteenth century, U.S. Indian policy had been instantiated...

Moccasin Thunder: American Indian Stories for Today (review)

Reviewed by: Moccasin Thunder: American Indian Stories for Today Deborah Stevenson Carlson, Lori Marie , ed. Moccasin Thunder: American Indian Stories for Today. HarperCollins, 2005156p Library ed. ISBN 0-06-623959-1$16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-623957-5$15.99 R Gr. 9-12 Noted anthologist Carlson (Red Hot Salsa, BCCB 4/05, etc.) turns here to contemporary short stories, collecting ten pieces, half of them original, about modern life as a Native American. Though reading sophistication levels vary (some entries were initially published for adult audiences), protagonists for the stories are all young, and settings for stories range from a southwestern boarding school (Joy Harjo's "How to Get to the Planet Venus"), to Canada's Northwest Territories (Richard Van Camp's "The Last Snow of the Virgin Mary"), to Chicago (Susan Power's "Drum Kiss"). Many of the stories are imbued with sadness—accounts of lost and deceiving families, straitened circumstances, missed opportunities—yet some of those offer tenderness and insight (the standout of the collection, Sherman Alexie's story of a boy's yearning for his father, shines with humor and resilience as well as loss), and several speak eloquently and directly to the power of storytelling that's accessible even to young tellers of tales. Individual stories could be shared as readalouds with younger audiences or the collection used as a resource rather than a straight-through read, while older readers will simply appreciate the concentration of literary experience. Author biographies are included. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

ROMANCING KINSHIP

ROMANCING KINSHIP

Writing (and Speaking) in Tongues: Zitkala-ša’s American Indian Stories

Writing (and Speaking) in Tongues: Zitkala-ša’s American Indian Stories

Utilizing traditional storytelling to promote wellness in American Indian communities.

Utilizing storytelling to transmit educational messages is a traditional pedagogical method practiced by many American Indian tribes. American Indian stories are effective because they present essential ideas and values in a simple, entertaining form. Different story characters show positive and negative behaviors. The stories illustrate consequences of behaviors and invite listeners to come to their own conclusions after personal reflection. Because stories have been passed down through tribal communities for generations, listeners also have the opportunity to reconnect and identify with past tribal realities. This article reports on a research intervention that is unique in promoting health and wellness through the use of storytelling. The project utilized stories to help motivate tribal members to once more adopt healthy, traditional life-styles and practices. The authors present and discuss the stories selected, techniques used in their telling, the preparation and setting for the storytelling, and the involvement and interaction of the group.