{i}

SAIL

Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2                Volume 5, Number 4               Winter 1993

CONTENTS

Introduction
        Rodney Simard          .                 .                 .                 .                 .       1

Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin): A Power(full) Literary Voice
        Dorothea M. Susag    .                .                 .                 .                 .       3

Acceptance and Rejection of Assimilation in the Works of Standing Bear
        Frederick Hale           .                 .                 .                 .                 .      25

The Great Spirit Goddess
        Raven Hail                 .                 .                 .                 .                 .      42

William Apess and Writing White
        Randall Moon            .                 .                 .                 .                 .      45

Trickster: Shaman of the Liminal
         Larry Ellis                 .                 .                 .                 .                 .      55

Communion in James Welch's Winter in the Blood
        Betty Tardieu             .                .                 .                 .                 .      69

FORUM
        1993 President's Report           .                 .                 .                 .      81
        1994 ASAIL Officers                .                 .                 .                 .      85

REVIEWS
Native American Literatures. Ed. Laura Coltelli
         Kenneth Lincoln       .                 .                 .                 .                 .      86

Alex Posey: Creek Poet, Journalist, and Humorist. Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr.
         John Purdy                .                 .                 .                 .                 .      91

{ii}
Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography. Hertha Dawn Wong
        Susan Scarberry-García              .                .                 .                 .      93

Choteau Creek: A Sioux Reminiscence. Joseph Iron Eye Dudley
Not First in Nobody's Heart: The Life Story of a Contemporary Chippewa. Ron Paquin and Robert Doherty
         Robley Evans            .                 .                 .                 .                 .      97

CONTRIBUTORS            .                 .                 .                 .                 .     101

1993 ASAIL Patrons:

California State University, San Bernardino
Western Washington University
University of Richmond
Laura Coltelli
Karl Kroeber
and others who wish to remain anonymous

1993 Sponsors:

Dennis Hoilman
and others who wish to remain anonymous

"to get there it had to walk through hell"

Rodney Simard         

       For the title of this introduction, I borrow the last line from Jim Barnes' wonderful poem "Contemporary Native American Poetry," from his The American Book of the Dead:

                For one thing, you can believe it:
                the skin chewed soft enough to wear,
                the bones hewn hard as a totem
                from hemlock. It's a kind of scare-
                crow that will follow you home nights.
                You've seen it ragged against a field,
                but you seldom think, at the time,
                to get there it had to walk through hell.

       This issue is largely concerned with so-called "transitional" literatures upon which the contemporary are based and from whose study we still have much to learn, as the authors of these essays on Zitkala-Sa, William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, and the Trickster all note. Betty Tardieu's study of Winter in the Blood shows this to be true, as does Raven Hail's original contribution, "The Great Spirit Goddess."
       Forthcoming special issues of SAIL will feature feminism and post-colonialism, pedagogy and theory, Linda Hogan, contemporary poetry, European approaches, and contemporary film and drama. Please let me know if you would like to guest edit an issue.

{full-page ad}

Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin): A Power(full) Literary Voice

Dorothea M. Susag         

Well, you can guess how queer I felt--away from my own people--homeless--penniless--and even without a name! (Zitkala-Sa June 1901)¹

        Like thousands of other American Indian children from across the continent, Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin 1876-1938) suffered under the post-colonial impact of displacement, (de)culturation, and acculturation. Along with the personal consequences of such policies and practices, Indian peoples on reservations suffered devastating territorial, economic, and physical losses.
       For over a century, paternalistic government policies and some well-intentioned reformers exacerbated the problems for America's indigenous peoples by viewing them as powerless victims of the clash between two cultures. Moreover, many proponents of assimilation through education regarded American Indians' bilingualism as a negative condition that inhibited effective communication in the English language--a rather absurd notion considering contemporary multilingual requirements for government diplomats. Nevertheless, these two myths still prevail for many American Indian descendants both on and off reservations. In the cultural purgatories of our public schools, too many children continue to learn and relearn myths of their "vanishing" power and verbal inadequacies in the English-speaking world.
        In addition, the power of such myths to perpetuate the victimization of Indian women increases when combined with a common myth concerning the feminine literary voice. According to Patricia Yaeger, feminist critics have "insisted on women's impotence in the presence of `masculine' language" believing that "men employ language for their own ends while women are contained by the `masculine' word's authority" (36, 56).
       Having established the existence of such myths, I want to focus attention on Zitkala-Sa's three autobiographical essays, first published {4} in The Atlantic Monthly, January, February, March 1900. Relying primarily on the voice within her essays, I have also cultivated available images from her surrounding cultural, sociological, and historical contexts to discover the ways in which we may read her writing as effecting a contradiction of the above myths. Using the insights and critical strategies of Edward Said and Patricia Yaeger, I will argue that Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical essays reveal a powerful feminine and ethnic voice when read against her two cultural influences. I will also argue that Zitkala-Sa's essays demonstrate the way her Native heritage of spiritual power and story works to overcome forces that would suppress the feminine Indian voice, to articulate Zitkala-Sa's personal and tribal experience, and to indict those who had victimized her people.
       Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Sa) was born in 1876 to a Yankton/ Dakota woman, Ellen Simmons--Tate I Yohin Win (Reaches for the Wind), and a white man who deserted the family before she was born.² Traditionally, the mother had full responsibility for children until they reached puberty. No doubt Ellen Simmons instructed her child in the Dakota way, expecting her to transmit to her children the same Dakota tradition as Ella Deloria would later articulate:

The ultimate aim of Dakota life, stripped of accessories, was quite simple: One must obey kinship rules; one must be a good relative. No Dakota who has participated in that life will dispute that. In the last analysis every other consideration was secondary--property, personal ambition, glory, good times, life itself. (Waterlily x)

       At the age of eight, Gertrude Simmons left the reservation for three years to attend a Quaker missionary school in Indiana where she would learn English and Quaker-American customs. Evidence in the first essay, "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," might indicate the child made her own decision to attend an Eastern boarding school, a "Wonderland" where the Indian children could "pick all the red apples" they could eat.
       However, this first essay and the following two also suggest she based her decision on false dreams painted by evangelicals who intended to "save" the children by "[killing] the Indian" in them.³ In a 1990 issue of Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Michael Coleman reported on the motivations of young Indian children during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

Ignorant of English and with emotions and motivations ranging from obedience to fear to curiosity to desires for white goods and an easier life, they set off into an almost totally alien world. (31)

{5}
       In an article entitled "Reflections on Exile," Edward Said defines the recent plight of exiles in "alien" worlds and their subsequent roles in the development of literature. Viewing the exile as permanently torn from "a native place" or a "true home," Said suggests the exile can never belong to the present landscape. "Clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealously insists on his or her right to refuse to belong." Furthermore, Said believes the exile's experiences in the present will always occur "against the memory of another, very distant, landscape." The literary voice then becomes the site of contestation between two languages, two systems, two cultures. Said goes on to suggest that exiles break "barriers of thought and experience," create "new worlds to rule," and use "willfulness, exaggeration and overstatement to force us to recognize the tragic fate of homelessness in a necessarily heartless world" (422-27).
       With respect to the "unhealable rift" between an exile and her "true home," Said's definition may easily apply to the life and experience of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa). Following a three-year separation, the child returned from White's Boarding School to her mother and to the traditional Yanktons on the reservation. But according to Dexter Fisher, she was "highly suspect. In their minds she had abandoned, even betrayed, the Indian way of life by getting an education in the white man's world." Fisher goes on to suggest "Zitkala-Sa was never reconciled with her mother" and that she "suffered intensely her alienation from her own family (Diss. 24).
       On the other hand, evidence exists that would indicate Zitkala-Sa did not remain the exile, refusing "to belong." Instead, according to Deborah Welch, Zitkala-Sa "felt pulled toward the Anglo world (8). Furthermore, she deliberately turned away from her Yankton/Dakota tradition and ambitiously moved into the literature, music, politics, and faith of the dominant culture. Having studied voice and violin at the New England Conservatory of Music, Zitkala-Sa proved her musical skills in both performance and composition. In Congress, against the Bureau of Indian of Affairs, and within national organizations such as the SAI and NCAI, she became a self-proclaimed advocate for pan-Indianism, a concept to which many tribal peoples objected. While she insisted on using her adopted name in her formal essay and short story writing, Zitkala-Sa identified herself by her married Anglo name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, "in all of her formal correspondence with the Indian Bureau, politicians, and other officials, clearly in deference to Anglo norms" (viii).
       Deborah Welch also suggests that Zitkala-Sa sought to "convince [Eastern society] that Indian peoples possessed abilities equal to those {6} of Whites," implying a regard for Anglo culture as equal if not superior to Indian culture. The following excerpt from Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's essay that won second place in the Indiana State Oratorical Contest of 1896 corroborates this view while it also demonstrates Zitkala-Sa's verbal adoption of the Judeo-Christian faith:

We come from mountain fastnesses, from cheerless plains, from far-off low-wooded streams, seeking the "White Man's ways." Seeking your skill in industry and in art, seeking labor and honest independence, seeking the treasures of knowledge and wisdom, seeking to comprehend the spirit of your laws and the genius of your noble institutions, seeking by a new birthright to unite with you our claim to a common country, seeking the Sovereign's crown that we may stand side by side with you in ascribing royal honor to our nation's flag. America, I love thee. "Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God." (Fisher Diss. 19)

       Seemingly, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin had decisively assimilated into the dominant culture. Yet evidence also exists that contradicts this conclusion. Even as Zitkala-Sa wrote and performed her essays, played her violin before America's elite, published essays and stories in the reputable Atlantic Monthly, and consented to the "wisdom" of the "White Man's Ways" in order to win the approval and support of her non-Indian audiences, she remained connected to her Native heritage. With respect to each "success" in the Anglo world, the issues of her own Indianness, of justice for Native peoples, and of the enduring values in Native traditions prevailed, even at the risk of her own personal dignity and health. When she returned to the East having "experienced first-hand the impoverishment of her [Yankton Reservation] family by landhungry Anglos," she found she could no longer tolerate the "anti-Indian educational principles" of Carlisle. And so Zitkala-Sa wrote essays and stories, in spite of Pratt's criticism that her stories were "trash" and she "worse than pagan" (Welch 24-27).
       We may regard Zitkala-Sa as an exile, according to Said's definition. As a child of the nineteenth-century reservation system, she couldn't claim the freedom of a traditional Yankton landscape. As a child removed from her family and transplanted in a boarding school for three years, she couldn't claim the presence of her childhood home and family. As a mixed-blood studying and later working in the East, she couldn't claim the emotional or even the intellectual security of a home in the "White Man's ways." Her experience at the Indiana State Oratorical Contest of 1896 exemplifies this alienation. Even as she closed her speech with "America I love thee. `Thy people shall be my {7} people and thy God my God,'" a racist banner labeled "Squaw" hung above the heads of contestants and audience (19). And finally, as an eleven-year-old child returning to the Yankton Reservation with the whiteman's clothes and the whiteman's words, she was forbidden to claim the only home she had ever known.
       Zitkala-Sa's three autobiographical essays communicate neither the complexity nor the tension she must have experienced living between two cultures. Instead they reveal a binary opposition between Indian and white, an opposition that further substantiates my claim that she stands in exile from both cultures. According to Said, exiles compensate for "disorienting loss" by creating "new worlds," resembling "an old one left behind for ever," while they demonstrate "intransigence . . . willfulness, exaggeration, overstatement . . . characteristic styles of being an exile, methods for compelling the world to accept [their] vision" (423). These characteristics are apparent in Zitkala-Sa's writing, evidenced primarily in her militancy, her romanticism, and her singular stereotyping of the "heartless paleface."
       In Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing, Patricia Yaeger provides an extension of Said's argument that exiles "break barriers of thought" and "create new worlds to rule" while she denies the inevitability of feminine literary impotence:

. . . in women's writing, the incorporation of a second language can function [not as a signifier of lost possibilities], but instead as a subversive gesture representing an alternative form of speech which can both disrupt the repressions of authoritative discourse and still welcome or shelter themes that have not yet found a voice in the text's primary language. (40)

Especially in the essay "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," we will see the way the Dakota language and culture function to disrupt the Judeo-Christian discourse, to dispel its repressive power, and to introduce themes that had "not yet found a [Native] voice" in the English language. Dexter Fisher suggests:

Language became the tool for articulating the tension she experienced throughout her life between her heritage with its imperative of tradition and the inevitable pressure of acculturation. (Critical Essays 205)

In her three autobiographical essays, Zitkala-Sa has constructed a literary voice both from the rhetoric and value systems of the colonizers, and from a remembered Yankton/Dakota landscape, language, and story. But these essays do more than "articulate the tension" between these two systems--they demonstrate Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's refusal to remain the victim. Grounded in Zitkala-Sa's claim that she {8} was a Dakota woman and not a mixed-blood, we may read these essays as power(full) works that celebrate a feminine Dakota heritage, challenge some of the most sacred Judeo-Christian attitudes and values, and accuse and further condemn those who would victimize Indian peoples.
       To begin this analysis, we must first look at a probable literary antecedent for Zitkala-Sa's essays: the Trickster/Transformer tales. Like all humankind, this Indian culture hero is an intensely complex figure capable of functioning--and surviving--as fixer or mischief maker, victimizer or victim, creator or destroyer. In his work The Trickster, Paul Radin suggests:

The symbol which Trickster embodies is not a static one. It contains within itself the promise of differentiation, the promise of god and man. For this reason every generation occupies itself with interpreting Trickster anew. No generation understands him fully but no generation can do without him. . . . And so he became and remained everything to every man--god, animal, human being, hero, buffoon, he who was before good and evil, denier, affirmer, destroyer and creator. If we laugh at him, he grins at us. Whatever happens to him happens to us. (158-59)

       Since the Trickster figure varies from culture to culture, I find Ella Deloria's description of Iktomi in Dakota mythology especially useful since she was raised within a Yankton/Dakota heritage similar to Zitkala-Sa's. Appearing in various human disguises, Deloria indicates Iktomi or Ikto is the "poser," out to get the best of any situation. "With no conception of sincerity," he pretends to have sincere motives while he works the situation to his own benefit. He is spare of speech, unable to use the more elaborate language of ordinary men. The traditional Iktomi is impulsive, thoughtless, without heart, and his actions represent a wide range of "possible" human behaviors (Dakota Texts 5). Zitkala-Sa provides her own description of Iktomi at the beginning of her collection, Old Indian Legends, first published in 1901:

Iktomi is a wily fellow. His hands are always kept in mischief. He prefers to spread a snare rather than to earn the smallest thing with honest hunting. . . . Often his own conceit leads him hard against the common sense of simpler people. (4)

In some stories, the overly enthusiastic Iktomi brings ridicule upon himself when he tries--and fails--to play the role of an extra-ordinary human. From our contemporary perspective, we can now read Iktomi {9} as suffering dramatic ironic reversals when storytellers such as Zitkala-Sa successfully outsmart him.
       Like folktales from many cultures around the world, Trickster tales are both attractive and dangerous. Within the traditional tribal setting, they provided good entertainment for long winter nights. But Iktomi stories also warned the listeners to watch for scoundrels who would establish themselves as oppressive powers over others. Storytellers would make asides about the stupidity of those who mindlessly followed the Trickster, and children would learn to be wary whenever an elder would caution, "He is playing Iktomi."⁴
       Indian peoples knew well these Tricksters and their disguises. In the mid-Seventeenth Century, English magistrates would play "deed games" with tribesmen. After getting an Indian drunk, the officials would have him sign a deed he couldn't read. Another game involved the magistrates' imposing fines for various offenses. When the fines were not paid in time, they would then require forfeiture of Indian lands. "These were devices to put a fair face on fraud," suggests Francis Jennings (144-45).
       The Indian people on Zitkala-Sa's home reservation also knew the "fair face" of fraud. Between 1874 and 1895, several Yankton Reservation agents reported the government's failure to fulfill annuity payments, and scouts who in 1864 had aided General Sully against the Santee Sioux were not paid until 1895, after most had died. Ostensibly, the Dawes Severalty Act of February 8, 1887, was passed to promote the Western-European idea of self-sufficiency, but in reality, the Dawes Act contributed to the further loss of Indian territorial integrity when much of the "surplus" land was purchased and leased by non-Indians (Annual Reports 1874-1902).
       Like other Dakota children, Gertrude Simmons had been raised on Iktomi stories. Evening after evening, until she boarded the "iron horse" for school in the East, she would "pillow" her head in her mother's lap while listening to the "old people" tell Iktomi stories. I suggest we can read Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical essays as following this tribal literary tradition, although I would agree with Dexter Fisher as she delineates the differences between autobiography/short story and the oral tradition, indicating the "writer [of autobiography] by necessity stands apart from his subject and comments on it" (Diss. 159). However, when accompanied by a Dakota belief system, these traditional Iktomi stories no doubt provided an explanation for human behavior that Zitkala-Sa would later apply to her own experiences both on and off the reservation. In her Preface to Old Indian Legends, Zitkala-Sa herself suggests these tales may apply to "wise grown-ups," both "patriot" and "aborigine":

A study [of Indian folklore] . . . so strongly suggests our {10} near kinship with the rest of humanity and points a steady finger toward the great brotherhood of mankind. (vi)

Like the traditional Iktomi storyteller, Zitkala-Sa was nobody's fool. She no doubt knew the "brotherhood of mankind" could encompass all possible human behaviors. She also knew the Trickster's many disguises and oftentimes fraudulent words. And Zitkala-Sa knew the ways to outsmart the Trickster, to practice her own trickery on him, and to disrupt his universe. Reading the essays as a contemporary Iktomi story, we can see how the storyteller works her trickery on the Trickster himself, even as he prowls beyond the page in the daily lives of Zitkala-Sa and her people. And she works her trickery on her non-Indian literary audience as well. Using Yaeger's strategy, we can see how the image and language in these essays function to "disrupt the repressions of authoritative discourse . . . [and to] shelter themes that have not yet found a voice in the text's primary language" (40).
       From the very beginning of "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," Zitkala-Sa gives voice to a theme that Euro-American society had previously ignored or suppressed: the strength and essential value of women in the traditional Lakota world. Behind the printed images of women roams the wily Iktomi, disguised as a white cultural imperialist, who would have Indian women believe they are the "quiet and passive drudges" of society, "beasts of burden," and inferior to Indian men, as long as they remain "uncivilized" (Weist 29). However, despite Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's life-long conflict with her home community, and especially with her mother, these essays work to outsmart Iktomi, by defending and honoring her mother, and by celebrating the strength of Indian women, even as they live midst the clash of two cultures.
       As we read these essays against the memory of a traditional landscape, the voices of Lakota women resound to defy the Trickster with their own definitions of Indian women. A Santee woman once told Ella Deloria the characteristics of a "good [Lakota] woman":

. . . devoted to her children, industrious and skilled in womanly arts, genuinely hospitable and generous, and a strict follower of kinship etiquette. She should think much but say little, and she should stay at home and occupy herself with her own business. (DeMallie 260)

Beatrice Medicine, a Lakota anthropologist and niece of Ella Deloria, considers the traditional roles of Indian women not as subservient to men but complementary, equally powerful, and viable today; she provides a more comprehensive definition of Lakota feminine power:

"We are the carriers of culture." This belief may provide {11} Indian women a mandate to transmit cultural viability, engendering a sense of identity with a unique and satisfying cultural group. It is this that gives Lakota women the strength to operate in both the native and the non-native life spheres. (171)

       Against the memory of a Dakota landscape, the word and image of the Euro-American's patriarchal and paternalistic belief system explode into Dakota metaphor. From the very beginning through her word and presence, Tate I Yohin Win sends her power and the power of her feminine Dakotah ancestors to her daughter, Zitkala-Sa.

. . . she patted my head and said, "Now let me see how fast you can run today." Whereupon, I tore away at my highest possible speed, with my long black hair blowing in the breeze. (Stories 8)

It is the power manifested in her name and in the feminine Wind, Tate, the extraordinary and no less powerful Lakota force that moves in connection with the masculine Sky, Skan.⁵ It moves in their "dwelling," when "cool morning breezes" sweep from the prairie. With her hair "blowing in the breeze," the child physically knows this power that whispers to clouds, roars around mountain tops, and drives her spirit as she runs "free as the wind . . . no less spirited than a bounding deer." With pride, her mother watches her daughter's "wild freedom and overflowing spirits." In Zitkala-Sa's recollection and recording of this image, she acknowledges her mother's personification of this most powerful force, and she affirms the continuity between the Wind, her mother, and herself.
       In her second essay, "The School Days of an Indian Girl," Zitkala-Sa again admits this power when she defines her Indian nature. It is "the moaning wind" with power to stir memories--Dakota memories of flowers and fruit, of soft laps and bent grandfathers, boarding-school memories of scissors and bells, and Reservation memories of hunger and shame and death. Later, in her third essay, "An Indian Teacher Among Indians," she returns to the Reservation to see her mother and her brother. Just as she "alights from the iron horse," she's struck by a "strong hot wind . . . determined to blow [her] hat off, and return [her] to the olden days." This recurring image of personified Wind and its accompanying power to move spirit and memory appears throughout Zitkala-Sa's early writing. Likewise, the absence of wind from the Eastern boarding-school landscape demonstrates the significant loss of power she and thousands of other Indian children must have felt when separated from families and home.
       In further subversion of Iktomi's manipulative power, Zitkala-Sa tells the story of her mother who teaches her "little daughter" the {12} practical skills of a traditional Dakota woman, as well as the wisdom for living at peace with others:

Frequently she asked, "What were they doing when you entered their tepee?" This taught me to remember all I saw at a single glance. Often I told my mother my impressions without being questioned. (14)

The child must watch and listen in order to learn: "I ate my supper in quiet, listening patiently to the talk of the old people." From her mother the child learns to value and practice hospitality and generosity to friends and strangers, and to respect the rights of others. Most importantly, she herself should never intrude:

My mother used to say to me, as I was almost bounding away for the old people: "Wait a moment before you invite any one. If other plans are being discussed, do not interfere, but go elsewhere." (13)

       Likewise, the mother herself respects the rights of others. Leaving her daughter to her "own taste," she treats her as a "dignified little individual" as long as she is on her good behavior. She chooses not to impose her will on her child but instead--with a warning--allows her to go to the "land of the big apples" in the East. To the traditional Dakota, children are wakan, sacred, and an old grandfather demonstrates that traditional respect for the child when she serves him. Neither he nor her mother would have criticized the child's cold, muddy coffee. Instead, they "treated [her] best judgment, poor as it was, with the utmost respect" (28). Zitkala-Sa's trickery goes beyond contradiction of such an entrenched belief system. The mother in these essays is not the "quiet drudge"; she has a voice that teaches her daughter about the "paleface" forces she must battle. Warning the child of beguiling threats such as the poison in porcupine quills and in "white man's lies," she says, "Their words are sweet, but, my child, their deeds are bitter" (40-41). This mother tells her people's stories of the fraudulent "paleface" who drove them "like a herd of buffalo" to the reservation. And she tells her own story of an older daughter's death at the hands of Iktomi, who wears the mask of a US Government agent responsible for enforcing the Indian Removal and Reservation policies:

With every step, your sister, who was not as large as you are now, shrieked with the painful jar until she was hoarse with crying. She grew more and more feverish. Her little hands and cheeks were burning hot. Her little lips were parched and dry, hut she would not drink the water I gave her. Then I discovered that her throat was {13} swollen and red. . . . At last when we reached this western country, on the first weary night your sister died. (10)

       Again this Euro-American rhetoric used by Zitkala-Sa explodes into multiple images when read against the Yankton Reservation landscape. By 1858, 431,000 acres remained for the Yanktons from the original 13.5 million acres they had used in the previous century. From a population of 2,600 in 1857, the numbers of Yanktons and mixed-bloods on the Yankton Reservation dropped to 1,678 in 1902, because of epidemics of sore eyes, influenza, consumption, scrofula (tuberculosis), measles, chicken pox, and whooping cough. In order to use Indian land for their herds of cattle, white men would marry Indian women, women like Ellen Simmons (Annual Reports). While the language in these essays works to honor the strength of women, it also revives the near-smothered voices of a suffering people to tell their own captivity stories. Iktomi, disguised as a proponent of (de)culturation, would also have Indian people believing in the words of Thomas McKenney: "the Indian tongue is the great obstacle to the civilization of the Indians" (Sheehan 136). But Zitkala-Sa knew how to use the English language of her time, and she tricked her readers into believing she had left behind her Native tongue and culture. Readers today might object to the stiff formality in words like "greatly vexed," "impudence" and "insipid hospitality." Nonetheless, this vocabulary impressed Zitkala-Sa's contemporary non-Indian readers and critics who admired her proficiency with the English language, and who ultimately were responsible for publishing and promoting her work. In May of 1900, Outlook published an article entitled "The Representative Indian" by Jessie W. Cook. Sounding like a Jeffersonian philanthropist,⁶ Cook began with the question: "when will [Indians] become Americanized and be of use to the world?" With acknowledgement of Zitkala-Sa's "unusual musical genius," the writer assumes Zitkala-Sa's readiness to assimilate and become part of the eastern "social, political, or literary life" (80-83). According to Dexter Fisher, she had "fascinated the eastern literary world" because she was a "savage" who had not only learned to read and write in English but had published as well (Diss 158). Again, trickery persuades the Eastern literary audience into believing Zitkala-Sa had moved away from the "Indian in her."
       On the other hand, Zitkala-Sa's expertise with the language would have impressed the elders from a number of tribal traditions. Brian Swann refers to John Stands in Timber (Cheyenne) who describes the sacredness of the word to the Cheyenne people:

Someone who used language without "absolute correct-{14," he says, was "relegated to an outcast in the tribe." (xi)

Elizabeth Luther Cary cites Francis La Flesche, a member of the Omaha tribe and a contemporary of Zitkala-Sa:

The Omaha child was also strictly trained in the grammatical use of his native tongue. No slip was allowed to pass uncorrected, and children soon spoke as accurately as their elders. There was nothing corresponding to slang, to localisms, or to profanity. (23-25)

Not only does Zitkala-Sa use English correctly, but she manipulates the language to convey the sounds and images of her ancestral Dakota landscape. Like water rippling through rough-piled rocks, parallel consonants, vowels, and phrases flow from the lyrical Native voice. "My mother stooped, and stretching her left hand on the level with my eyes, she placed her other arm about me" (9). Through the repetition of "s" and "l" sounds, the words flow as her mother moves, releasing feminine energy and power through her eyes and hands. Later, the child moves with the same fluid power: "Standing straight and still, I began to glide after it, putting out one foot cautiously" (23). Parallel participles communicate the urgent determination in the child's voice as she runs after her shadow, "faster and faster, setting [her] teeth and clenching [her] fist" (23). Although Zitkala-Sa may have been imitating other Euro-American writers of the time, the lyric quality in her writing strongly resembles the fluidity of her Native language.
       Iktomi, masked as a nineteenth-century Quaker missionary, would have Indians believe they must set aside their pagan beliefs for the "more civilized" Judeo-Christian belief system,⁷ but Zitkala-Sa outsmarts the Trickster again. Like thousands of other Indian children, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin learned her English in a boarding school where Christianity and Euro-American civilization and culture were taught simultaneously. Consequently, the influence of Puritan rhetoric and its symbols pervades her writing, just as it does the writing of her nineteenth-century contemporaries. Taking the Puritan rhetoric, the writer tricks the reader into believing she has moved from her "pagan" belief system to Christianity, and then she uses that rhetoric to raise the value of her Dakota experience in the eyes of her Eastern audience. To master the "art" of beadwork, the child practices the Dakota value of fortitude by suffering "many trials." So important is proper Dakota behavior that the child judges and "punishes" herself when she misbehaves. Zitkala-Sa's Dakota family and community are raised to the sacred level of Christ when the guest is served "unleavened bread" and when her mother "worships" the uncle's memory. Here the writer reveals a traditional Lakota value: a woman's most valued relative is her brother.
{15}
       On the surface, it may appear that the writer has abandoned Wakan Tanka, and other symbols representing Lakota power, for the Judeo-Christian God, translated as "Great Spirit" for Indian peoples. The child fears the judgment of the "Great Spirit," and the mother accuses the "Great Spirit" of forgetting their family when a child dies. William K. Powers provides a possible suggestion for reading Zitkala-Sa's use of this term. He refers to Riggs who in 1869 defined the Lakota understanding of "Great Spirit":

Great Spirit is a god named last and least among their divinities. In no sense is he held in high reverence, no worship is offered to him. He is the white man's god, and they find no better way to name him. (175)

Powers suggests the cosmological understanding moves from JudeoChristian to Lakota and then back again. In the process, the Lakota and even the Christian belief system is reinvented or changed to a certain extent. Although the Great Spirit isn't designated as masculine within these essays, Zitkala-Sa's mother appears to regard this Spirit as an authoritarian and patriarchal power in the Judeo-Christian sense. However, there is another interpretation that would follow Riggs' definition.
       For the most part, the mother only speaks about the "Great Spirit" with reference to whites and to missionaries. In Zitkala-Sa's third essay, "An Indian Teacher Among Indians," the young woman returns home to the Reservation. There she sees her mother, now carrying the Bible translated in Dakota and praying for the "Great Spirit to avenge" the wrongs of the "palefaces." This mother knows this Spirit is the white man's god, and yet she believes he is Power. On the other hand, her daughter has learned not to trust this god because she has seen the suffering "His people" have caused in His name. But when the girl cries, "The Great Spirit does not care if we live or die! Let us not look for good or justice," the mother strokes her daughter's head, "as she used to do," and says: "There is Taku Iyotan Wasaka to which I pray." Like her mother, who--in her word and spirit--has outwitted the Trickster, Zitkala-Sa, with her own literary trickery, proves the continuance of the Dakota spiritual system and dispels the power of the established Judeo-Christian belief system.
       Furthermore, "against the memory" of Dakota culture, a Lakota power provides the child with the promise of a Dakota identity. By 1900, Indian people had lost land, relatives, and lost an element of their tribal identity as a consequence of marriages between whites and Indians. Although the essays never make reference to a non-Indian father, I believe the identity issue is treated symbolically in the episode about "shadows in the landscape." The child leaves behind the great {16} shadows of clouds and begins to chase her own shadow. But it "slips away . . . beyond" and moves whenever she moves. She finally "dares it to the utmost" and sits on a hillside rock where her shadow follows to sit beside her. Her friends don't understand the experience, just as Zitkala-Sa's brother and sister-in-law didn't understand her desire to keep her Dakota identity even as she pursued a Euro-American education.
       Biographers have suggested that Zitkala-Sa was never able to "catch" her heritage and claim it for her own since it was neither Indian nor Euro-American. Deborah Welch believes Zitkala-Sa was "at home in neither Anglo or Indian society (68). But the "rock imbedded in the hillside" may provide the clue to another interpretation. The rock is Power, Inyan, one of the four animate forces in the universe controlled by wakan, the "incomprehensible" of the Lakota people. Even in the midst of conflict, she "chases [her] shadow" and finally rests on the powerful and secure "rock" while her shadow comes to "sit beside" her.
       Further evidence of a certain Dakota identity appeared in Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's obituaries in three major newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Daily News, and The Washington Star. All three indicated she claimed to be the granddaughter of Sitting Bull. Dexter Fisher regards this as evidence of her personality, which had become an "admixture of myth and fact," resulting in such an "erroneous" belief ("Evolution" 236-38). Perhaps Zitkala-Sa was still practicing her trickery to outsmart the cultural imperialists who would define her for themselves. No doubt she knew traditional Lakota people use behavior rather than biological connections to define relationships. In her essay, "Impressions," Zitkala-Sa invites "a" grandfather, not "my" grandfather, indicating he was one of several grandfathers or older men whom she respected and valued. Likewise, Sitting Bull could have been her grandfather because she revered him as a leader who until his death continued to fight for the territorial and cultural integrity of his people.
       On Zitkala-Sa's home reservation, Yankton Reservation Agent J. F. Kinney summarized the US Government's manipulative scheme to eliminate the tribal and cultural identities of Indian peoples:

Education cuts the cord which binds them to a pagan life, places the Bible in their hands, and substitutes the true God for the false one, Christianity in place of idolatry, civilization in place of superstition, morality in place of vice, cleanliness in place of filth, industry in place of idleness, self-respect in place of servility, and, in a word, humanity in place of abject degradation. (1887 Annual Report 143)

{17} But with powerful trickery, Zitkala-Sa turns this pervasive fraud inside out as she articulates the story of her own victimization.
       With the vision of an adult looking back on her childhood, Zitkala-Sa could no doubt see the role Iktomi had played in her life's story. Moreover, we may read the motif of a personal and tribal trickster running throughout all three autobiographical essays. In the essay, "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," the Trickster has disguised himself as the "paleface . . . the heartless sham . . . who has defrauded" them of their land and "forced" them away. From the very beginning episode, the mother warns her daughter about the "white man's lies." But as Coleman suggests, "with emotions and motivations ranging from obedience to fear to curiosity to desires for white goods and an easier life," the child fails to recognize him when he arrives in missionary disguise.
       Throughout the essays, missionaries are associated with deceit, and just like Iktomi, they disturb the traditional Lakota world order, which is based on interdependence and trust. Once missionaries gave the child "a little bag of marbles . . . all sizes and colors. Among them were some of colored glass" (37). Intrigued with the "same colors of the rainbow" in the river's "crystal ice," she tried to pick out the colors with her fingers. But the "stinging cold" hurt, and she had to bite her fingers "to keep from crying." The adult narrator remembers that story and closes with serious irony: "From that day on, for many a moon, I believed that glass marbles had river ice inside of them" (38). The beauty in marbles deceives, just as the overt generosity of the missionaries masks their intention to remove and change Indian children forever.
       In the episode "The Big Red Apples," missionaries from the East arrive wearing big hats and carrying "large hearts, they said." Again the child's mother warns: "they have come to take away Indian boys and girls to the East." Although the inclusion of a sarcastic "they said" may indicate the adult narrator's disbelief in their "large hearts," the child foolishly trusts the missionaries and fails to heed her mother's warning. Consequently, she follows the temptation of "the big red apples." Here we can see how the Lakota story tradition, translated into English, has been woven into the Judeo-Christian tradition and rhetoric. With striking irony, the storyteller outwits the Trickster and condemns him for his fraudulent actions.
       In the Lakota oral tradition, storytellers would include "they said" in the telling to indicate the story represented the vision of a whole people and their traditions, not the singular "I." In this text--this story--we can interpret the inclusion of this phrase as an accusation of all missionaries. Not only does the adult narrator disbelieve these particular missionaries, but their deceitful voices represent the {18} collective voice of the whole community of "palefaces."
       Within this episode, Iktomi dons another disguise. Like the serpent in the Genesis account of the Fall, missionaries manipulate their victims into leaving parents and friends for boarding school in the East:

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:3-5)

Her friend Judewin becomes the tempters' accomplice when she tells about the "great tree where grew red, red apples . . . all the red apples we could eat"; and through the interpreter, missionaries promise "a ride on the iron horse." Like Eve, the child's "hope of going to a Wonderland" prevents her from recognizing the deceit:

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. (Genesis 3:6-7)

Adam and Eve knew their sin and tried to hide themselves "from the presence of the Lord God," and the child, with "vague misgiving," feels the "sense of regret" and weakness. Adam and Eve--and also this child--experience the consequences of their choice in the flesh as well as in their minds and hearts. Adam and Eve stand exiled, driven out, separated forever from the sacred ground of Eden, and the child, "the captured young of a wild creature," is turned over to "the hands of strangers" her mother didn't trust.
       In this episode, Zitkala-Sa has translated her Native belief system into English, has displaced the mythology of her Dakota heritage to shape her own voice and to subvert what she had no doubt experienced as the oppressive Judeo-Christian belief system. Iktomi is "not your relative" in the traditional sense of the word, according to Deloria. He is "without heart," selfish, manipulative, and deceitful, as he goes about his business of making fools of his victims. This is also true of the missionaries. But here we see not the Trickster, Iktomi, who acts on mere impulse and cannot be regarded as inherently evil.⁸ Instead, Iktomi is disguised as the premeditative serpent--the personification of Evil--in Genesis. There is no humor, no entertainment here; the consequences of this "trick" are too serious. Neither do we see this Iktomi experiencing ridicule or shame at the end.
       Nevertheless, the writer reverses Agent Kinney's scheme to {19} "elevate" the Indian, and she outsmarts the "paleface" as he stands accused. When this Dakota mother teaches her child--"free as the wind"--never to intrude herself upon others, multiple visions of American Indians' territorial and cultural losses--the consequence of "paleface" encroachment--surround and indict him. With bayonets and cannons, "palefaces" purge the American landscape of native animals and peoples to bring wagons and cattle, fences, plows, Bibles, crucifixes, and books that teach the Natives what to value. He is indicted when he fails to live up to his own Jeffersonian belief that individuals' expressions of freedom should never infringe on others' equal right to express and to act out their freedom. And he is indicted when he fails to abide by the Christian tenet: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Ideally, this is what it means to be "civilized" in the Lakota world as well as in the Judeo-Christian world. But the Indian child's practice of respect for the rights of others stands in bold opposition to visions of many selfish colonialists as they practiced relentless expansionism and cultural domination. In one scene, the mother directs her child to "go elsewhere" rather than to interfere with or hinder the elders' other plans. By contrast, many Indian people, and particularly Zitkala-Sa, witnessed settlers, government agents, and Christian enthusiasts both interfering with and hindering the Indians' plans for themselves. At the end of the "Impressions" essay, the "paleface" is indicted for kidnapping children when the child, in "trembling" fear, clutches a wall in place of her mother. And with the last words we hear from her mother in "Impressions," he is indicted for all those who have defrauded and victimized Indian people:

This tearing her away, so young, from her mother is necessary, if I would have her an educated woman. The palefaces, who owe us a large debt for stolen lands, have begun to pay a tardy justice in offering some education to our children. But I know my daughter must suffer keenly in this experiment. For her sake, I dread to tell you my reply to the missionaries. Go, tell them that they may take my little daughter, and that the Great Spirit shall not fail to reward them according to their hearts. (44)

This mother knows these "palefaces." She has grown up on Iktomi stories, and she has learned to watch for him. The gracious facade of the missionaries covering their heart(less)ness and the means to cause suffering don't fool her. Therefore, her last line is not a plea, not a prayer, but a curse upon those who have "stolen the land" and the children.
       With one more trick, Zitkala-Sa's storyteller's voice can be heard {20} from a traditional Dakota setting. In "Impressions," the "legends" are told by grandfathers and grandmothers around the nighttime fires "when the sun [hangs] low in the west." While telling the stories, the grandfather gestures, and the old women participate by making "funny remarks" and laughing, and the children practice responses such as "Han Han," (yes, yes) when the speaker pauses to breathe. The stories represent the experience and will of the entire group, the collective experience of the community, rather than the experience of one individual. "Our parents were led to say only those things that were in common favor" (22). In these essays, not only can we read the "paleface" as a collective Iktomi in disguise, but we can also read the voice within as a collective Native voice, telling the "common" story of a people and their experience to an eastern literary audience.
       Evidence from Zitkala-Sa's contemporaries indicates her trickery--or accusations--had succeeded in causing "personal" injury. Those at Carlisle were embarrassed by her purposeful identification as an Indian, especially since Pratt had advocated "killing the Indian within." The Red Man and Helper, Carlisle's newspaper, called her writing injurious and harmful, devoid of gratitude for the "kindness on the part of her friends" (Fisher "Evolution" 230). Further evidence suggests Gertrude Simmons left teaching at Carlisle because her employer, Richard Henry Pratt, "was unwilling to continue to employ a teacher who disagreed publicly with his acculturation practices" (Welch 25). In a response to Pratt's attack after her publications in The Atlantic Monthly, she said: "I won't be another's mouthpiece--I will say just what I think. I fear no man" (Welch 27).
       In 1902 Elizabeth Luther Cary reviewed Zitkala-Sa's three essays. In this review, she credits three American Indian Writers--Charles Eastman, Francis La Flesche, and "the Indian girl" Zitkala-Sa--for their contributions to "our" literature. Cary claims to have found literary value in Zitkala-Sa's writing because of its

truly compelling eloquence. Strange, pathetic, and caustic, her phrases burn themselves into the reader's consciousness . . . whole descriptions are instinct with passion and significance and curbed by a fine restraint. Her emotions, concentrated and violent, strike us with an electric shock; the form in which she wraps them is luminous and highly synthetic. (25)

With her colonial view that Indians can raise their level of civilization or status through education and the imitation of rational white ways, Elizabeth Cary denies the voice of Zitkala-Sa that attacks those same ideological foundations of Euro-American racial and cultural superiority. Squirming when Zitkala-Sa's "emotions" strike with an "electric {21} shock," Cary denounces the voice's rationality and regards the "sympathy" created as "forced." Cary calls the mashing turnips episode from "Indian School Days" "absurd . . . childish revenge," and she criticizes its inclusion in the text since it destroys the "element of tragedy" when it deviates "from the standard of brevity, emphasis, and incisiveness set for the adequate rendering of a dramatic situation."
       Cary quotes Zitkala-Sa in one of her explicit statements of pain: "it was inbred in me to suffer in silence rather than to appeal to the ears of one whose open eyes could not see my pain." Yet with Cary's "open eyes," she is still unable to see the "rationality" of Zitkala-Sa's pain and chooses instead to blame her "rebellion and bitter opposition" and to blame Zitkala-Sa's "revolt against civilization" on an "over sensitive nature" or to a "melancholy" that her classmates said was basic to her nature. Again, Cary insists that Zitkala-Sa's failure to find happiness or peace was basically her problem and not the problem of the system. It is ironic that Cary patronizes Zitkala-Sa and hopes she may find a "way of solving her problem" that might bring "peace in place of [her present] temper of mind." I suggest Cary's criticism of Zitkala-Sa's "forced sympathy" simply demonstrates the effectiveness and power of Zitkala-Sa's writing (Cary 23-25).
       On one level, we may interpret "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" and the following essays as nostalgic respect for a "vanished" way of life, as well as an approach to reconciliation with her mother and with her people. However, Zitkala-Sa's writing powerfully surpasses nostalgia when it is read against Said's suggested "memory of another landscape." With this reading, using the writer's surrounding cultural, sociological, and historical contexts, Zitkala-Sa's writing works to contradict the myths of powerless victimization, language inadequacy, and feminine impotence. Through these essays, with particular attention to "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," the writer demonstrates her refusal to accept defeat at the hands of the cultural imperialists who would deny her Native heritage and humanity. From exile, she establishes a strong and humane Dakota identity that no doubt gave her the strength to operate in both systems. But probably most important, with this reading Zitkala-Sa succeeds in fulfilling Beatrice Medicine's definition of a strong Lakota woman by maintaining her role as a "carrier of culture" to future generations.
       In contradiction of the second myth of bilingualism as a handicap, Zitkala-Sa appears to have adopted the rhetoric and ideology of the colonizers and thereby proves her ability to successfully communicate in English--even as she incorporates the resonant sounds and images of her Native language into the context of this colonial rhetoric. And finally, Zitkala-Sa contradicts the myth of feminine literary impotence. With the language and story of her Dakota heritage, Zitkala-Sa disrupts {22} the repressive forces of the Judeo-Christian discourse and ideology. With multiple images emerging from her Dakota landscape, she creates a literary world that pulses under the power of her feminine Dakota ancestors while it operates to break the Euro-American powers of (de)culturation and acculturation.
       It can't be denied that Lakota tradition--traditional Lakota values, her mother (Tate I Yohin Win), and the traditional strength of women as teachers in the Lakota culture--was the major source of Zitkala-Sa's power and voice. But she also effectively used the dominant culture to communicate with both cultures. I believe she proved to be a very strong voice both to the Indian world and to America's literary society, always insisting that "Anglo America must recognize what was good and deserving of preservation in Indian culture" (Welch 33), not so much that "Anglo America" might benefit but so they would cease depriving Indian peoples of their rightful cultural heritage.

NOTES

       ¹From a letter Gertrude Simmons wrote to Carlos Montezuma, as quoted by Dexter Fisher in her Foreword to American Indian Stories, x.

       ²Before contact, the greater Sioux nation was divided into seven major bands. Three dialects, representing three major alliances, existed within this nation--Dakota, and Nakota, and Lakota, which also represented the larger nation as a whole. Whenever I have referred to aspects of the larger culture, I have used "Lakota" rather than "Sioux," which several scholars believe is a French aberration of a Chippewa word for the Lakota people. Although some anthropologists would designate the Yanktons as Nakota speakers, I have used Yankton/Dakota throughout this essay for three reasons: Gertrude Simmons was born on the Yankton [Sioux] Reservation and throughout her life claimed to be a Dakota woman; Raymond DeMallie, in his "Introduction" to Sioux Indian Religion Tradition and Innovation, suggests the Yanktons called themselves "Dakotah" throughout recorded history (7); and the Yanktons are regarded as "Dakotas" in the Yankton Reservation Agency reports.

       ³This was the philosophy of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School where Gertrude Simmons taught for a year. Merrill Edwards Gates, LL.D., President of Rutgers College included Pratt's philosophy in his article, "Land and Laws as Agents in Educating the Indian." He prefaced the quotation with, "the noblest rejoinder I have heard come recently from the staunch hero who is the head of the Carlisle School for the Indians, Captain Pratt." Gates' article was published in the 1885 Annual Report of the Department of the Interior 1, 775.

       ⁴This citation is from the Introduction to Dakota Texts, but the previous information may be found in Ella Deloria's footnotes throughout the text.

{23}
       ⁵For cosmological information, I have relied primarily on two sources by James R. Walker: Lakota Myth, edited by Elaine Jahner (30-33), and Lakota Society, edited by Raymond DeMallie (5). Walker takes an Oglala perspective, although, according to DeMallie, Walker used the word "Lakota in its broadest sense . . . to include the Dakota speakers (the Santees and the Yanktons/Yanktonais) as well as the Lakota speakers (Tetons) . . . with common language (divided into three or more dialects), by common culture, and by common blood."

       ⁶Bernard W. Sheehan discusses the Jeffersonian philosophy: All humans are of equal origin, but all humans are also in a state of becoming. If the natives were equal physically, then they could become morally and culturally equal also. The Euro-Americans could help the natives achieve the superior development of whites as they "made over the Indian in the image of the white man." Once they accomplished this task, they believed the Indian would become incorporated into the Euro-American society (142).

       ⁷Sheehan cites an excerpt from a letter written by Cyrus Kingsbury in 1826: "the plain and simple, yet powerful truths of the gospel addressed to the hearts and consciences of the heathen is the most direct way to civilize, as well as christianize them" (127).

       ⁸Dexter Fisher suggests Zitkala-Sa broke from the oral tradition in her telling of the story "Iktomi and the Ducks." "By rearranging the same events [Zitkala-Sa] presents Iktomi as one who, indeed, does will things consciously. He premeditates his action by devising a trick and then seeks the opportunity to enact it" (Diss. 61).

WORKS CITED

Cary, Elisabeth Luther. "Recent Writings by American Indians." The Book Buyer: A Monthly Review of American Literature. February 1902: 23-25.

Coleman, Michael C. "Motivations of Indian Children at Missionary and U.S. Government Schools." Montana: The Magazine of Western History. Winter 1990: 30-45.

Cook, Jessie W. "The Representative Indian." The Outlook. 5 May 1900: 80-83.

Deloria, Ella. Dakota Texts. New York: Stechert, 1932.

---. Waterlily. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.

DeMallie, Raymond. "Male and Female in Traditional Lakota Culture." The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Eds. Patricia Halbers and Beatrice Medicine. New York: University Press of America, 1983.

Fisher, Dexter. "The Transformation of Tradition: A Study of Zitkala-Sa and Mourning Dove, Two Transitional American Indian Writers." Diss. City University of New York, 1979.

---. "The Transformation of Tradition: A Study of Zitkala-Sa and Mourning Dove, Two Transitional American Indian Writers." Critical Essays on American Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. Boston: Hall, 1985.

{24}
---. "Zitkala-Sa: The Evolution of a Writer." American Indian Quarterly 5 Aug (1977): 229-38.

Gates, Merrill Edwards. Annual Report of the Department of the Interior 1: 775.

Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. New York: Norton, 1975.

Medicine, Beatrice. "Indian Women and the Renaissance of Traditional Religion." Sioux Indian Religion Tradition and Innovation. Eds. Raymond DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987.

Powers, William K. "Cosmology and the Reinvention of Culture: The Lakota Case." Canadian Journal of Native Studies 7.2 (1987): 165-80.

Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York: Shocken, 1972.

Said, Edward. "Reflections on Exile." One World, Many Cultures. Ed. Stuart Hirschberg. New York: MacMillan, 1992.

Sheehan, Bernard W. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian. New York: Norton, 1973.

Swann, Brian, ed. Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.

United States. Department of the Interior and Indian Affairs. Annual Reports. Washington: GPO, 1874-1902.

Walker, James R. Lakota Myth. Ed. Elaine A. Jahner. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.

---. Lakota Society. Ed. Raymond DeMallie. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982.

Weist, Katherine. "Beasts of Burden and Menial Slaves: Nineteenth Century Observations of Northern Plains Indian Women." The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Eds. Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine. New York: University Press of America, 1983.

Welch, Deborah. "American Indian Leader: The Story of Gertrude Bonnin." Diss. U of Wyoming, 1985.

Yaeger, Patricia. Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing. New York: Columbia U P, 1988.

Zitkala-Sa [Gertrude Simmons Bonnin]. American Indian Stories. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.

---. Old Indian Legends. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.

Acceptance and Rejection of Assimilation in the Works of Luther Standing Bear

Frederick Hale         

        Research on various fronts since the 1970s has illuminated many aspects of American Indian Literatures but has as yet shed very little light on the works of Luther Standing Bear. This Lakota chief, who was apparently born during the 1860s in what became South Dakota, originally bore the name Ota K'te, meaning "Plenty Kill," followed a highly unusual course through life, a path to whose uniqueness his written works testify. When approximately twelve years old he became one of the first pupils at the new Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. After some three years of study there and a brief period of employment at a department store in Philadelphia, he returned to his native area, where the defeated Lakotas were being subjected to reservation life at Rosebud and Pine Ridge. Standing Bear spent three decades on those two reservations, finding employment as a teacher, lay minister, shopkeeper, and rancher. During this crucial period in the history of the Lakotas, the Ghost Dance religion unfolded and the massacre at Wounded Knee of 29 December 1890 occurred. Early in the Twentieth Century Standing Bear accompanied Buffalo Bill Cody's notorious Wild West show to England. In 1905 he was chosen chief of the Oglala Sioux. Seven years later, after numerous clashes with government Indian agents, he left South Dakota permanently to pursue a career as a film actor in Hollywood. His literary career began in the mid-1920s when he started to write a largely autobiographical book titled My People the Sioux. Standing Bear's other significant work, Land of the Spotted Eagle, followed in the early 1930s. This latter volume is an ethnographic study in which he describes Lakota traditions and stridently defends them from what he perceived as a deeply entrenched pattern of unjust and condescending white distortions of Native American life.
       In the present article I endeavor to take initial steps towards redressing scholarly neglect of this author. Beyond presenting a {26} general introduction to Standing Bear, I shall examine in detail aspects of a conspicuous underlying theme in his works, namely the radicalization that is apparent in his attitudes towards European-American culture and control over his own ethnic group. When one compares My People the Sioux and Land of the Spotted Eagle, one finds two fundamentally different, though not diametrically opposed, perspectives on the general question of assimilation into white society. More specifically, Standing Bear modified somewhat his attitudes towards the Lakotas themselves, though this metamorphosis should not be exaggerated, and white benevolence vis-a-vis Native Americans. Given his unique history of involvement in white society and his position of leadership in his own ethnic group, as well as the nature of his literary production, future study of his works will have to take into account these fundamental shifts.

My People the Sioux

       Standing Bear began to write My People the Sioux in 1925, more than a decade after he had left Pine Ridge to pursue a career in Hollywood, and completed it in 1927. Houghton Mifflin published this groundbreaking corrective the following year. The volume is self-consciously tendentious and defensive. The purpose of his first major venture with the pen, Standing Bear states in his Preface, was to counter misrepresentations that authors of "white blood" and "mixed blood" had inflicted on the reading public. "White men who have tried to write stories about the Indian have either foisted on the public some bloodcurdling, impossible `thriller'; or, if they have been in sympathy with the Indian, have written from knowledge which was not accurate and reliable," he laments. Nearly 300 pages long, My People the Sioux is divided into twenty-six chapters of greatly varying length. The overall structure of the book is autobiographical with a well-integrated admixture of amateur ethnography. Standing Bear chronicled his life from the plains of what became South Dakota and Nebraska through his approximately three years of formal education and other means of assimilation at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1882, his return to Dakota Territory, and his career in southern California. The neophyte author dealt with some phases of his life in rich detail while giving others short shrift.
       The extent to which the book is Standing Bear's own work is probably impossible to ascertain. It was edited by E. A. Brininstool, a white writer of western lore and fiction. Much of the prose rings true, however, and bears the stamp of naive plausibility. It is moderately polished writing, although the book is rather loosely organized. There are also numerous minor solecisms and, considered {27} in the context of Standing Bear's total authorship, narrative inconsistencies. The latter cast faint shadows on Standing Bear's credibility but in at least one case also help to illuminate his shift in attitude towards European-American culture. He declared emphatically in My People the Sioux that he was born in December 1868 (3). In an article written in 1931, however, after he had become decidedly more critical of white cultural hegemony over the Lakotas, Standing Bear insisted that he was "born during the troublous days of the 60s, the exact year is not known, when the Sioux were succumbing to the trickery of the whites and the undermining of their own tribal morale" ("Tragedy of the Sioux" 273). The ambiguity regarding the year of his birth also found its way into secondary accounts. In Who's Who Among the Sioux, the time of his birth is given obliquely as "the mid-1800s" (228). According to his obituary in The New York Times, Standing Bear was seventy-four years old at the time of his death in February 1939, which would place his birth in 1864 or 1865 ("Chief Standing Bear" 23). Underscoring the unreliability of that source, however, is the fact that his birthplace is given as the Pine Ridge Reservation, which did not exist at that time. Other inconsistencies also mar the text. Standing Bear stated that he was the first Indian boy to enter the school at Carlisle (133) but subsequently admitted that counterparts from tribes in the South preceded his enrollment there (177).
       Standing Bear did not paint an entirely one-sided portrait of his ethnic fellows in My People the Sioux, although his reminiscences of his early life are unabashedly romantic. Writing when approximately sixty years old, he evidently nurtured fond memories of his boyhood on the plains. "We had everything provided for us by the Great Spirit above," he recalled. "Is it any wonder that we grew fat with contentment and happiness?" (27). If his memories are even remotely correct, one can well understand the gratitude inherent in his generalization. Life on the open prairie seemed almost edenic. Standing Bear repeatedly lauded his parents and grandparents for their nurturing skills, which seemed to manifest their kindness in the younger generation. "There was no roughness shown among the children, nor was any advantage taken of any one. We always `played fair,' as we were taught to be fair in all things," he remembered (48). Recreational activities produced a race who were "all fast runners, very strong and fine-looking" (45). Moreover, "there were no idlers in our camp, no lazy ones," and the Lakota women, productively engaged making moccasins and other attire when not playing games, conducted themselves equally well. "There was no gossiping," according to Standing Bear (67).
       A less idyllic portrayal of Native American life emerges in only a few pages of My People the Sioux. Standing Bear emphasizes the {28} centrality of preparation for warfare in his informal education and repeatedly stresses his father's admonition that he die in battle in accordance with the warrior tradition of the Lakotas. Furthermore, hunting parties had to take special measures to prevent some bowmen from violating the tribal ideal, necessary for survival, of sharing the bounty. "To make sure that none of these hunters tried to be tricky and get ahead of some other hunter, three men rode with them with war-clubs in their hands, which they were to use on any hunter who tried to `get funny,' as the white man calls it" (52). Finally, however peaceful and otherwise ideal Lakota society seemed in Standing Bear's eyes, it did not reflect American Indian reality in general. He notes that fear accompanied buffalo hunters in areas contested by other tribes, especially the Pawnees to the south. Standing Bear relates how his father returned from such an excursion and notes nonchalantly that he had killed seven Pawnees in a skirmish. Warriors who performed such feats gained their "just merits" at Lakota feasts (57).
       Nowhere does Standing Bear reveal his generally though by no means categorically positive attitude towards assimilation in European-American society more clearly than in his recollection of his experience at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. That institution, which Richard Pratt (1840-1924) established in 1879, became his home in the autumn of that year.¹ Standing Bear recalls that initially he and his fellow pupils had to sleep on a hard floor and eat meager rations, and that he and the other boys deeply resented being shorn of their long hair. Moreover, the stress of white academic life apparently took its toll in Indian lives as several of the children succumbed to unknown causes at Carlisle. Nevertheless, his overall assessment of the opportunity it provided him was clearly positive. Standing Bear gives no indication that he resisted compulsory religious education; indeed, he mentions approvingly that all pupils enjoyed some measure of religious freedom (144-45). As part of his unwitting assimilation, he chose "Luther" from a list of names a teacher had written on the blackboard. Furthermore, the Lakota youth soon learned that "it paid to do whatever was asked of me, and to do it without grumbling; also that it pays to obey your parents in all things" (153). Standing Bear remembered that by 1881 he was doing "splendidly" at the school, that he impressed many whites with the speed with which he and his fellow pupils "were acquiring the white man's ways," and that he had a strong desire to speak English fluently (155). Indeed, so impressed was Standing Bear with Carlisle Indian Industrial School that in 1882 he gladly accepted Pratt's offer to send him back to his home area to assist in recruiting more Lakota pupils. He succeeded in convincing approximately fifty to accompany him back to Carlisle, an accomplishment he relates in detail (160-66). Standing Bear had mixed feelings {29} about leaving the school in 1882 and declared retrospectively that it "was the best place for the Indian boy" (179).
       After returning to his homeland and settling on the Rosebud and, later, Pine Ridge Reservations, Standing Bear found himself inevitably straddling two cultures. Some of the Lakotas at Rosebud thought his complexion, lightened because of limited exposure to the sun, made him different from other members of the tribe. "It made me feel very proud to have them compare me to a white boy," he wrote. Standing Bear added that his attire made him resemble "one of these Jew comedians on the stage" (191-92). In a similar attitudinal vein, he remembered that his first child, a girl born to his mixed blood wife, was "very pretty, and took after the white side of the family." Their second child, a son, by contrast, "took after my side of the family, being of dark complexion, but was a very fine baby, nevertheless (203). Like his father, Standing Bear became a shopkeeper, applying for his own economic advancement skills acquired while briefly employed at a department store in Philadelphia. Other signs of his assimilation also came to the fore. In 1898 he and his father had their horses branded in accordance with white ranching practice (244). While teaching at Pine Ridge, he participated in a dramatic production titled The Landing of Columbus, an act that a later generation of Native Americans would have dismissed as cultural treason (235). Standing Bear expressed no regret for this activity.
       No less revealing is his attitude towards the Ghost Dance in the early 1890s. Standing Bear explained that his fellow Lakotas were "very superstitious" at that time and thus "their feelings were easily aroused and played upon" (218). He consequently thought it was natural but nevertheless regrettable that "they felt that this new religion was going to rid them of the hated pale-faces who had antagonized them so long" (219). It should be borne in mind that at this time Standing Bear was serving as a lay minister in the Episcopal Church, the denomination in which he had been baptized while attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. When asked for his opinion about whether people should join the Ghost Dance, Standing Bear had taken a pragmatic position and told fellow Lakotas that "it would not be right for them to join the ghost dancers, as the Government was going to stop it, and it would not be best for them to be found there" (220). He praised his father's role in serving as an agent of reconciliation after the carnage at Wounded Knee and rebuffed those "wild Indians" who refused to smoke the peace pipe (228-29). Standing Bear left no doubt that he regarded the violent suppression of the Ghost Dance as inexcusable but nevertheless insisted that on their reservations in the late Nineteenth Century "the Indians, as a whole, were quite happy, as they appeared to be getting about everything they wanted" (241).
{30}
       Near the end of My People the Sioux Standing Bear recounts both his participation and that of many other Lakotas in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, focusing on its tour of England shortly after the turn of the century. His account sheds additional light on his sometimes condescending attitude towards his settled tribesmen in the era of the reservation. One of the abstemious Standing Bear's greatest tribulations while serving as a disciplinarian was keeping the Lakota members of the troupe sober. Despite implementing various means of controlling them, including a pass system, he recalled that "the Indians managed to get their whiskey." Implying the existence of an innate behavioral factor, Standing Bear related that "the craving for the vile stuff made them go to extremes," which he described in lurid examples (256-58). Further underscoring the impression that his fellow Native Americans in the employ of Buffalo Bill required paternalistic discipline, he told how that American entertainer had praised him for "the good work I had done in keeping the Indians sober and in good order." Standing Bear agreed and wrote that "to this day I am proud of the success I had while abroad with the Buffalo Bill show, in keeping the Indians under good subjection" but admits that because some had "spent their money foolishly" he had autocratically decreed that part of their salaries would be withheld until their return to the United States of America (268-69). However critical his attitude towards his ethnic brethren may have been at that time, Standing Bear was sufficiently enamored of British and European-American culture to name his daughter, who was born in England in 1902, inter alia after the wife of Prince Edward, namely Alexandra Birmingham Cody Standing Bear (266). His subsequent writing would be in a much different vein, reflecting an almost total reversal of this general pattern of respect for whites and acceptance of the paternalism with which they treated indigenous Americans.
       Possibly owing to a need to complete forthwith My People the Sioux, which had been in progress for approximately two years, Standing Bear treated the most recent two decades of his life inconsistently and glossed over many events after the completion of his stint with Buffalo Bill. On the one hand, he described in detail how he was chosen chief of the Oglala Sioux in 1905 and, after bureaucratic machinations, finally acquired United States citizenship, an achievement that at the time made him "feel that I had been raised higher than a chieftainship" (282). On the other hand, Standing Bear related both his economic activities in and crucial relations with government Indian agents in South Dakota in a most cryptic fashion, and his wife simply disappears from the narrative following the deaths of two of their children. He provided very few details about his career in the film industry, which began in 1912, although he complained bitterly that Indian actors suffered racial discrimination that hampered their {31} professional advancement and that every film depicting Native Americans had severely misrepresented them (284-85). My People the Sioux ends rather abruptly after Standing Bear had made these points and appealed to readers to give Indians further economic opportunities.

The Tragedy of the Sioux

       Standing Bear's brief return to Rosebud and Pine Ridge in 1931 proved a watershed event in his authorship, one that appears to have made an indelible mark on his perceptions of Lakota life and United States government policy vis-a-vis Native Americans. It also shaped the content and tone of Land of the Spotted Eagle, as we shall see shortly, and signalled a radicalization of his social and political views. Standing Bear described this disenchanting experience in an article titled "The Tragedy of the Sioux," which The American Mercury, then edited by the caustic social critic Henry Mencken, carried later that year.
       After an absence of approximately sixteen years, lived under economically privileged conditions, Standing Bear appears not to have been fully prepared for the debilitating conditions that approximately half a century of subjugation on the reservations of South Dakota had wrought. His article testifies boldly to the anger that resulted from his perceptions at Rosebud and Pine Ridge and, one suspects, his sense of virtual helplessness to ameliorate the indigence and spiritual torpor of their residents.
       The brief reminiscences in the first few paragraphs of Standing Bear's article underscore his new posture. Regarding his decades at the two reservations after his return from Carlisle, he generalized that he had "developed into a chronic disturber" and "a bad Indian" who "remained a hostile, even a savage, if you please." As Standing Bear insisted without apology, "I still am. I am incurable" (273). He painted a decidedly more critical portrait than previously of his exposure to assimilationist education, declaring that "in 1879 I was sent, with some eighty other boys and girls, to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, to be made over into the likeness of the conqueror" (273). Entirely absent from his not entirely ingenuous depiction of this episode of his life was any indication that he had wanted to go to Carlisle in the first place and voluntarily stayed there longer than anticipated. Standing Bear's attitude towards Christianity also appears to have undergone a metamorphosis during the 1920s or early 1930s. The church, he judged, had played a role in "routing the old life" of the Lakotas and was "very foreign, very upsetting, to minds and bodies that had, out of centuries of struggle, achieved a harmony with their surroundings" (274). Again, Standing Bear chose not to {32} mention his elective participation in the Episcopal Church or involvement in its work as a lay minister, which he had described in My People the Sioux.
       The physical conditions that the Lakotas were then experiencing in South Dakota made the first impact on Standing Bear. During the previous winter, he observed, they had been "in desperate straits" because of a food shortage. Some had been compelled to violate a deeply seated taboo by eating horse meat, which the alarmed Standing Bear found ubiquitously drying in the sun. He attributed to a scarcity of meat, the mainstay of the tribe's traditional diet, the physical degeneracy he perceived. Older Lakotas, Standing Bear believed, still evinced the physical vigor he had known decades earlier. "But the young--they showed weakness coming on. Their cheeks were hollowed and their lower jaws drooped down--the inevitable sign of hunger." He thus feared that the coming winter would bring a catastrophe to the reservations (275). The encroachment of white cattlemen on reservation land for grazing purposes seemed to Standing Bear to be the primary cause for the decline of the food supply. Whereas the Lakotas at Rosebud and Pine Ridge had possessed noteworthy herds earlier in the century, the intermingling of their animals with those of the white ranchers had somehow decimated the former. "The Indian's herds have not ceased to exist," Standing Bear declared obliquely without explaining how this had come about. The solution seemed obvious to him: "Remove the white man entirely. Fence the reservation if necessary. Stock the land with cattle and let the Sioux do the rest" (276). Related to the economic changes they had experienced, the Lakotas had begun to suffer various medical difficulties of a magnitude previously unknown. Standing Bear found most of his ethnic fellows wearing canvas instead of leather moccasins and thought the "most noticeable thing about the Sioux people in general is their dire need of dentistry" (276).
       Physical deprivation had enervated the Lakotas spiritually, morally, and mentally. Standing Bear recorded testimonies that the medicine men no longer could heal or work wonders and that in a broader sense the combination of autocratic rule by government agents and the presence of sizeable numbers of other whites had cost the Lakotas their faith. He longed for the days of his youth "when everyone ate or no one ate; when a man's word was never broken; when there was plenty, for no man killed except for food" (277). In none of these respects did the reality of 1931 live up to the ideal conditions of his memory.
       Standing Bear was especially concerned about the younger generation and clearly feared that if it did not somehow reverse the course that the Lakotas were then following, the tribe would soon be entirely decrepit if not extinct. They struck him as bereft of the {33} manners of their elders, lacking educational and cultural direction generally, and in want of a vision of the future that in any meaningful way related to their ethnic past. Standing Bear found many young Lakotas of both sexes addicted to alcohol and nicotine and using profane language. "Self-mastery--which the old Indian knew so well--is weakened and the young have not the strength to deny themselves." He therefore thought it particularly imperative that young Lakota "be trained in the history and arts of their people," for only by receiving such education could they "perpetuate the native dances, songs, music, poetry, languages and legends, as well as the native arts and crafts" that supplied the spiritual lifeblood of their tribe (278). Instead of providing adequate educational conditions, however, the segregated government schools were "a curse and a blight." Standing Bear acknowledged that the mission schools on the reservations were superior to those which the government administered but lamented that the former lacked the capacity to admit large numbers of applicants.
       Broaching a theme to which he would return in a subsequent book, Standing Bear delivered a parting shot at white America. He resented oft-repeated, condescending assertions of the necessity of elevating Indians to the standards of European-Americans. "It is not a question (as so many white writers like to state it) of the white man `bringing the Indian up to his plane of thought and action.' It is rather a case where the white man had better grasp some of the Indian's spiritual strength." Reversing this rhetorical tradition, Standing Bear insisted that "the white race today is but half civilized and unable to order his [sic] life into ways of peace and righteousness (277). How whites could tap what he acknowledged was rapidly disappearing Native American civilization, however, he did not explain.

Land of the Spotted Eagle

       Shortly after returning to southern California, Standing Bear began to write his second major book, Land of the Spotted Eagle. Houghton Mifflin did not publish this work until 1933, but internal evidence indicates that it was completed before the end of 1931, i.e., within a few months of Standing Bear's dispiriting visit to South Dakota. Much in this volume reflects a sentiment that harmonized with that of "The Tragedy of the Sioux." Land of the Spotted Eagle must be read with this in mind. It also reflects its author's disillusionment with white life in the Los Angeles vicinity during the 1920s, when he experienced unbridled greed, detachment from nature, and other manifestations of cultural decadence of the "Jazz Age" at their worst.
       In the meantime, public attitudes towards American Indians had undergone a partial metamorphosis that made such ethnic identity less {34} shameful for many who claimed it. The extent of this shift should not be exaggerated, but in any case the decade of the 1920s brought certain developments that stand out in this respect. The protracted controversy over the Bursum Bill, which was introduced in Congress in 1922 and would have dispossessed the Pueblos of much of their traditional land, aroused the sympathy of sectors of the American public. It consequently never became law. Two years later President Calvin Coolidge signed an act granting citizenship to all Indians who had been born in the United States but who did not yet have it. In the meantime, organizations like the American Indian Defense Fund had arisen to advocate the rights of indigenous peoples. They took their place alongside the older Indian Rights Association in this broad campaign.
       Among influential Lakotas, after a generation on their reservations, there had developed by the 1920s a general acceptance of white hegemony and indeed a high degree of dependence on the federal government. Symbolically, this was typified in 1927 when Chief Henry Standing Bear, younger brother of the author and actor, welcomed Coolidge to South Dakota, adopted him into his tribe, and bestowed on him the name Wamblee-Tokaha, or "Leading Eagle." Dressed in full regalia, Henry Standing Bear read an oath of fealty to Coolidge as the "White Chief and Protector of the Indians." In a brief speech, the Lakota chief acknowledged that men like Sitting Bull, Spotted Tail, and Red Cloud "may have made mistakes" but expressed his confidence that as their successor Coolidge would "fulfill the same duty call from which they never did shrink, a duty to protect and help the weak" ("Coolidge Becomes Chief" 1). This obsequiousness dovetailed perfectly with the assimilationist position of Henry Standing Bear and relatively well with the ambivalent attitude towards European-American civilization expressed in his brother's My People the Sioux.
       In literary circles, there was a resurgence of interest in Native Americans during the 1920s. Perhaps no work gained more prominence in this regard that Oliver La Farge's novel of 1929, Laughing Boy, for which its author was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature. La Farge juxtaposed pristine Navajo society and the degenerate white civilization that was continuing to intrude and leave its debilitating stamp on it. Whereas white public sentiment hitherto had overwhelmingly favored the assimilation of Native Americans, many culturally prominent people began to revive the ideal of the undisturbed primitive indigenous society, examples of which they perceived in the Southwest. The Dakotas and Lakotas, by contrast, had obviously changed too greatly since the 1870s to fuel the imaginations of even the most romantic whites in this way. Brian W. Dippie has summarized the proliferating attitude and how it was replacing a previous one: "The noble savage, wild, free-spirited the antithesis of societal restraint, had 34ii} now become the model member of an organic community, the perfect tribalized being. Those who did not fit this mold, like the settlement Indians of the past, were somehow less Indian" (295). Standing Bear, who had spent the decade of the 1920s in southern California acting in films and engaging in various other economic activities in a culture dominated by avaricious whites with little apparent interest in the welfare of Native Americans, appears to have come under the influence of this new spirit. He composed his subsequent literary works in a correspondingly different key.
       In obvious respects Land of the Spotted Eagle reflects both Standing Bear's anger at the decadence of the Lakotas and his eagerness to identify with his tribal legacy. Whereas My People the Sioux was largely autobiographical, this volume was a foray into the world of ethnography, though of a subjective sort that afforded its author abundant opportunity to employ his experiences as illustrations of Lakota folkways and evidence of the devastation that European-American cultural and economic hegemony had wrought. Land of the Spotted Eagle encompasses 259 pages divided into nine chapters. Like Standing Bear's first book, it is stylistically simple and straightforward. Furthermore, it imparts a wealth of information about most aspects of traditional Lakota life; indeed, in some respects the detail may have overwhelmed the nonspecialist readers for whom it was intended. Standing Bear's zeal to depict his ethnic tradition in a favorable light led him to make generalizations that are neither substantiated nor plausible. He thus created a tendentious work that arguably sheds just as much light on its author's anger and resulting pride as it does about the subject he intended to portray.
       Standing Bear's overarching and intertwined themes were that the Lakotas were a vigorous, harmonious, artistically talented, spiritually vibrant, morally upright, and cultivated people well-adjusted to their natural environment on the plains before the advent of European civilization; that they were not inferior to white Americans; that European-American civilization was decadent and tended to corrupt that of Native Americans; and that to the extent that the Lakotas no longer displayed the admirable traits of their ancestors to any appreciable degree this shortcoming could be attributed to the impact of whites and United States government policies towards American Indians. Indicative of his tendentiousness, Standing Bear conceded that "the Indian, like every other man, was possessed of both faults and virtues" (66), but he ignored the former almost entirely while underscoring the latter throughout his book.
       In fact, to an even greater extent than in My People the Sioux Standing Bear depicted the Lakotas and their traditional ways in glowing terms. Before being conquered, he averred, members of his {36} tribe were "large and strong with well-defined features" (45). Standing Bear had never seen "crippled or deformed babies" (3). Many had possessed "perfect teeth" into old age (63), and on the whole remained "lean and thin due to their outdoor and vigorous lives" (64). They were "blessed with good health" and had little need for medicines. Standing Bear did not believe that contagious diseases existed among the Lakotas before they were enclosed on reservations (60). So keen were the senses of the Lakotas that they "almost matched those of that animals that he caught for food" (69). Some, for that matter, were prescient (72). Socially, members of the tribe were "industrious" and, while living in their natural, unrestricted environment on the plains, they had remained active, in contrast to the relatively sedentary life that had begun to form part of the stereotype of existence on the reservations (66-67). Tidiness, moreover, had characterized their households. Family life was exemplary. Echoing themes he had developed in My People the Sioux, Standing Bear declared in Land of the Spotted Eagle that Lakota parents never abused or neglected their children and that they taught them effectively by natural example (7, 16, 84). In this Eden of the American West, moreover, "there was little or no crime among the people of the plains until their tribal life was disrupted" (175).
       The question of education occupies a prominent place in this book. Standing Bear found a stark contrast between Lakota and European-American pedagogy. In his early childhood, he noted, education had been natural rather than unnecessarily systematic and contrived. "When children are growing up to be individuals there is no need to keep them in a class or in line with one another," the aging chief insisted (15). His recollections of life at Carlisle had taken a sharp turn for the worse. He recalled bitterly that there the dignity of the pupils fell victim to "foolish examinations" that did little more than make children conscious of their shortcomings. "I never knew embarrassment or humiliation of this character until I went to Carlisle School and was there put under the system of competition," Standing Bear remembered. He related how one ostensibly insensitive teacher had ordered him to read a passage aloud no fewer than eleven times without giving him any positive feedback. "I sat down thoroughly cowed and humiliated for the first time in my life and in front of the whole class!" he recalled (17). Entirely absent from Standing Bear's account of his years at Carlisle in Land of the Spotted Eagle, conspicuously so to one who has recently read the corresponding chapters in My People the Sioux, are his praise of the opportunities it gave him or any mention of his efforts to recruit dozens of other Lakota boys and girls to accompany him back to Pratt's school in the early 1880s.
       The depiction of traditional Lakota religious life and practices is {37} similarly roseate. Standing Bear praised them as a natural expression of Native American spirituality that harmonized perfectly with the forces of nature. Yet he sought to dispel accusations of animism by explaining that the Lakotas did not worship the sun or any other physical object, but concentrated their veneration on Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit or Great Mystery (46-47). Standing Bear remained silent about his participation in the ministry of the Episcopal Church and did not explain how and why he had ended that phase of his career or reveal what had prompted him to revert to traditional tribal spirituality. Treatment of this topic could have added a valuable dimension to sections of Land of the Spotted Eagle whose ramifications would have extended well beyond an understanding of its author as an isolated individual.
       Standing Bear defended the Lakotas against the stereotype of violence with which he believed white America had unjustly burdened them. His rhetoric involved an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, he praised the tribal warrior tradition, pointing out that it provided an ideal of bravery which Lakota society lauded in song and dance and which boys wanted to emulate (24-25). Chivalry reached its zenith on the plains: "The great brave was a man of strict honor, undoubted truthfulness, and unbounded generosity. He was strong enough to part with his last horse or weapon and his last bit of food. In conduct he never forgot pride and dignity, accepting praise and honor and wearing fine regalia without arrogance" (39). On the other hand, Standing Bear insisted that his people had been peaceful and blamed their undeniable history of warfare on incursions by their ostensibly less irenic Pawnee and Crow neighbors (40-41).
       To a much greater extent than in My People the Sioux, white Americans are the imperialist villains of Land of the Spotted Eagle. Whereas in the former volume Standing Bear had alternatively praised and vilified them, in the latter book they serve as objects of his almost unqualified contempt. Apparently his rhetorical strategy entailed reversing the threadbare and condescending stereotype of American Indians as people less civilized than their European-American subjugators. Aesthetically, the latter had seemed downright repulsive when they settled on the plains. Standing Bear recalled that "we had, in the beginning, found the smell of the white man obnoxious" and that cattle, or "spotted buffalo," as the Lakotas referred to the exotic bovines that the pioneers herded, had made him and his fellows hold their noses (57). Later in Land of the Spotted Eagle he returned to this theme, noting that "some [white settlers] were rough, loud-talking and swearing, and not too clean; their habit of wearing whiskers and beards added to their strange and foreign appearance" (172). In his description of these unwelcome people, Standing Bear played on the wide-{38} spread white perception of American Indian women as a dominated ethnic gender: "These people endured great hardships, and all the while they were thinking that our women were slaves we felt that theirs were. It may not flatter the white man, but the Lakota did not think him considerate toward his women" (172). However plausible this memory may have been, he stretched credibility in another implied comparison of these clashing cultures: "Moths, bedbugs, fleas, cockroaches, and weevils came simultaneously with the white man, so they must have been co-travelers" (65). Standing Bear, moreover, described traditions of Lakota dancing in graphic detail and defended the violent but no longer performed Sun Dance but revealed that he held no brief for at least one fad of the 1930s which he believed deserved even harsher criticism: "It is quite likely that the present hysteria for dance `marathons' warrants more condemnation for senseless cruelty than ever did the Sun Dance" (62).
       That the Lakotas had declined precipitously during the Twentieth Century Standing Bear did not deny. His observations at Pine Ridge and Rosebud in 1931, after all, had been distressing in the extreme. In Land of the Spotted Eagle he conceded, for example, that tribal medicine men had lost their ability to cure because "there is no solidarity of faith to work its magic wonders" (74). The artistic talents of Lakota women had largely fallen victim to cultural change and, indicative of the hegemony this had wrought, because centuries-old skills of creating decorative elements from natural resources "the only means whereby native designs might be kept alive is through the use of the white man's beads" (91). Extending his gaze to Native Americans in general, his summary of contemporary conditions was bleak:

Today my people, and all native people of this continent, are changed--degraded by oppression and poverty into but a semblance of their former being; health is undermined by disease, and the moral and spiritual life of the people deadened by the loss of the great sustaining forces of their devotional ceremonies. . . . There is not a tribe but has been poisoned by oppression and the thwarting of the natural course of life. (226)

       Standing Bear left no doubt about who deserved the blame for this cultural degeneracy. He fired his most explosive salvoes in the final chapters of Land of the Spotted Eagle. A sample of these fulminations will illustrate the intensity of his anger. The "white strangers, who came unbidden, yet remained to become usurpers," had assumed an attitude of superiority and consequently maintained distorted images of American Indians as part of their strategy of hegemony. Furthermore, their axiology was inferior; they "did not observe the same high {39} principles which we observed" but rather "violated all of our rights as natives in our own land and as humans. . . ." Standing Bear wondered whether whites were even capable of doing otherwise, for "being narrow in both mind and spirit, they could see no possible good in us" (227). Making generalizations but offering no evidence to substantiate them, he declared that "all groups of public opinion and action, the schools, universities, men's and women's clubs, churches, and other organizations are apathetic toward the Indian and his situation" (229). In a less categorical assertion, the piqued chief and erstwhile lay minister stated that "the missionary oftentimes was an ally to the agent in trying to stop everything the Indian naturally did either in the pursuit of living or pleasure" (237). The entire issue of land tenure particularly fueled Standing Bear's wrath. Undoubtedly recalling his visit of 1931 to South Dakota, he in effect accused the United States government of practicing genocide by alleging that "the reservation became a place where people were herded under every possible disadvantage and obstruction to progress until the race should pass out from sheer physical depletion" (245). Standing Bear dismissed the law of 1924 that granted citizenship to Native Americans as "the greatest hoax" ever perpetrated on them (229, 245). Indeed, it seemed simply absurd for whites to believe that they should determine policies affecting the general course of American Indian history, for their "tyranny, stupidity, and lack of vision have brought about the situation now alluded to as the `Indian Problem'" (248). No less ridiculous, Standing Bear thought, was the notion that Native Americans should continue to emulate their neighbors of European ancestry. The fruits of the latters' civilization, "though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening" (249). On the contrary, the United States of that decadent era should reverse course as a matter of self-interest: "But America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a native school of thought. The Indian can save America" (254). Looking back at his own life, Standing Bear in effect disavowed any meaningful indebtedness to European-American influence. "Regarding the `civilization' that has been thrust upon me since the days of reservation, it has not added one whit to my sense of justice," he wrote in his conclusion; "to my reverence for the rights of life; to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity; nor to my faith in Wakan Tanka--God of the Lakotas" (258).

Conclusion

       With regard to the vital and enduring question of attitudes towards assimilation, the works of Luther Standing Bear collectively form a microcosm of widespread Native American views on the subject, {40} despite the atypicality of his life. These uncomplicated volumes encompass an initial unquestioning acceptance of the Lakota heritage as it existed before the white conquest of the plains, followed by a general if not categorical embracing of the dominant European-American culture in the efforts of Pratt and other assimilators to transform indigenous peoples in their own image. That Standing Bear cooperated enthusiastically with this general endeavor as a young man is beyond dispute; indeed, he virtually claimed as much himself. Yet after returning to what became South Dakota, he found himself divided between two worlds, neither of which was particularly strong or appealing. His own traditional culture was rapidly fading, while his people were increasingly becoming the dependent victims of white society and hegemony of an exploitative and tawdry sort that hardly reflected the ideals of what is too loosely termed "western civilization." Small wonder that Standing Bear eventually found it necessary to withdraw from this repugnant scene, which bore scant resemblance to his childhood memories of Lakota life and, despite close familial ties to South Dakota, not return there for a period of sixteen years. Precisely why he went back in 1931 is not known; perhaps it was to gather information for a second book, My Indian Boyhood, in which he summarized Lakota traditions in sympathetic terms for young white Americans. In any case, his observations of the plight of the cultural and economic decline of the Lakotas prompted him to write his angry article in The American Mercury and bitterly announce his general rejection of European-American civilization in Land of the Spotted Eagle. That Standing Bear did so in English and through the medium of the printed word while working as a movie actor and residing in Los Angeles County underscores the virtual impossibility of turning back the clock in the 1930s.

NOTES

       ¹The standard and highly sympathetic biography of this educator is Elaine Goodale Eastman, Pratt: The Red Man's Moses (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1935).

       ²In the meantime he had written My Indian Boyhood, which Houghton Mifflin published in 1931. This popular book was intended to introduce the Lakota to white children.

{41}

WORKS CITED

"Chief Standing Bear." The New York Times 23 February 1939: 23.

"Coolidge Becomes Chief of the Sioux." The New York Times 5 August 1927: 1.

Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown CT: Wesleyan U P, 1982): 295.

Eastman, Elaine Goodale. Pratt: The Red Man's Moses. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1935.

Paulson, T. Emogene and Lloyd R. Moses, eds. Who's Who Among the Sioux. Vermillion: Institute of Indian Studies, U of South Dakota, 1988: 228.

Standing Bear, Luther. Land of the Spotted Eagle. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933.

---. My Indian Boyhood. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

---. My People the Sioux. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928.

---. "The Tragedy of the Sioux." The American Mercury 24.95 (November 1931).

The Great Spirit Goddess

Raven Hail         

               The Great Goddess Agehyagugun

                Spirit of the sky above
                Spirit of the underworld
                Spirit of the land between
                Spirit of the living waters

                was once the Vital Essence of the People

                of the sun and moon and stars
                and winds that blow
                in all the seven ways:
                from the four corners of the earth
                from the sky vault up above
                from the caves of nether regions
                from the very Center-of-Being.

                The People understood The Goddess

                all Her mysteries:
                the cycle of the seasons,
                how the entities of earth
                are but a shadow
                of the stars that shine above;
                the infinity of youth and growth, maturity,