Cross-Cultural Collaboration and Stories of Survivance: The Work and Legacy of Zitkala-Ša

by Stephanie Settle

A Thesis presented to

The University of Guelph

In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in

Literary Studies/Theatre Studies in English

Guelph, Ontario, Canada © Stephanie Settle, January, 2022

ABSTRACT

CROSS-CULTURAL COLLABORATION AND STORIES OF SURVIVANCE: THE

WORK AND LEGACY OF ZITKALA-ŠA

Stephanie Settle University of Guelph, 2022

Advisor: Christine Bold

This dissertation's focus is Yankton Dakota writer, musician, and activist Zitkala-Ša (1876-

1938), who also used the name Gertrude Bonnin, and who published a wide variety of

works across multiple genres between the early 1900s and the 1930s. The guiding

principle that shapes my analysis is White Earth Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor's

term “survivance.” Most illuminating to me, working from the position of a settler scholar,

is how Vizenor describes the ways that Indigenous storytellers remain alive in the impact

their stories have on others who share them. One of the driving questions of my research

is what role collaboration played in Zitkala-Ša's survivance, and the survivance of her

work. She was involved in many forms of collaboration, across genres and across

cultures, and this dissertation seeks knowledge and understanding about how these

different forms of connection to other artists and to her audience affected her artistic

processes. Building on previous scholarship on Zitkala-Ša, my primary methodology in

analyzing these texts is close reading of archival, published, and performed materials that

were developed by or in connection to Zitkala-Ša, while also taking care to position these

works within their historical contexts, and taking guidance from Indigenous critical

analysis and Indigenous artists as much as possible. This dissertation first works to build

an understanding of the legacy of Zitkala-Ša’s work through asking what it means to

contemporary Indigenous women artists, particularly the Turtle Gals Performance

Ensemble, whose 2007 theatrical production The Only Good Indian...included a recovery

and embodiment of Zitkala-Ša by researcher and performer Michelle St. John

(Wampanoag). Building on that knowledge, it continues to analyze Zitkala-Ša's

collaboration with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists across multiple genres, and

finally considers her textual adaptations of orature within the context of her relationships

with other Indigenous intellectuals of her era. Studying the relationships that Zitkala-Ša

formed with her collaborators and audiences has allowed me to understand her

survivance into the present, and the significance of the legacy that she built.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was made possible by funding from the University of Guelph, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ............................................................................................................................ii

Acknowledgements .........................................................................................................iv

Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ v

List of Appendices .......................................................................................................... vii

Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter 1: Zitkala-Ša’s Survivance through the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble’s The Only Good Indian ... ............................................................................................... 27

1.1 The Development of The Only Good Indian ... ................................................. 29

1.2 “How much Indian were white audiences willing to accept?” ........................... 33

1.3 “We need them to put food in our mouths.” ...................................................... 47

1.4 “It’s never just a job.” ........................................................................................ 54

Chapter 2: Zitkala-Ša’s Collaboration with William F. Hanson on The Sun Dance Opera ............................................................................................................................ 64

2.1 The Historical Context of The Sun Dance Opera ............................................. 67

2.2 Zitkala-Ša’s Resistance to Colonialism through Opera .................................... 74

2.3 Zitkala-Ša’s Survivance through Contemporary Indigenous Opera .................. 91

Chapter 3: Zitkala-Ša’s Activist Collaborations on “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians” and The Petition of the NCAI ................................................................................................ 96

3.1 “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians” ....................................................................... 99

3.2 The Petition of the NCAI ................................................................................ 122

3.3 Response to Zitkala-Ša’s Activism in Non-Indigenous Media ........................ 136

Chapter 4: Zitkala-Ša’s Adaptation of Oral Storytelling in “The Witch Woman” and “Squirrel Man and His Double” .................................................................................... 142

4.1 Some Context—on Orature and Written Narrative ......................................... 144

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4.2 Some Context—on Zitkala-Ša’s Friendship with Arthur C. Parker ................. 147

4.3 The Story Versions Under Review ................................................................. 153

4.3.1 “Squirrel Man and His Double” ................................................................ 158

4.3.2 “The Witch Woman” ................................................................................. 163

4.3.3 “A Youth’s Double Abuses His Sister” ..................................................... 178

4.4 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 187

Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 190

Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 194

Appendices……………………………………………………………………………………205

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LIST OF APPENDICES

1. 1898 photograph of Zitkala-Ša with her violin

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INTRODUCTION Claims of This Dissertation

In 2020, Métis scholar Warren Cariou argued for a new kind of “critical humility” in

academics approaching Indigenous literatures, an approach valuing “an openness to

learning...[and] a mode of listening” (6) over a more colonial “construction of critical

authority...through the application of theoretical principles” (8). While Cariou’s reflections go

considerably beyond the scope of this dissertation, my work does aim to rise to some of the

challenges articulated in his vision, here in the context of listening across historical time. My focus

is Yankton Dakota writer, musician, and activist Zitkala-Ša (1876-1938), who also used the name

Gertrude Bonnin, and who published a wide variety of works across multiple genres between the

early 1900s and the 1930s. Working from a settler position,1 I am particularly interested in several

ways in which Zitkala-Ša reached across cross-cultural divides, sometimes literally through

creative collaboration with non-Indigenous artists and writers, sometimes more metaphorically in

1 As Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice observes, there are many complexities inherent in the use of the term “settler,” as well as in the construction of an Indigenous/settler binary. Some scholars object to the term because of its “negative…associations with shameful atrocities” (10); they argue that, for instance, not all historical settlers were actively violently engaged in the displacement of Indigenous people from their lands, and that some were even incorporated into Indigenous communities and formed “alliances of kinship, love, and fierce friendship” (11). Justice also cautions against over-emphasizing the term “‘settler’…as an identity category” (12), which can too easily lead to a focus on “the speaker’s settler status rather than giving attention to the relationships and displacements in which that settlement takes place” (12). However, he also explains that his use of the word “settler” is “not a value judgement about the individual people” (14), nor is it an attempt to collapse diverse and sometimes overlapping cultural groups into a single binary. Rather, it is a term which “centres these complexities and the discomfort that comes with them” (16), which can make it useful and important in contexts such as cross-cultural research and analysis. While it is not the primary purpose of my dissertation to probe these complexities, I follow Justice’s example in using the term to refer to my own primarily white European background, as well as to generally describe other non-Indigenous artists and scholars when relevant.

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apparently anticipating and enabling non-Indigenous reception of her work, and sometimes in

Indigenous-to-Indigenous relationships forged across generations of performers.

This self-positioning has direct implications for the critical framework of this dissertation,

as being a non-Indigenous scholar means that there are some codes of communication at work

between Zitkala-Ša and her Indigenous audience that lie beyond my sphere of access. As such,

while I often pay attention to the pressures of settler colonialism and hegemonic power structures

on Zitkala-Ša's work, and while it is important to emphasize that these pressures do affect both my

reading of the texts and the texts themselves, they do not make up the full critical framework of

my research; that is, this dissertation is not primarily shaped by theories of decolonization. It is

largely a critical project rather than a theoretical one, guided specifically by the principle of White

Earth Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor's term “survivance.” Vizenor defines “survivance” as

“an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion” (“Aesthetics” 1).2

“Survivance stories,” he continues, “are renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the

unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry” (1). Renouncing the victim position

created by colonial violence, Indigenous storytellers of the past remain alive in the impact their

stories have had on others who continue to share them. One example Vizenor provides is the

testimony of an Anishinaabe man named Charles Aubid, who brought another man named John

Squirrel to life in the courtroom when he argued for their Nation's right to harvest wild rice on

their lands (2). As Aubid related the conversation he had witnessed as a young man between John

Squirrel and a group of federal agents, “John Squirrel was there in memories, a storied presence

2 See also Manifest Manners for Vizenor’s initial use and development of the term.

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of native survivance” (2). Aubid was able to convince an initially reluctant white judge to accept

the indirect testimony of the long-since-dead John Squirrel through “inquisitive, visual memories,

a native sense of presence, and sources of evidence and survivance” (3). My dissertation will

highlight some of the ways that other Indigenous storytellers have kept Zitkala-Ša alive through

the same principles.

One of the driving questions of my research is what role collaboration played in Zitkala-

Ša's survivance, and the survivance of her work. She was involved in many forms of collaboration,

across genres and across cultures, and this dissertation seeks knowledge and understanding about

the different forms this collaboration took, in pursuit of greater insight into how these different

forms of connection to other artists and to her audience affected her artistic processes, as well as

the effect those processes had on her audiences. I also pay close attention to the communities of

Indigenous artists and activists whose work is more broadly interconnected with hers, and to the

impact of that work across generations. My primary methodology in analyzing these texts is close

reading of archival, published, and performed materials that were developed by or in connection

to Zitkala-Ša, while also taking care to position these works within their historical contexts, and

taking guidance from Indigenous critical analysis and Indigenous artists as much as possible.

I first became inspired to study the works of Zitkala-Ša when I took a class on Indigenous

literatures as a master’s student at the University of Guelph, located on the lands of the

Mississaugas of the Credit and the Dish with One Spoon territory (“Land Acknowledgement”). I

was fortunate to be able to attend a guest lecture by Michelle St. John (Wampanoag) and Falen

Johnson (Mohawk and Tuscarora from Six Nations), who shared their experiences as Indigenous

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actors, writers, and researchers with the class. They spoke at length about the creative process

behind the 2007 production The Only Good Indian...,3 which they had developed and performed

alongside Jani Lauzon (Métis), and Cheri Maracle (Mohawk/Irish) as members of the Turtle Gals

Performance Ensemble. The play celebrates the lives of several Indigenous women artists,

including Zitkala-Ša, interweaving them with the narratives of contemporary performers and

illustrating the relationships between Indigenous women across generations, as well as the

continuation of colonial oppression across history. I was fascinated with the insight St. John and

Johnson provided into the level of in-depth research and personal emotional connection that went

into their performances. These Indigenous women were recovering new details about the work and

legacy of their artistic predecessors, and making an effort to embody the truths of their

experiences—even when those truths may not be what settler members of their audience want to

hear. I found it impressive and admirable, and I wanted to understand and learn about more of their

work.

I was particularly interested in Michelle St. John’s embodiment of Zitkala-Ša, as something

in Zitkala-Ša’s work especially had spoken to me when I studied it in Professor Christine Bold’s

course. I use the term “embodiment” here rather than “portrayal” in acknowledgement and

3 The ellipsis in The Only Good Indian... are part of the title of the play. As the Turtle Gals explain in the program of the 2007 production, part of their inspiration came from a book by Ralph and Natasha Friar also titled The Only Good Indian..., which chronicled the history of Indigenous performers “from the Wild West shows, through vaudeville, burlesque and silent film” (Turtle Gals, Program, 5). Both the Friars and the Turtle Gals are in turn referencing an 1886 quote from Theodore Roosevelt: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth” (qtd. in Turtle Gals, Program, 5). As the allusion to the hateful continuation of the quotation is clearly an important part of the meaning of the title, I elect not to omit the ellipsis when referring to it, despite some potential confusion it may cause.

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appreciation of the way that the Turtle Gals’ work—as well as that of many other Indigenous

performers—goes far beyond simply playing a role on stage. In building an understanding of The

Only Good Indian... from this deeper perspective, I draw on the words of Monique Mojica (Guna

and Rappahannock Nations)—co-creator of the show as well as a distinguished Indigenous scholar

and researcher in her own right—in both her published scholarship and in a recorded introduction

to a 2004 performance. In the recording, she describes the ensemble’s creative process as “tracing

our lineage as performers” (Turtle Gals, Weesageechak). She expands on this idea in her 2009

essay “Stories from the Body,” writing that the experiences of her ancestors have been “passed on

through [her] blood” (97), and highlighting the importance of bringing their stories to life through

performance: “You’ve witnessed me naming the names of my predecessors. Now their names and

our stories are part of your memory, and as long as they are remembered they live on. This is blood

memory. This is where my work comes from” (109). Mojica’s work emphasizes the literal physical

realities of intergenerational trauma, as she argues that beyond mere metaphorical connection,

these stories are “encoded in [her] DNA” (97). This physical aspect of connection may not

necessarily apply to all of the Turtle Gals through all versions of The Only Good Indian..., as they

bring to life the works of women from a variety of Nations rather than solely their own ancestors.

Yet each of them also contributed greatly to research and recovery efforts as part of the

collaborative creation of the production, and this creative process brought emotional weight and

intensity to their performances on a far deeper level than those of actors who portray a character

according to someone else’s script. These unique connections that they formed with their artistic

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predecessors cannot be described by the language of fictional theatrical performance, and they

constitute one of many forms of Zitkala-Ša and her contemporaries’ survivance.

Prior to the course during which I experienced St. John and Johnson’s guest lecture, I had

not been familiar with very many Indigenous writers, and I lacked much of the knowledge required

to place those few works I had read in their historic and cultural contexts. Learning about Zitkala-

Ša opened my eyes to the incredible courage that it took for Indigenous women in the early

twentieth century to express themselves and make themselves visible to a settler audience through

publishing, as well as to the multitude of complex issues they would have had to negotiate in order

to do so. I was especially captivated by the differences between two archival drafts of one story,

which P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) presents in the anthology Dreams and Thunder, and which my

analysis will turn to in the fourth chapter of this dissertation. The changes Zitkala-Ša had evidently

made through the creative process of adapting an oral narrative to print made me want to learn

more about who she was, what factors may have motivated her to take certain approaches to her

work, and how her audience may have reacted. And it struck me as a clear problem with the

education I had previously received that I had to continue past a bachelor’s degree in English and

into a master’s, and then take a course specifically focused on Indigenous literatures, in order to

ever come across the significant works of this fascinating woman. It inspired me to focus my future

studies on Zitkala-Ša, and on Indigenous literatures in general, so that I might be able to educate

future settler scholars like myself and share with them some of that knowledge that remains far

too easy to miss.

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During the process of researching this dissertation, I was fortunate enough to be able to

interview several of the Indigenous artists involved in the production of The Only Good Indian...

via email, including Michelle St. John. She described feeling a similar inspiration, when, on a

research trip to the Smithsonian Museum, she stumbled upon “a picture of a beautiful young

Dakota woman” (St. John) she had never seen or heard of before, who turned out to be Zitkala-Ša.

She searched for more information and was “blown away” (St. John) when she read her stories

and learned about the complexities of the life she had led. It was this experience which led, in part,

to the recovery and embodiment of Zitkala-Ša on stage in 2007, more than a century after some of

her best-known works were published—and to my own initial inspiration in that guest lecture in

2015. While keeping in mind the limitations of my position as a settler scholar, I hope to follow in

Michelle St. John’s footsteps in shedding more light on the significance of Zitkala-Ša’s remarkable

career, as well as her work’s survivance into the twenty-first century.

Historical Context

Zitkala-Ša was born in 1876 on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota to an

Indigenous mother and a settler father (Dreams xiii). During the year of her birth, the American

government forced the Yankton Dakota people—alongside those of several other Nations that

made up the group known at the time as the Sioux, and some of the Northern Cheyenne and

Arapaho as well—off their lands west of the Missouri River, in blatant violation of the 1868 Treaty

of Fort Laramie (Barrett 330-331). Some fought back against the encroaching American military,

achieving victory against the forces of General Custer at the June 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass,

also known as Little Bighorn (Dreams xiii, Barrett 330-331). Yet the settlers retaliated, and by the

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end of the 1870s, the vast majority of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains had been killed

or forced onto reservations (Barrett 332). The specter of this tragic injustice hung over Zitkala-

Ša’s childhood. In 1900, she published the narrative “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” in the

Atlantic Monthly magazine; it opens with a description of her mother, Táte I Yóhin Win, weeping

over the deaths of Zitkala-Ša’s sister and uncle, both of whom died of illnesses that were

exacerbated by the physical and emotional strain of being “driven like a herd of buffalo” (Stories

10) away from their home. A multitude of Indigenous people of Zitkala-Ša’s generation suffered

under such genocidal policies throughout their lives.

There is some disagreement among scholars about the most appropriate way to describe

Zitkala-Ša’s Nation. Many sources including some of her own letters describe her as Sioux

(Unpublished 47) or Yankton Sioux. However, as Marlene R. Atleo/?eh ?eh naa tuu kwiss

(Ahousaht) et al. explain, the word “Sioux” is “a French corruption of an enemy-name used by the

Ojibwe” (63), and it is much more appropriate to refer to someone by “band...or location...or

familial group” (63) than it is to reproduce this colonial imposition. Scholars including Ryan Burt

(59) and Dorothea M. Susag (4) accordingly refer to Zitkala-Ša as Yankton Dakota instead. This

is not entirely in contradiction with her self-identification during her lifetime either, as she also

occasionally described herself and her community as “Dakotas” (Stories 57). A 2013 dissertation

by Lumbee scholar Barbara R. Bilek, however, points to a source that categorizes the

Ihanktowan—or Yankton—division of the “Sioux Nation” as Nakota (58-59), while another from

the following year by Gayle Bird identifies her as Lakota instead (iii). As these groups are closely

related, it seems possible that she had some cultural heritage from more than one, and likely spoke

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several of their languages (Bilek 59).4 I have elected to refer to her as Dakota or Yankton Dakota—

the National affiliation which seems to appear most often in recent scholarship as well as in the

work of the Turtle Gals (2007, 28)—but I would be remiss not to acknowledge the fact that I may

be wrong.

The name Zitkala-Ša is in fact a Lakota one she chose for herself, which translates to “Red

Bird” (Dreams xvii). As a child, she was first called Gertrude Felker, and then Gertrude Simmons

when “her mother became disaffected with her father” (xvii) and decided to give her the last name

of her brother instead. As she explains in a 1901 letter to her colleague and one-time fiancé Carlos

Montezuma (Yavapai-Apache), her brother’s wife later became angry with her and admonished

her to stop using her brother’s name, which inspired her to invent a new one (xvii-xviii). She

published much of her creative work under the name Zitkala-Ša, and a collection of her letters

available at the Brigham Young University Archives in Provo, Utah shows her signing some letters

by that name throughout her life as well. However, she also used her married name, Gertrude

Bonnin, or even Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, in other letters and publications. I choose to

consistently call her Zitkala-Ša, because that was the name by which I was introduced to her work,

and because that was the name she chose. Many other scholars do the same; P. Jane Hafen (Taos

Pueblo) interprets her use of the name as an affirmation of “her sense of Indian identity” (Dreams

xvii). However, some other scholars prefer to call her Gertrude; Bilek, for example, makes the case

that it is respectful to the writer’s mother and to the tradition of matrilineal descent in her Nation

to call her by the name her mother gave her (59). That Zitkala-Ša was constantly re-negotiating

4 Non-Indigenous scholar Patrice Hollrah also identifies her as a “native Nakota speaker” (26).

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her presentation of her own name and identity illustrates some of the complexities inherent in her

work as a writer and activist.

When Zitkala-Ša was eight years old, a group of white missionaries traveled to her

reservation, promising to take children on a great adventure to “a more beautiful country” (Stories

39) in the East, with enticing offers of an exciting train journey and “all the red apples they want”

(42). Táte I Yóhin Win was reluctant to let her leave, but eventually sadly concluded that her

daughter would need an education in order to survive in an increasingly settler-dominated world,

even if she might “suffer keenly in this experiment” (44). And so Zitkala-Ša traveled to White’s

Manual Labor Institute in Indiana, where she would soon learn that the missionaries’ promises

concealed many dark truths (Dreams xv). In her writing, she chronicles many traumatic

experiences during her time in the genocidal institution of this residential school, including but not

limited to a violent forced haircut that made her feel like she had “lost [her] spirit” (Stories 56),

the threat of eternal torture in hell if she disobeyed her teachers (63), and the death of a sick

classmate whom she believed might have survived if the authorities had not neglected her health

(67). Her experience was shared by Indigenous children all over the United States and Canada,

many of whom “lost their lives as the result of intense physical abuse and neglect, infectious

diseases that attacked them in their dormitories, or severe emotional battery and trauma” (Katanski

13) within the residential school system. The extent of these horrors, which went on for

generations, is still being uncovered as I write the introduction to this dissertation in 2021, not long

after the unearthing of the remains of over one thousand Indigenous children in unmarked graves

at the former sites of three residential schools alone (E.V. Lee). The amount of violence committed

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by both the American and Canadian governments against Indigenous children through this cultural

genocide cannot be overstated—and during the same period that Zitkala-Ša and her classmates

fought to survive in the unfamiliar state of Indiana, further violence was also being done to the

Indigenous peoples back in her home of South Dakota.

On December 29, 1890, as part of attempts to suppress an anti-colonial movement centered

around the Ghost Dance, American soldiers confiscated weapons from a band of Minneconjou

Lakota people, who were traveling near Wounded Knee Creek in search of safety after the recent

death of Hunkpapa Lakota warrior Sitting Bull (Barrett 598-600). Sitting Bull, who had been a

significant leader during the Battle of Greasy Grass and whom Zitkala-Ša would later respectfully

refer to as “Grandfather,”5 had been shot by police just weeks earlier, on December 15 (599). When

one of the Minneconjou people at Wounded Knee resisted the soldiers’ orders, the soldiers opened

fire on all of them, killing more than 150 innocent Indigenous people whom they knew to be almost

entirely unarmed (600-601). The military faced no repercussions for this horrific massacre, which

has “traditionally...been viewed as the last resistance of the Indians to reservation resettlement”

(601). Zitkala-Ša was fourteen years old; the date of the Wounded Knee Massacre coincides with

the time she spent back at the Yankton Sioux Reservation with her family after three years at

residential school (Stories 69). She does not discuss the massacre directly in her own description

of her childhood, but she does express that she felt unhappy during this period, unable to relate to

5 Some reporting on Zitkala-Ša during her lifetime seems to assert a biological relation between Sitting Bull and Zitkala-Ša. Hafen explains that this is unlikely to be the case, but that “‘Grandfather’ can be an honorific term, rather than a literal relationship” (Help 25). The two may have also possibly been related through marriage (25).

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the relatives who had not shared in her trauma at residential school (69). Eventually, she chose to

return East, seeking further education that might equip her for professional success, surrounded by

“a cold race whose hearts were frozen hard with prejudice” (76).

Throughout these turbulent and violent times, American federal policy toward Indigenous

peoples was also changing. Hafen explains that after 1871:

There would be no more treaties but rather “agreements” between tribes and the

government. Treaties would have required the government to acknowledge that

tribes were sovereign nations...Indians were thrust into depending on Congress for

resolution of issues, for land and legal compensation. The logistics of appealing to

Congress, and then waiting for authorizations of monies or resolution, perpetuated

injustice toward Indians. Many issues could not be solved at a local level. (Help

217)

Zitkala-Ša worked to address these injustices throughout her career with a variety of activist

organizations, including the National Council of American Indians, which she and her husband

Raymond Bonnin (Yankton Dakota) co-founded in 1926 (13). Her short stories, which she

published in several books and magazines, also asserted the importance of Indigenous cultures and

beliefs and provided commentary on the legal injustices that she and her colleagues fought against.

For instance, “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” published in the 1921

anthology American Indian Stories, tells the story of a middle-aged woman who has no formally

accepted legal means of proving her membership to the Sioux Nation (Stories 159), and therefore

struggles to survive without a land allotment or any other form of government assistance (163).

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This makes her vulnerable to a group of con men who take advantage of her and others in her

community to amass more land for themselves. During the same period that Zitkala-Ša brought

these issues to the attention of non-Indigenous readers, many other Indigenous writers and activists

such as Charles Eastman (Santee Dakota), Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), Ella Cara Deloria

(Yankton Dakota), E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk from Six Nations), and Arthur C. Parker (Seneca)

made similar efforts to further the cause of Indigenous people’s rights.

In 1934, the efforts of these networks of Indigenous activists finally had a major influence

on US government policy in the form of the Indian Reorganization Act. While many of the

injustices wrought by colonialism remained unaddressed, and the bill received criticism from some

Indigenous activists of the time, it was a step forward which restored some land to many Nations,

allowing them more political and economic control as well as greater religious freedom (Barrett

216). Zitkala-Ša lived to see this so-called “single most important piece of federal American Indian

legislation” (216) put into action before her death at age 61 in 1938 (Dreams xxiii). Her work and

the work of her colleagues brought about massive changes during her lifetime, and Dakota/Apache

scholar Kiara M. Vigil asserts that the Indigenous intellectuals of this era “collectively reshaped

how Native and non-Native people alike would come to see the past, present, and future regarding

Indian policy in the United States” (312). As Hafen writes, during a time of terrible oppression of

Indigenous peoples, Zitkala-Ša “[chose] survival, even at the price of melodrama and mainstream

education and religion...she never forgot the essence of herself while demanding the freedom to

act within her changing environment” (Help 19). This dissertation will analyze the powerful legacy

those choices led to, and the continued survivance of her and her work in the present day.

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Literature Review

Critical discussion of Zitkala-Ša’s work took off in the late 1970s, and has taken many

forms since. Many of these critical discussions are helpfully plotted in a recent article by non-

Indigenous scholar Tadeusz Lewandowski. In this section, I will first recapitulate his overview,

then proceed to scholarship that goes beyond his template. Finally, I will address how my own

work both builds on and is distinct from this body of scholarship. Lewandowski sorts the

scholarship from the late 1970s to the early 2010s into three categories, which he terms “liminal

interpretations,” “assimilationist interpretations,” and “bicultural interpretations.” While of course

not all writing on Zitkala-Ša falls neatly into one category, these terms provide a generally accurate

summary of the changing shape of scholarly approaches to her work over time. What

Lewandowski terms “liminal interpretations” began with a 1979 article by non-Indigenous scholar

Dexter Fisher, which inspired a resurgence of interest in Zitkala-Ša’s work while also

characterizing it as a failure (“Changes” 37-38). Fisher focused on Zitkala-Ša’s autohistorical6

6 Fisher, and many other scholars, actually use the term “autobiographical” to describe Zitkala-Ša’s “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians”—works which were first published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine before their later inclusion in American Indian Stories. However, in this dissertation, I instead use the term “autohistorical” after the example of Georges E. Sioui (Huron-Wendat). Sioui defines “Amerindian autohistory” as Indigenous people’s “testimony” (21) about their histories, through both oral and written traditions that are based in Indigenous cultural values such as “the universal interdependence of all beings” (xxi)—the witnessing by one person of a larger situation or set of truths, in contrast with the more individualistic literary tradition of settler autobiography. In addition to the relevance of this term, there is some debate among critics about whether these stories should be considered a straightforward accounting of Zitkala-Ša's own experience at all, or instead to be a partially fictionalized story drawing inspiration from her own life. For instance, the group of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous editors of the anthology Read, Listen, Tell describe the narrator of “School Days” as Zitkala-Ša’s “main character” (227) rather than a representation of herself. Taking all of these factors into account, it seems to me that the term “autobiographical” is not necessarily appropriate or accurate in this case, and I therefore avoid using it to refer to Zitkala-Ša’s work. For more analysis of these autohistorical works, which are not the focus of my dissertation, see also Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews by Penelope Myrtle Kelsey.

15

stories and read them as an expression of her inability to find happiness in either Dakota or settler

societies, writing that she instead inhabited a “truly liminal position, always on the threshold of

two worlds but never fully entering either” (qtd. in “Changes” 37). Lewandowski writes, “Though

Fisher’s work was vital to reviving Bonnin’s legacy, its critical precedents exercised a decidedly

negative effect on how subsequent scholars perceived the writer’s work and drew attention to the

Atlantic Monthly series as the principal, full, final and liminal representation of her life” (38). Other

non-Indigenous scholars such as Mary Stout, Laura Wexler, and Sidonie Smith followed, with

similar focus on Zitkala-Ša’s autohistorical work, their perspectives on it limited by their

preconceptions about Indigenous cultures and the genre conventions of settler autobiography (38).

Interpreting this one example of her writing through such a flawed and incomplete lens, these

scholars continued to contribute to an image of Zitkala-Ša as someone caught between two

disparate cultures, whose writing failed to live up to settler-normative standards and was only

worth studying for the insight it provided into the “fragmented nature” (“Changes” 38) of

Indigenous writers of the early twentieth century. While there may be some truth to the idea that

some Indigenous writers of this era struggled to define their cultural identities in the face of

pressure to assimilate, the Eurocentric bias that such an experience of “in-betweenness” prevents

writers in those positions from creating good literature led to dismissal and misunderstanding of

Zitkala-Ša’s work.

Lewandowski goes on to explain that by the 1990s, a contrasting but similarly limited

reading of Zitkala-Ša’s work began to emerge—one which instead characterized her as someone

who had completely “assimilated” into settler society, abandoning or even betraying her Dakota

16

heritage. Because of her controversial opposition to peyote use during her years working with the

Indian Rights Association in the 1910s, scholars such as William Willard (Cherokee) and Robert

Allen Warrior (Osage) referred to Zitkala-Ša and her colleagues as agents of a harmful colonial

agenda against Indigenous sovereignty and religious freedom (39-40). This scholarship once more

narrowly focused on one particular moment in Zitkala-Ša’s long and multifaceted career, and

positioned her identity as belonging to a binary wherein this disagreement with some other

Indigenous people of the time meant she had “lost touch with her...roots” (41). According to

Lewandowski, more nuanced approaches to the question of Zitkala-Ša’s identity began with the

writing of Taos Pueblo scholar P. Jane Hafen in 1997, whose work has continued to shape much

of the discourse surrounding Zitkala-Ša. Hafen’s article “Zitkala-Ša: Sentimentality and

Sovereignty” gave “a more inclusive survey of [Zitkala-Ša’s] life” (“Changes” 41) than those that

had come before, and expressed that while “the ‘dominant ideologies’ of early twentieth-century

white America” (41) appear to have had some influence on Zitkala-Ša’s beliefs, her identity was

not defined solely by her relationship to settler society’s assimilationist ideals. Others such as Ron

Carpenter and Martha J. Cutter followed in reading Zitkala-Ša’s identity as bicultural and began

to interrogate more of the complexities of her work, furthermore acknowledging that for

Indigenous writers of Zitkala-Ša’s era, “engaging Euro-American society required an intricate

negotiation ripe with real and rhetorical literary barriers that restricted literary protest” (42), and

recognizing that elements of Zitkala-Ša’s writing which earlier scholars had read as assimilationist

or “liminal” may instead be the results of such complex negotiation processes.

17

Lewandowski also writes that “Bonnin’s agency has come more fully to the fore in recent

interpretations of her writing and activism” (43), influenced by a 2012 article by non-Indigenous

scholar Julianne Newmark. Newmark may have been the first to contextualize Zitkala-Ša’s work

within the context of Indigenous survivance, as part of an argument for more nuanced analysis of

her political views and activist work (Newmark 341). Newmark provides a wider survey of

Zitkala-Ša’s activist career than previous scholarship had, situating the development of her

political beliefs and rhetorical strategies within their historical and locational context. Since then,

other scholars have followed Newmark’s example in considering more varied aspects of Zitkala-

Ša’s work from more inclusive viewpoints. Lewandowski cites Paige A. Conley, whose 2016

analysis of Zitkala-Ša’s 1920-1925 speeches also focuses on survivance (“Changes” 44), as well

as his own book Red Bird, Red Power, which positions Zitkala-Ša as “a precursor of the Red Power

movement of the late 1960s and 1970s” (44). He concludes by expressing the hope “that assessing

Bonnin’s life and legacy more broadly and inclusively is still in its infancy and that differing

evaluations of her work will continue to appear, each adding insight into issues of liminality,

assimilationism, biculturalism, pluralism, survivance and the Red Power movement” (46).

True to Lewandowski’s hopes, other scholars his article does not cite have begun to work

beyond the paradigms he covers. Notably, non-Indigenous scholar Michael P. Taylor’s 2016

dissertation highlights the collaborative nature of Zitkala-Ša’s work with the National Council of

American Indians, positioning it within a long history of Indigenous group activism.7 More than

7 Some of Taylor’s analysis on this subject has also more recently been published as “Conational Networks: Reconstituting Indigenous Solidarity through the Works of Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin.”

18

much of the previous scholarship, Taylor’s work centers Indigenous-to-Indigenous connections,

collaborations, and networks. Taylor also notes that the writing of other scholars such as James

Cox and Kiara M. Vigil (Dakota/Apache), as well as the continued efforts of P. Jane Hafen, have

begun to expand the view of Zitkala-Ša from one that singles out a few well-known short stories

to one that encompasses her work in other areas including magazine editing and opera (Taylor 91).

Vigil’s work especially also focuses on the networks of relationships that influenced Zitkala-Ša

and her contemporaries, with comparative analysis of the works of several “Indigenous

intellectuals” who all faced the same “struggle to define oneself for a wide array of audiences”

(Vigil 3) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other significant recent work includes

Catherine Parsons Smith’s contextualization of The Sun Dance Opera within the historical

“Indianist” opera trend. Far from the narrow and negative perspectives that characterized early

scholarship of Zitkala-Ša, these scholars have emphasized the broad and varied nature of her

career, and contributed to building an understanding of that career within the context of the

relationships that shaped it.

This dissertation sets out to build on the works of those scholars, examining several

different sides to Zitkala-Ša’s career with an emphasis on relationality, and the ties between her

and her contemporaries, collaborators, and audiences both past and present. As a settler scholar,

while guided by the more recent emphases on networks and connection, I feel myself most

appropriately positioned to closely read Zitkala-Ša’s crossing of Indigenous-settler divides,

through such relationships as her collaborations with non-Indigenous artists and her apparent

anticipation of the potential reactions of non-Indigenous readers. In reading into the latter

19

relationship, however, I have kept in mind the dangers of overemphasizing the extent to which

Zitkala-Ša’s work was influenced by her concerns about audience reactions, which risks seeming

to position strategic engagement with settler cultures in opposition to “authenticity.” As Paige

Raibmon writes in the book Authentic Indians:

reducing Aboriginal action to strategy alone misses some important truths...There

was no single, unified Aboriginal experience of true “authenticity.” To suggest

otherwise invokes an image of colonized populations so culture-bound by ‘the

tyranny of custom’ as to be devoid of human agency. Aboriginal communities—

like many others—crafted tradition and continuity through repeated and contested

use. (12)

With these words as a guideline, I have done my best to avoid reductive readings of Zitkala-Ša’s

communication with her non-Indigenous audience, and to consider rhetorical strategies that may

be embedded in her work as only one of a multitude of complexities—including codes of

communication between Zitkala-Ša and her Indigenous audience that lie beyond my sphere of

access.

Another influential text in my research has been Nêhiýaw and Saulteaux scholar Margaret

Kovach’s Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts.8 In the parts

of my research that involved interviews with Indigenous performers, I have followed Kovach’s

suggestions for keeping “good relations” through “[ensuring] that research participants understand

8 I would also like to acknowledge the text Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat, by non-Indigenous scholar Margery Fee, which I found generally helpful in shaping my perspectives on Indigenous literatures when I read it early in my studies.

20

and accept how their teachings are represented” (48) and striving to provide the “opportunity to

review their contributions and make changes wherever necessary” (48). Some of the participants

were introduced to me through pre-existing networks of relationships, as Kovach also encourages.

And while the nature of my research may not always lend itself well to the “ongoing relationships”

(51) that would follow “tribal paradigms” (51) as described by Kovach, I hope to build an ongoing

relationship with Indigenous communities in general by using my research to find ways to benefit

and give back to them. In my archival research, I have also kept in mind the words of Yidinji

scholar Henrietta Fourmile, who addresses the inherent inequality in issues of access to archives,

which too often leads to non-Indigenous academics controlling the presentation of Indigenous

peoples’ histories (8). I hope that through this dissertation and my future research, I can use the

privilege I have in accessing these archives to disseminate what I learn from them more widely,

making the knowledge they contain more accessible to people from whom it has been kept hidden.9

I have furthermore chosen to take a non-interventionist editing policy when it comes to quotations

from these interviews and from archival material by Indigenous artists, such as the Turtle Gals’

scripts of The Only Good Indian.... While some quotations have been condensed to highlight the

most relevant parts of them, I have not presumed to “correct” any non-standard spelling or

grammar, as I feel that it would be inappropriate as a settler scholar to impose my own linguistic

standards in these contexts.

9 For one example of the kind of archival exchange I hope to participate in more in the future, during the research process of this dissertation I was fortunate to be able to work as Dr. Christine Bold’s research assistant. One aspect of her ongoing research projects which I assisted in completing was a document for the Princess White Deer Collection at the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center of Kahnawà:ke, in cooperation with Kanien'kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke archivist Thomas Deer, which compiled various archives’ information about the vaudeville performance history of the Deer family into one easily accessible timeline.

21

Additionally, I would like to add to this literature review my own observations that some

of the shifting scholarly views of Zitkala-Ša as catalogued by Lewandowski can be traced through

close reading of different descriptions of one experience she relates in her autohistorical work: the

racist hostility she faced at an oratory contest where she competed as a student against

representatives of other colleges. This event, which marks the end of “School Days of Indian Girl,”

has been of particular interest to many scholars. As Zitkala-Ša explains, while on stage awaiting

the announcement of the winners of the contest, “some college rowdies threw out a large white

flag, with a drawing of a most forlorn Indian girl on it. Under this they had printed in bold black

letters words that ridiculed the college which was represented by a ‘squaw’” (79). She was initially

angered by the display, and felt some temporary triumph when her name was read out as one of

the winners, apparently prompting the audience members holding the offending banner to drop it

(79-80). But this feeling soon faded, and she spent the rest of the night alone in sadness. The

closing lines of the story read, “This little taste of victory did not satisfy a hunger in my heart. In

my mind I saw my mother far away on the Western plains, and she was holding a charge against

me” (80). Several scholars in the 1990s, prior to when Lewandowski indicates that Hafen’s

influence began to shift the discourse, write about this passage as symbolic of Zitkala-Ša’s failure

to find acceptance in settler society. For instance, in 1994, Martha J. Cutter used the incident to

illustrate the point, “Even when Zitkala-Sä [sic] does 'master' discourse, she does not achieve a

sense of integration into the white man's world” (39). Cutter further describes the racist message

of the banner as one which expresses that in the eyes of a white audience, Zitkala-Ša “is and always

will be only an inferior ‘Other’—a ‘Squaw’—despite her achievements” (39). Mary Paniccia

22

Carden and Susan Bernardin both make similar arguments in 1997 essays, respectively writing

that the banner demonstrates “that success wielding the white man's tools does not affect his

formulation of her place in his culture” (Carden 67) and “that taking on the terms of dominant

culture in fact does not guarantee ‘the white man's respect’” (Bernardin 226). All three of these

scholars conceptualize Zitkala-Ša’s main goal in competing in the oratory contest to be earning

the respect and acknowledgement of a settler audience, and therefore interpret the racist response

of some members of that audience to mean that she could never possibly succeed. They do not

appear to consider any other possible motivations that Zitkala-Ša might have had, or any ways in

which her success in the contest could have still been beneficial to her in spite of the harmful

response to it that she experienced.

However, some later scholarship began to consider the incident from different angles, just

as scholarly views of Zitkala-Ša’s work generally developed toward less narrow viewpoints. In

2005, Barbara Chiarello provided more historical context, examining contemporary press coverage

of the oratory contest, including an article in the newspaper of Zitkala-Ša’s college, as well as a

later response from one of her classmates (2-3). Where previous scholarship focused only on

Zitkala-Ša’s description of what happened in her own work, Chiarello provides deeper insight into

the reactions of others present—several of whom “trivialized the incident” (2), evidently

undisturbed by its racist nature. Paige Conley’s 2013 dissertation also frames the story within the

larger context of Zitkala-Ša’s entire career as a public speaker, taking a much more optimistic tone

where others had portrayed it as a failure. Conley argues against earlier scholars who depicted

Zitkala-Ša as disillusioned and despairing—both directly following the oratory contest and, more

23

generally, in reference to the issues she faced throughout her years of activism (179). In her

conclusion, Conley writes the following:

Certainly, Bonnin’s life, at many points, came to be marked by poverty and

powerful forces of social, political, and economic marginalization but her legacy

transcends these challenges. Clearly, the young woman who spoke to the hostile

crowd assembled for the Indiana state oratory contest in 1896 learned, over time,

to fight effectively for access to, and legitimacy within, several key speaking

platforms of her time period. (179)

Where others isolated the incident of the oratory contest and read it as exemplifying the

impossibility of gaining respect from settler audiences as an Indigenous woman, Conley here

positions it as simply the beginning of a long career, throughout which Zitkala-Ša continued to

fight for the cause of Indigenous people’s rights, achieving many later successes as her rhetorical

strategies evolved. Conley also emphasizes the importance of Zitkala-Ša’s continuing legacy,

aligning with those scholars—such as Hafen, Newmark, Taylor, Cox, and Vigil—who have placed

her work within the context of Indigenous survivance.

My own reading of this scene builds on the scholarship of Chiarello and Conley, as I agree

that a fuller understanding of the incident must draw on the context of contemporary reactions to

it, and on Zitkala-Ša’s subsequent career. Additionally, I would like to draw attention to what the

scene suggests about the process of addressing a white audience from an Indigenous woman’s

position. The hostile reactions of some audience members highlight the risks that Zitkala-Ša takes

in expressing her opinions publicly, potentially making herself a target for racist harassment, or

24

for even more physical violence. Her success in the contest despite those circumstances

demonstrates the possibility of overcoming colonial oppression through art and activism—

particularly of an oral nature, as she was awarded a prize for her public speaking skills. And yet

the loss of kinship she feels when she imagines her mother’s reaction makes it clear that such

success must still come with some level of sacrifice. The emphases that cluster together in this

scene—orality, cross-cultural communication, reception taking the form of violence against an

Indigenous woman, the felt loss of kinship—shape the close readings that I undertake in the

ensuing chapters.

Chapter Breakdown

The first chapter, “Zitkala-Ša’s Survivance through The Turtle Gals Performance

Ensemble’s Production The Only Good Indian...,” works to build an understanding of the legacy

of Zitkala-Ša’s work through examining what it means to contemporary Indigenous women artists.

The Only Good Indian... went through several iterations before its final run in 2007, and in this

chapter I trace its changing depiction of Zitkala-Ša through archival scripts and recordings. I

analyze the play’s depiction of Zitkala-Ša’s complex self-presentation, its comparison of her

approaches to art and activism with those of other Indigenous women of her era, and its stark

portrayal of the risks of violence that Indigenous women face under colonialism. Through this

analysis, the chapter demonstrates the significance of Zitkala-Ša’s survivance and the important

meanings her work still holds.

The second chapter, “Zitkala-Ša's Collaboration with William F. Hanson on The Sun Dance

Opera,” applies the first chapter’s lessons to an examination of a theatrical work on which she

25

collaborated with a non-Indigenous composer. This chapter contextualizes The Sun Dance Opera

in relation to other operas in which Indigenous artists were creatively involved, including

Shanewis, or The Robin Woman as well as more recent works. It considers the complexities that

Zitkala-Ša had to negotiate in her collaboration with Hanson, as well as the ideas she was able to

express despite those challenges, and the opportunities she was able to give to Indigenous artists

through the opera’s performance. As this analysis will show, The Sun Dance Opera is a work

embedded with multiple layers of meaning, which grew out of cross-cultural communication

across many networks of relationships.

Subsequently, “Zitkala-Ša’s Activist Collaborations on ‘Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians’

and The Petition of the NCAI” analyzes two more significant works on which Zitkala-Ša

collaborated with others—one with two non-Indigenous men, and one with an activist group

consisting entirely of other Indigenous people, including her husband Raymond Bonnin (Yankton

Dakota). It considers the differences between these different collaboration dynamics, and situates

Zitkala-Ša’s activist work within the long history of Indigenous petition writing. Just as with The

Sun Dance Opera, this chapter demonstrates the importance of context and relationality to building

an understanding of her activist career.

Finally, I apply everything I have learned about Zitkala-Ša’s work and legacy to a close

reading of her textual adaptations of orature in “Zitkala-Ša’s Adaptation of Oral Storytelling in

‘The Witch Woman’ and ‘Squirrel Man and His Double’.” This chapter compares a posthumously

published English-language story with a more literal translation of its earlier Dakota draft, as

provided in the anthology Dreams and Thunder, as well as a different telling of a similar narrative

26

in the work of Zitkala-Ša’s friend and contemporary Arthur C. Parker (Seneca). Through these

varying versions of similar narratives, I trace the story’s depictions of female agency and violence

against women, and shed light on some of the complexities at play in Indigenous authors’

adaptations of oral narratives to written text in the early twentieth century.

Throughout all of this analysis, I strive to follow the principles of Cariou’s “critical

humility,” positioning myself as a learner and listener rather than an authority, and remaining open

to changing my perspective as I draw more valuable lessons from the Indigenous scholars who

have influenced my research, the Indigenous artists who so kindly contributed their words to parts

of it, and especially from the works of Zitkala-Ša.

27

Chapter 1: Zitkala-Ša’s Survivance through the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble’s The Only Good Indian ...

Before analyzing the work that Zitkala-Ša did in her lifetime, it is vital to build an

understanding of the legacy that work has had, especially in terms of what it means to

contemporary Indigenous women artists. A deep insight into that question, as well as a strong

example of Zitkala-Ša’s ongoing survivance, appears in the work of the Turtle Gals Performance

Ensemble, a group of Indigenous women artists who “incorporate[d] song, dance, vaudeville,

gesture, satire, and other elements of performance into all of their work” (Nolan, 2015, 43) in the

Toronto area in the 2000s. Their production The Only Good Indian...,10 which was workshopped

starting in 2004 and performed for the last time in 2007, includes Zitkala-Ša among a cast of

characters of Indigenous artists throughout history. Analysis of this play will inform the

subsequent chapters’ perspectives on Zitkala-Ša’s writing, performance, and collaboration by

highlighting what these Indigenous women performers who view her as an artistic predecessor

find most important, as well as illuminating some of the injustices that Indigenous women artists

continue to face in their careers.

As embodied in the character creation and performance of Michelle St. John

(Wampanoag), Zitkala-Ša initially struggles with issues that are provoked by the settler colonial

world. In company with other Indigenous women performers of her own and subsequent

10 As discussed in the introduction, the ellipses in The Only Good Indian...are a significant part of the title of the work, and will therefore appear each time I refer to it.

28

generations, she carefully negotiates the expectations of a non-Indigenous audience, determining

her own self-presentation based on what that audience will accept, and anticipating potential

hostile reactions. As the production continues, however—both in its evolution from early

workshops to final performances and in the progression of the storyline in the latter—the

Indigenous women on stage become more oriented towards each other. In some ways, this

description appears to apply both to the performances by the Turtle Gals and to their

understandings of the lives of the women they bring to life through those performances; while I

do not mean to conflate the artistic choices and intentions of the contemporary performers with

their historical predecessors completely, this chapter's analysis will show that both groups are

deeply connected, and that the work of the Turtle Gals often emphasizes those connections. By the

end of The Only Good Indian..., despite still being performed in front of an audience, the actions

the women take in their work and the choices they make about their careers become less

determined by the pressures of settler society, and more dedicated to building solidarity with other

Indigenous women in the past, present, and future. Furthermore, the production emphasizes the

violent nature of the settler gaze, highlighting the risks that Indigenous women performers are

consistently forced to take, and honouring the victims of that violence.

This chapter will trace some of the changes that were made to Michelle St. John’s

embodiment of Zitkala-Ša throughout the three different available scripts of the play, with

particular regard to Zitkala-Ša’s orientation and self-presentation in relation to her audience, as

well as to the contrast the play examines between her approaches to rhetorical strategies and those

of her contemporaries. Furthermore, it will analyze the Turtle Gals’ creative responses to violence

29

against Indigenous women, which they intertwine with their embodiments of their predecessors in

order to emphasize the inherent risks that Indigenous women performers are forced to take in

revealing themselves to a non-Indigenous audience. Illuminating the creative processes of the

Turtle Gals from this perspective will aid in forming an understanding of the meaning and

significance that Zitkala-Ša’s life and work still have for Indigenous women artists today.

1.1 The Development of The Only Good Indian ...

The Only Good Indian... was the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble’s third and final show,

following The Scrubbing Project and The Triple Truth (53, 61).11 By the time of its final

performance at the Tarragon Extra Space in Toronto in 2007, its cast was composed of Falen

Johnson (Mohawk and Tuscarora from Six Nations), Jani Lauzon (Métis), and Cheri Maracle

(Mohawk/Irish), alongside Michelle St. John. Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) was the director, and by-

then-former member and co-founder Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations) was also

credited for her contributions to the creation of the show (53). Mojica performed in an earlier

workshop production, a video recording of which is archived at the University of Guelph library

and also includes Jill Carter (Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi) temporarily filling in for Michelle St. John.

These archives furthermore contain scripts of the show from 2004 and 2006 workshops, as well as

the final production in 2007, alongside a full recording of one of the 2007 performances and a

11 See Yvette Nolan’s book Medicine Shows for further information on the significance of the Turtle Gals’ other work, and their relationships to many other Indigenous performers in Canada.

30

partial recording from 2006. These documents and videos provide a great deal of insight into how

the play changed throughout the Turtle Gals’ long creative process.12

While the scripts of The Only Good Indian... most commonly refer to Zitkala-Ša with the

name Gertrude, this chapter will continue to call her by her chosen name of Zitkala-Ša. This is not

only for the purpose of consistency with other chapters—it is also in accordance with the opinions

of Yvette Nolan, whom I asked about the choice of what to name Zitkala-Ša in the script directly.

She wrote in her emailed response that she believed that Zitkala-Ša decided on which name to use

at various times in her life depending on the answer to the questions, “how much Indian were white

audiences willing to accept? did she get better opportunities or less resistance when she used her

white name?” (Nolan, 2020).13 Her personal impression was that despite the intermittent use of the

English name, “she thought of herself as Zitkala-Sa” (Nolan, 2020).

The 2004 version of the play was workshopped at the Native Earth Performing Arts annual

festival Weesageechak Begins To Dance. This version is a collection of vignettes depicting the

experiences of a variety of Indigenous performers throughout different time periods. Zitkala-Ša

appears at two different points in her career; other characters include Cherokee jazz singer Keely

Smith, a fictional amputee performer named “Techumseh Stubs,” and Monique Mojica as her

12 I am indebted to the staff of the University of Guelph archives—as well as to Jani Lauzon, whose contributions make up much of the archive’s unpublished material—for making my research into the Turtle Gals’ embodiment of Zitkala-Ša possible. I would also like to acknowledge that my reflections on the Turtle Gals’ work have been informed by perspectives shared by Jani Lauzon, Michelle St. John, and Yvette Nolan in personal interviews.

13 As discussed in the introduction, I have taken a non-interventionist editing policy with regards to quotations from the Turtle Gals and their collaborators, rather than presuming to “correct” the English of Indigenous artists from my position as a settler scholar.

31

childhood self, discussing her grandmother’s friendship with other Indigenous women performers

such as the film star Red Wing (Winnebago).14 By November 2006, the date of another workshop,

the Turtle Gals had narrowed their play’s focus to four Indigenous women performers in particular:

Zitkala-Ša, Tsianina Redfeather (Creek/Cherokee), Molly Spotted Elk (Penobscot), and E. Pauline

Johnson (Mohawk from Six Nations), the latter of whom is portrayed in conflict with Zitkala-Ša

over their different approaches to poetry, performance, and activism. The program of the 2007

performance includes some biographical information about these women, in a section titled “A

Little Bit About Our Predecessors” (13). It identifies Tsianina Redfeather as a singer who worked

with non-Indigenous “Indianist” composer Charles Wakefield Cadman, and whose “greatest

success came in 1926 when she sang the title role in Cadman’s opera Shanewis” (13);15 Molly

Spotted Elk as a dancer and star of the 1930 film The Silent Enemy, who later in life became a

writer (14); and E. Pauline Johnson as “an extremely popular poet” (15) whose work “bridged the

gulf between her Native and European backgrounds” (15). Their biography for Zitkala-Ša begins

with a summary of her educational history at White's Manual Institute, Earlham College, and the

New England Conservatory of Music—the same background which a monologue introducing her

highlights in the 2004 version of the play. While the biography does also include some information

about her writing in books and magazines, it is especially focused on her career as a violinist,

14 While the 2004 script is not explicit about the fact that the young girl character is Monique Mojica herself, the experiences she describes are clearly drawn from Mojica’s real life, as she also references them in other works of hers such as the essay “Stories from the Body: Blood Memory and Organic Texts.”

15 Shanewis will be discussed in more detail in relation to Zitkala-Ša’s work on The Sun Dance Opera in the following chapter.

32

noting that she once performed at the White House and also toured with the Carlisle Indian

Industrial School Band during her time as a teacher (14). It also credits her as the “co-composer”

(14) of The Sun Dance Opera, and seems to characterize her later focus on activist work as

something she only “turned to” (14) when she had no more opportunities as a musician. This forms

a contrast with many academic sources on Zitkala-Ša’s life, which—as discussed in the

introduction—have tended to center around her writing or activist work and provide less attention

to her musical endeavours, especially during the time of this production in the 2000s, prior to much

of the more recent scholarship on her work across multiple genres. The Turtle Gals’ focus on

lesser-known aspects of her career remains evident throughout all three versions of the play.

The predecessors’ stories are intertwined with those of four contemporary Indigenous

performers, struggling through demanding auditions for stereotypical and demeaning roles. While

the final 2007 version of the production names these characters Rachael, Mika, Rebecca, and Kaya,

the 2006 workshop version identifies them only by the names of the Turtle Gals playing them:

Michelle, Jani, Falen, and Cheri respectively.16 Each of the performers plays a double role,

alternating between their predecessors and the contemporary characters based on themselves. In

this way, they are embodying intergenerational relationships between Indigenous women

performers across time. This also highlights how little has changed for Indigenous women artists

16 When I asked them about this change, both Jani Lauzon and Yvette Nolan explained that the characters’ names in the 2007 version allowed for more creative freedom, as the performers were no longer limited to drawing from the specifics of their own experiences and could instead fictionalize more elements of the story.

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over a hundred years, connecting the violence done to the predecessors with the dangers

encountered by the present-day performers, with gestures on into the future.

1.2 “How much Indian were white audiences willing to accept?”

The first stage directions that describe Zitkala-Ša in the 2004 version read, “She steps onto

the stage, as if walking a tightrope, violin in hand” (14). The tightrope simile conjures up the image

of someone carefully balancing herself during performance in order to avoid danger. The

directions go on to describe her “wearing the Victorian dress” (14), but in the video recording of

the workshop, Jill Carter instead positions herself, clad in all black, behind a dress hanging on a

dressmaker’s form. The resulting image seems to suggest that Zitkala-Ša is taking on a persona

greatly removed from herself in order to perform—perhaps even hiding behind it, as the directions

further specify that while she is “uncomfortable and afraid she knows she can not let it show” (14).

The combination of the dress and the violin recall one of two photographs taken by Gertrude

Kasebier in 1898, in which Zitkala-Ša wears a dress that Kiara M. Vigil (Dakota/Apache) describes

as “Edwardian” (199), and rests her violin on her lap (see appendix 1). As Vigil explains,

Kasebier’s photographs of Indigenous people are unique for their time period because they lack

any stereotypical “primitivist aesthetic” (199), instead depicting their subjects dressed in

contemporary fashions and holding objects that demonstrate their own personal interests—such as

Zitkala-Ša’s violin. Vigil further notes that “the more relaxed position of her body calls into

question some of the strict conventions of portrait photography from this period” (200), and

speculates about the extent to which the subject herself may have been involved in the creative

34

process behind the photograph: “To what extent was she aware of or did she seek to control this

representation of herself?...How might this portrait exemplify self-determination?” (202). By

recreating some aspects of this image in The Only Good Indian..., therefore, the Turtle Gals may

be celebrating this early example of an Indigenous woman artist striving to control the way she is

presented to her audience, reflecting some of the play’s major themes about orientation; yet at the

same time, they present a version of the picture in which Zitkala-Ša is decidedly not relaxed, and

the scene highlights a lack of control over audience reaction to her at this point in her career. As

Michelle St. John told me in our interview, it was one of these same photographs appearing in a

book about the history of residential schools (Archuleta et al. 78) that initially inspired her to begin

researching Zitkala-Ša; she was intrigued by the image of this “beautiful young Dakota woman

holding a violin” (St. John), and wanted to learn more about her. However, there is also another

major difference between the photograph and the staged tableau: while Jill Carter does hold the

bow of a violin on stage, she does not carry an actual violin. The instrument’s absence will later

become symbolically significant in the 2006 version of the play.

When Zitkala-Ša first speaks in the 2004 workshop production, with “a heavy Dakota

accent” (Turtle Gals, 2004, 14) specified in the script, she begins by highlighting one of the many

times her name changed over the course of her life:

I was born is Gertie Felker on the Yankton Sioux Reservation. My name now, is

Gertrude Simmons. As a result of the outstanding education I have received during

my tenure as a student at Whites Manual Institution in Indiana and Earlham College

35

in Indiana, I have excelled in piano, voice, oratory and violin. It is my honor to

perform for you this evening. (14)

The non-standard grammar of the opening phrase, “I was born is Gertie Felker,” marks Zitkala-Ša

as somewhat out of place in the formal setting of her performance; she has not yet quite learned to

speak in the manner that her non-Indigenous audience demands.17 Even more significantly, this

occurs in her initial introduction of herself and the name she was given at birth, highlighting her

apparent discomfort with self-presentation and negotiating her own identity. Next, she explains

that she is currently using the name Gertrude Simmons, which can be read as a subtle resistance

to the residential school system's practice of forcibly renaming Indigenous children. As Marlene

R. Atleo (Ahousaht) et al. write, “Naming and self-naming was a fluid, ongoing process” (59) in

many Indigenous cultures, and randomly assigning new names to children, as residential schools

did, “denied [them] the ability to express their life stories in name, an act of independent,

autonomous identity central to Native ways of being” (59). Zitkala-Ša breaks from the expectation

of taking on an assigned name at school, instead choosing by herself to change from a diminutive

form of her first name and her absent father’s last name to the full name of Gertrude and her

brother’s last name.18 She will continue to resist colonization through engagement in this process

17 While the use of the word “is” may appear to be a simple typographical error for “as” upon reading it in the script, Jill Carter does also seem to say “is” rather than “as,” in accordance with the script, in the video recording of the live performance. This leads me to draw the conclusion that it is an intentional choice by the Turtle Gals.

18 As she explains in a 1901 letter to Carlos Montezuma, while Zitkala-Ša’s father’s last name was Felker, she went by Simmons, the last name of her half-brother’s father, until young adulthood. It was then that a conflict with her brother’s wife inspired her to set herself apart from that side of her family with her new chosen name of Zitkala-Ša (Dreams xvii-xviii).

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of fluid self-naming later in life, by giving herself the third name of Zitkala-Ša and seizing further

options about how to present herself depending on her audience—as Yvette Nolan said, “how

much Indian were white audiences willing to accept?” She goes on to list the institutions where

she studied, and once more potentially provides a subtle criticism of colonialism, as her repetition

that both schools were in Indiana highlights how far she was forced to travel from her home on the

Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Her self-introduction complete, she begins to play

the violin—which, in the recording, Jill Carter mimes while holding only a bow.

This performance does not last long, however, as Monique Mojica and Jani Lauzon take

on the roles of rude audience members interrupting:

HECKLER 1: Where are z'Indians? I came to see z'Indians.

HECKLER 2: Go ride a pony — (war hoops) (14)

These lines highlight the contradictions inherent to how settler audiences of Zitkala-Ša’s time

wanted Indigenous performers to behave. They attempt to force Indigenous children to assimilate

into settler society through the residential school system, and yet when an Indigenous woman

meets the expectations of that system, appearing in English formal wear and detailing her

education before beginning to play classical music, they promptly mock her for not being “Indian”

enough. This moment in the play expresses the impossibility of meeting the contradictory

standards imposed by settlers on Indigenous peoples—an injustice also faced by many other

colonized peoples throughout the world. In 1984, Homi Bhabha termed this complex form of

marginalization “colonial mimicry” (126). As he explains with reference to Edward Said,

colonized peoples continually face “the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of

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domination—the demand for identity, stasis—and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of

history—change, difference” (126). “Colonial mimicry” is the oppressor’s “desire for a reformed,

recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (126, italics

in original). In her manner of dress and performance, Zitkala-Ša appears to have become too

similar to settler musicians in the eyes of her hostile audience; they would prefer to see more

“slippage” (126) into their own imagined ideals of Indigenous culture, in order for her to remain

“almost the same, but not quite.” Philip J. Deloria addresses similar issues in Indians in Unexpected

Places, presenting images such as Red Cloud Woman getting a manicure (3) and Geronimo driving

a Cadillac (135), to which typical audience reactions demonstrate the harmful settler tendency to

consign Indigenous people to an invented version of the past. Any Indigenous person who draws

from multiple cultural influences and adapts to dominant settler societies—or adapts items of

settler culture to their own purposes—is viewed as an amusing anomaly, even though the

expectation of assimilation is imposed on them by the same settlers who mock and criticize them

for changing in any way. These impossible demands for an imagined ideal of Indigenous

“authenticity” affected Zitkala-Ša’s entire career, as further chapters will show.

Zitkala-Ša’s second and final appearance in the 2004 version of the play is a stark contrast

with the first one, beginning with the stage directions: “The Victorian dress is gone. With as much

of the regalia as possible, she moves confidently to the podium with grace and elegance” (27). In

the archival video, Jill Carter appears in buckskin clothing, and stands center stage rather than off

to the side behind a mannequin. All of her earlier reluctance and discomfort is gone alongside the

“Victorian dress,” which is no longer on stage. This time she speaks with only “a slight accent”

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(27), highlighting the amount of time that has passed since she left her home and began learning

to negotiate settler society. In their juxtaposition of these two different points in Zitkala-Ša’s

career, the Turtle Gals express the risks that Indigenous women take when their careers put them

in the public eye, and the difficulty of negotiating their position in the face of a dominant settler

gaze. This settler gaze is deeply interconnected with the male gaze as theorized by non-Indigenous

feminist scholar Laura Mulvey, “[projecting] its fantasy onto the female figure” (436). As Mulvey

writes, “the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of

the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified” (438)—and men often

respond to this anxiety with fetishization of the woman, as well as with “sadism: pleasure lies in

ascertaining guilt...asserting control and subjugating the guilty person” (438). In a society

dominated by white men, Indigenous women are additionally subjugated and fetishized for their

perceived difference from the white settler norm as well as from heteropatriarchal expectations of

womanhood. These intersecting prejudices provide the motivations for all manner of violence; as

Jill Carter herself writes in an article on anti-colonial art in Canada, “Just as Indigenous lands

continue to be targeted for resource extraction and blighted for development, the Indigenous body

is targeted for extraction and consumption. We are exoticized in life and onstage” (“Teeth” 17).19

As an Indigenous woman performing for an audience that includes white men, Zitkala-Ša becomes

an anxiety-inducing symbol of difference because of both her gender and her Indigenous heritage,

19 My thinking here is also influenced by Sarah Hunt’s (Tlingit and Kwagiulth of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation) “Decolonizing the Roots of Rape Culture,” Colleen Kim Daniher’s “Looking at Pauline Johnson,” and Christine Bold’s “Popular Indigenous Women Performers.” Furthermore, the concept of “extraction” as it applies to art and to people’s bodies as well as to the extraction of resources from land will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3.

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to which these audience members are likely to respond with hostility and violence. Yet the stage

directions here state that unlike the hecklers of the previous scene, the audience is “awestruck by

[Zitkala-Ša’s] powerful presence” (27). In both scenes, as in many points in the rest of the

production, the Turtle Gals portray both performer and audience, emphasizing that meeting point

of power, exposure, and negotiation. In doing so, they confront the settler gaze and reconfigure it

on their own terms, creating a form of what Michelle Raheja (Seneca descent) terms “visual

sovereignty.”20And in contrast to her introduction, this time Zitkala-Ša shows a practiced aptitude

for navigating those difficulties.

In this scene, Zitkala-Ša is addressing the audience “as the featured speaker for the National

Indian Welfare Committee” (27), and she speaks confidently for several paragraphs with no

interruptions. She begins with a similar summary of her background to the one in her previous

speech, yet with differences in diction that reflect the change in her persona and presentation over

the years:

I was born Gertie Felker on the Yankton Sioux reservation. Upon matriculation to

White's Manual Institute in Indiana in 1880, my name was solidified in government

records as Gertrude Simmons. The surname of my brother's father as my mother

loved him most dearly. My Indian name is Zitkala Sa, it means Red Bird. (27)

The earlier non-standard grammar is gone, and she simply begins with, “I was born Gertie Felker.”

In the next sentence, she demonstrates her command of the English language with the use of the

20 See Raheja’s text Reservation Reelism for further detail about the ways that many Indigenous artists “revisit, contribute to, borrow from, critique, and reconfigure” (193) colonial expectations, particularly through film.

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formal term “matriculation,” and furthermore, creates some new distance between herself and the

name Gertrude Simmons—rather than announcing it as her own name, she simply describes it as

the name “in government records.” Finally, this time she also gives the “Indian name” she chose

herself, and explains its meaning. In comparison with the previous introduction, this one portrays

Zitkala-Ša as more secure in her public speaking ability as well as in her own identity. She goes

on to summarize her education and professional success, stating that she has “published hundreds

of stories, poems and essays in magazines and books that have been read the world over” (27), as

well as mentioning her work on The Sun Dance Opera and her violin performance at the White

House. After this, she talks about her activist work and quotes from her 1921 essay “America’s

Indian Problem,” arguing that Indigenous people should have American citizenship. The last line

she speaks is, “I appeal to you all to take consideration of our circumstance and history and let us

not repeat the brutality of the past but move forward to a new future with hope and opportunity for

all” (28). This use of the plural collective in the phrase “our circumstance and history” is typical

of Zitkala-Ša’s political writing and speeches, such as the aforementioned 1921 essay, in which

she refers to a broad group of Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous allies with sentences like,

“We serve both our own government and voiceless people within our midst” (Stories 186, emphasis

added). She speaks not only for herself, but for all of those who support the same cause. Unlike

the earlier appearance of the “hecklers,” this scene has Zitkala-Ša in complete control of her own

performance, appearing confident in her achievements and asserting her collectivized position

regardless of what the audience might think or desire.

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In contrast with scholarly work on Zitkala-Ša, which often focuses on her short stories, the

Turtle Gals’ celebration of her life and legacy instead highlights her work as a performer and public

speaker. This places emphasis on the risks and exposure to violence that public presence and public

voice bring with them to Indigenous women artists, at the same time as the Turtle Gals’

embodiment of their predecessors exposes the performers themselves to the same risks. While the

only type of violence by the audience shown directly in this version of the play is the verbal

harassment from the “hecklers,” such a hostile reaction to her performance suggests the possibility

of worse violence if she continues to perform for a variety of audiences who may react similarly;

other scenes later in this chapter will also further detail the production’s focus on violence against

Indigenous women. The Turtle Gals’ audience is therefore brought face-to-face with those

experiences. The Turtle Gals also give the audience access to Indigenous women’s interiority

through glimpses of the thought processes behind complex negotiations of self-presentation,

further risking potentially negative reactions from some non-Indigenous spectators, just as their

predecessors did. These themes of violence and exposure, already evident in Zitkala-Ša’s two

scenes in the 2004 production, were then emphasized to an even greater degree as the production

evolved through its second workshop in 2006 and final performance in 2007.

In both the 2006 and 2007 productions, Zitkala-Ša first appears on stage at the St. Louis

World’s Fair of 1904. This shift from a stage of uncertain location in the 2004 version to a more

specific setting makes it clearer that she is in a vulnerable position where she will be likely to be

exploited; the Turtle Gals write in the 2007 program that the fair “was designed to celebrate,

conquest and civilization...[and] featured Indigenous peoples ‘on display’ in human zoos” (5).

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Even more clearly than the concert and public speaking settings in the 2004 production, this

version of the scene shows the violence of being subject to the dominant gaze. Buffalo Bill, who

appears throughout the production as a representative of all white men who exploit Indigenous

performers, announces Zitkala-Ša’s act to an audience that includes Theodore and Edith Roosevelt.

The scene progresses similarly to the previous version, with Zitkala-Ša introducing herself and

giving a brief outline of her education before beginning a violin performance. This time it is

Theodore Roosevelt who expresses disappointment that she does not live up to his stereotypical

ideas about Indigenous peoples, with the line, “Gertrude? Why, what kind of Indian name is that?”

(Turtle Gals, 2007, 22). Rather than the anonymous hecklers of the earlier scene, this issue of

expectation is now attached to a powerful white man, further emphasizing the degree to which

such harmful views are inherent to colonial society. Yet at the same time, both Roosevelt and

Buffalo Bill are portrayed by the Indigenous women performers in the ensemble, re-orienting some

of the power relations in the scene. These scenes depict the history of white men controlling

Indigenous women's agency and access to audiences, yet the Turtle Gals play the roles of those

white men in power themselves, putting them in control of how they present that history. In a

reversal of the historical moments the production portrays, Indigenous women are the ones making

their own choices about how to represent white men.

In this version of the production, Zitkala-Ša really does hold a physical violin. Her

performance is specified as music from The Sun Dance Opera, yet she “hesitates” (23) to begin it,

and cuts herself off after a few bars because she “still has more to say” (23). When she tries to

speak further about her “memories of Dakota customs that will endure now that [she] can write

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and speak and sing in new traditions” (23), Buffalo Bill snatches the violin away and ushers her

off the stage with his introduction of the next act. Clearly, the audience is not interested in what

she has to say, especially if it is about the endurance of a culture they would rather see eradicated.

On her way offstage, images are projected on the backdrop of the set, and the stage directions

specify, “the word squaw appears—she feels it as an arrow in her back/heart” (Turtle Gals, 2007,

23). This combination of action, sound, and image blends several different points in Zitkala-Ša’s

life into one: her performance at the White House in 1900,21 her work on The Sun Dance Opera in

the early 1910s, and her experience of racism at the oratory competition in 1896. The resulting

scene subverts settler conceptions of linear time, echoing Mark Rifkin’s explanation that from a

settler perspective, “Native people(s) do not so much exist within the flow of time as erupt from it

as an anomaly, one usually understood as emanating from a bygone era” (Beyond vii). Michelle

St. John’s embodiment of Zitkala-Ša “erupts” from the timeline of her life and career, resisting

attempts to assign a specific date to when the scene takes place. Instead, this combination of

multiple different events emphasizes the degree to which she repeatedly struggled against the same

prejudice and discrimination regardless of any so-called “progress” across time. Furthermore, it

highlights the fact that Zitkala-Ša’s refusal to remain in a “bygone era”—instead blending elements

of cultures that settlers saw as belonging to the past with the popular entertainment of the present—

may have made a non-Indigenous audience less willing to listen to her. This scene also stands out

21 While Zitkala-Ša really did perform for the president, at the time it was William McKinley rather than Theodore Roosevelt (Dreams 125).

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in contrast to most scholarly perspectives on Zitkala-Ša’s experience at the 1896 oratory contest,

as discussed in the introduction. While many articles simply analyze the incident itself without

surrounding context, here it is blended with several other moments in Zitkala-Ša’s life, drawing

important connections that make its significance clearer at the same time as resisting the imposition

of linearity.

With the Roosevelts disappointed by Zitkala-Ša’s performance, Buffalo Bill tries to win

back their attention by presenting “the most dignified, the most civilized, the most, and the MOST

Palatable for white audiences, E. PAULINE JOHNSON” (Turtle Gals, 2007, 24). Pauline,

embodied by Cheri Maracle, enters the stage and begins to recite her most famous poem, “The

Song My Paddle Sings.” One difference here between different versions of the play is that in the

one from 2006, Buffalo Bill announces his intention to have Pauline and Zitkala-Ša compete in a

“poetry slam” (Turtle Gals, 2006, 18) from the beginning of their performances. However, in the

2007 version, the conflict is spontaneously initiated by Zitkala-Ša when she “realizes that Pauline

is pandering to the elite...[and] can't take anymore” (2007, 24). This change further emphasizes

the incompatibility of the two women’s rhetorical strategies, while at the same time giving them

more agency. Rather than having a white man initially pit the two of them against each other for

entertainment, the 2007 version depicts Zitkala-Ša deciding to make their disagreement public on

her own terms. In exposing the conflict to a non-Indigenous audience and disrupting Buffalo Bill’s

show in the process, the Turtle Gals’ Zitkala-Ša puts herself at great risk of violence; the fact that

she chooses to do so regardless suggests that she feels that voicing her opinion on the subject is

important enough to be worth it. And in this moment, the actions of the predecessors as written by

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the Turtle Gals closely parallel those of the performers themselves. Within the context of the story,

Zitkala-Ša (as embodied by Michelle St. John) is taking a risk; but within the real context

surrounding the creation of the production, the Turtle Gals are also putting themselves at risk with

the content of their performance.

Zitkala-Ša interrupts “The Song My Paddle Sings” with her own political poem, “The Red

Man’s America”—a biting parody of the song “My Country ’Tis of Thee” which makes direct and

specific critiques of the American government (Dreams 119). In addition to referring to “numerous

bills to abolish the Indian Bureau” (119), Zitkala-Ša’s take on the nationalistic tune replaces the

lines “Land, where my fathers died/Land of the pilgrim’s pride/From every mountain-side/Let

freedom ring” (qtd. in Branham and Hartnett 210) with “Land where our fathers died/Whose

offspring are denied/This Franchise given wide/Hark, while I sing” (Dreams 119, italics in

original). As a settler audience of the time would obviously not want to hear these aggressively

anti-colonialist words, Buffalo Bill initially apologizes for Zitkala-Ša’s actions; Edith Roosevelt,

however, is intrigued by the “dueling poetesses” (Turtle Gals, 2007, 25) and insists that he “make

them entertain [her]” (25). Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) describes the following scene, in

which the two take turns reciting parts of the contrasting poems, as a struggle for each of them to

“maintain her dignity in an inherently degrading context where their intelligence, talent, even

humanity are constantly held in question by their observers” (Why 175). Indeed, it is with

dehumanizing language that Edith Roosevelt eventually responds to the increasing tension

between the two, ordering Buffalo Bill, “Get these squaws confined to their dressing room, before

they go on the warpath and we have a massacre” (Turtle Gals, 2007, 25). As with Buffalo Bill and

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Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Roosevelt’s portrayal in the production is complicated by the fact that

the role is played by an Indigenous woman. There is a stark contrast between the Turtle Gals’

embodiments of their Indigenous predecessors, which honour and celebrate them as well as strive

to earn sympathy from the audience, and their depictions of non-Indigenous people of the same

era, which instead expose the violent and prejudiced nature of those characters at the same time as

adding further nuance to their commentaries on the power relations of the historical scenes.

The two versions of the scene differ again here, as in the one from 2006, Buffalo Bill

declares Pauline the winner of the poetry slam (Turtle Gals, 2006, 20). But in the 2007 version,

both women are pushed offstage and threatened with violence for interfering with Buffalo Bill’s

show (Turtle Gals, 2007, 26). Through this change, the final 2007 version ultimately provides a

very pessimistic conclusion to the two writers’ conflict. While they fought over their competing

strategies for getting their messages across to non-Indigenous audiences, the argument’s clear lack

of winner suggests that neither strategy is successful; there is no way at all for them to convince

settlers to care about Indigenous people’s issues. In this instance, the answer to the question of

“how much Indian were white audiences willing to accept?” appears to be “none.” Yet at the same

time, it is possible to read the argument's lack of winner as a refusal, on the part of the Turtle Gals,

to replicate the competitive terms of settler culture that would proclaim one strategy to be the best,

and treat one Indigenous woman as the representative for all of them.

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1.3 “We need them to put food in our mouths.”

The 2007 version of the play then adds further complexity to the contrast of the two women

with a continuation of their argument in a dressing room “where the worlds meet” (26), paralleled

with a discussion between Mika (Jani Lauzon) and Rebecca (Falen Johnson) in the present.

Zitkala-Ša accuses Pauline of pandering to white audiences with her tempered messages and

sensationalized costumes; Pauline argues, “They wouldn’t listen if I didn’t show a well-mannered

Indian. I wear the attire they’ve managed in their minds, in order to get our message across” (27).

Meanwhile, Rebecca is shocked to find Mika dressing in stereotypical garb to sell “instant Indian

kits” (27) to tourists. Mika explains that jobs like that are the only ones still available to her. She

no longer receives offers of serious acting roles after turning down too many in films like “yet

another Pocahontas movie with the Chinese babe” (27)—the same colonialist narrative told over

and over again, by white men who fail to even cast Indigenous performers. Despite the century of

difference between the two scenes, all four women struggle against the same obstacles. Their only

options seem to be to compromise their artistic integrity and play to demeaning stereotypes in

hopes of finding success and making a small difference in the world, or to rebel and risk absolute

failure. The Turtle Gals depict Pauline Johnson favouring the former option, while Zitkala-Ša

argues for the latter.

The lives and careers of Zitkala-Ša and E. Pauline Johnson—who was born fifteen years

earlier than Zitkala-Ša, in 1861 (Piatote 187)— bear many similarities. Both were writers and

performers with one settler and one Indigenous parent; Johnson’s father was Mohawk, while her

mother was an English immigrant (187). And similar to Zitkala-Ša’s self-naming, Johnson chose

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to adopt her grandfather’s name, Tekahionwake, and often signed it instead of—or in addition to—

her English name (Gerson 432). Both struggled throughout their lives to achieve professional

success as Indigenous women artists. Like Zitkala-Ša, Pauline Johnson wrote short stories as well

as poetry—sometimes adapting Indigenous oral storytelling, such as in her book Legends of

Vancouver, and other times using contemporary settings to make explicit social commentary, such

as in “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” whose protagonist argues for the importance of Indigenous

marriage ceremonies (Fee and Nason 163).22 Both also wrote in opposition to the residential school

system through short stories at around the same time, with the serialization of Zitkala-Ša's

autohistorical pieces beginning in Atlantic Monthly in 1900, the year after Johnson's “As It Was in

the Beginning”—a tragedy about a young Cree girl at residential school23—first appeared in

Saturday Night (193). Finally, both women were performers and public speakers whose self-

presentations drew on multiple cultural influences; Carole Gerson writes that Johnson performed

in “a costume that was a collage of various aspects of Native culture” (427) as well as often

switching to an “evening dress” (427) at intermission, while Zitkala-Ša received criticism during

her lifetime for combining several Nations’ clothing into what one detractor called a “tribal

mélange” (qtd. in Lewandowski 141). As the Turtle Gals write in their 2007 program, “while we

cannot know for sure that Pauline, Gertrude, Molly and Tsianina would have worked together or

even known each other, we can assume that they would have at least been aware of each other”

(5); and in the case of Zitkala-Ša and Pauline Johnson in particular, the two had many things in

22 For more analysis of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” see also Nez Perce scholar Beth H. Piatote’s Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature. 23 See also an illuminating introduction to this story in McCall et al.’s anthology Read, Listen, Tell.

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common and may have even influenced each other. Yet it is Johnson’s work which has survived

in settler consciousness much more than Zitkala-Ša’s, earning her a spot as the token Indigenous

writer in the overwhelmingly white and male early twentieth-century Canadian “canon” (Goldie

382). “The Song My Paddle Sings,” her most famous work which she performs in the poetry slam

in the play, consists mainly of idyllic descriptions of nature which fit in with the sentimentalist

tropes that settler audiences expected from Indigenous writers at the time.

In the Turtle Gals’ dressing room “where the worlds meet,” Zitkala-Ša admonishes Johnson

for writing poems like this, which “challenge nothing” (2007, 26). Johnson argues by naming some

of her more political poems, such as “Cry from an Indian Wife” and “As Redmen Die” (2007, 26).

The first poem in this list, written from the perspective of an Indigenous woman whose husband

is heading off to battle against settlers, is one which Pauline Johnson actually revised in between

its first and second publications in order to strengthen its anti-colonial message. While it initially

concluded with the woman urging her husband to accept whatever outcome the battle has, saying

“God, and fair Canada have willed it so” (qtd. in Gerson 433), the later version removes that line.

The new conclusion includes the statement, “By right, by birth, we Indians own these lands” (433),

and changes the final line to “Perhaps the white man’s God has willed it so” (433)—a line which

non-Indigenous scholar Carole Gerson reads as “a challenge to ‘the white man’s God’ that locates

the speaker outside European Christianity” (433). The second poem describes the death of a

Mohawk warrior taken captive by the Huron, with no direct references to settlers. However, its

repeated assertions that the Mohawk will “never [be] conquered” (Johnson 105, italics in original)

and may “[bend] to death—but never to disgrace” (106, italics in original) can certainly be read in

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opposition to colonial attempts to defeat and assimilate Indigenous people. Furthermore, Johnson

herself went on to mock “The Song My Paddle Sings” in her later poem “His Majesty, the West

Wind,” chiding her past self for trying to write about something she had no experience with and

referring to it as “a very stupid, maudlin invocation” (149).

As all of these poems demonstrate, there were many elements of social and political

commentary in Pauline Johnson’s works; her writing addressed the issues that she faced as an

Indigenous woman, just as Zitkala-Ša’s did. However, in the play, Zitkala-Ša is unimpressed by

Johnson’s reference to these poems which she chose not to perform, and accuses her of “cow

towing to the privileged elite...[with] less stimulating pieces” (2007, 26). Johnson's argument for

presenting herself according to the ideal of “a well-mannered Indian” (27) is that she must

conform, to some extent, to the expectations of settler audiences, if she wants to get any kind of

message across. Zitkala-Ša still disagrees, stating “we must not bow to their fancy” (28), but

Johnson has the last word, commenting on the difficulties of finding success as an Indigenous

woman artist and the financial necessity of earning a settler audience’s approval: “We need them

to put food in our mouths” (28). The scene then shifts for the last time to Mika and Rebecca, facing

the same struggle one hundred years later. Together, they practice their sales pitch for a cheap,

revealing costume based on their oppressors’ primitivist views of their cultures, apparently

resigned to the fact that they must play to this stereotype in order to survive (28). This scene

between Mika and Rebecca reveals to the audience one of the major challenges that the Turtle Gals

themselves face in their careers. And through their embodiments of their predecessors, they

express the largely unchanging nature of the injustices against which they continually struggle,

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showing Indigenous women performers being forced to take the same risks over and over again

across generations.

The last scene involving the predecessors in the 2007 version has all four women

competing for one role in Buffalo Bill’s show, which Johnson ultimately wins. Tsianina Redfeather

laments that she never had a chance, Molly Spotted Elk comments that she “wouldn’t have

bothered coming” (47) if she knew that she was guaranteed to lose, and Zitkala-Ša asks, “Why is

there room for only one?” (47). Yet even as all of them mourn their missed opportunity for greater

recognition as artists, there remains some hope for the future. Tsianina Redfeather clarifies, “Our

quarrel isn't with you Pauline” (47)—indicating that she understands that the oppressive systems

of colonialism are the reason for her struggle to succeed, and that the other Indigenous women

with whom she has been forced to compete for limited roles are not themselves at fault. Zitkala-

Ša’s last line as she begins her final transformation into Michelle St. John’s contemporary double

role—the line in the script is attributed to “Gertrude/Rachael” (48)—is, “While the old people last

I will get from them their treasured ideas of life” (48). This line, which may refer to the real

interviews Zitkala-Ša conducted with her Yankton Dakota elders to inform her work on texts such

as Old Indian Legends (Lewandowski 55), emphasizes the importance of lineage and continuance.

In the ensuing final scene, some of the contemporary characters find opportunities for better roles

or begin to make their own films. Justice describes this conclusion in positive terms, writing that

the women “[take] the means of artistic production into their own hands, creating their own films,

their own plays, casting themselves and their contemporaries in works that reflect and represent

their ways of being in the world” (Why 178). However, Nolan points toward a more layered

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interpretation, highlighting the lyrics of the parody song the Turtle Gals close the show with,

“There’s No Indians Like Show Indians” (Nolan, 2015, 51-53). The song jokes about several

stereotypes alongside the statement that “Reclaiming our own image isn’t easy” (qtd. in Nolan,

2015, 52) and a closing vow to “go on with the show” (qtd. in Nolan, 2015, 53). While some

aspects of the ending point toward a more positive future for Indigenous women performers

working together in solidarity, the song also reminds the audience that these women will still have

to face prejudice and discrimination, and that creating their own representation will still be

difficult.

In the earlier 2006 production, the predecessors’ final scene is much darker and more

disjointed, with three of them monologuing about their personal unhappiness. Tsianina Redfeather

quotes from her autobiography, Where Trails Have Led Me, about experiences of racism, including

an encounter with a phrenologist who asked her to donate her skull to him upon her death (2006,

42); Pauline Johnson defies her ex-fiancé Charles Drayton (Fee and Nason 17), who expected her

to sacrifice her career and Mohawk identity (Turtle Gals, 2006, 45); and Zitkala-Ša implores

whoever is listening to help her find her son and her violin (43-44). While the video recording of

the 2004 version shows Zitkala-Ša’s violin apparently missing from her performance, and the 2007

version includes a brief reference to it having been taken away by “The patrons who took pride in

[her] musical prodigiousness” (47),24 the 2006 version is the only one that dwells on that

24 The Turtle Gals also reference this detail in their 2007 program, writing, “after having to return her violin to patrons, she turned to a life of politics” (14).

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symbolism for longer. In this production, Zitkala-Ša implores her contemporaries—and perhaps

also the audience—to help her find her violin, which has gone missing, along with her son Ohiya

(2006, 43-44). Whereas previous scenes included the Turtle Gals playing the role of Zitkala-Ša's

audience, here the real audience of the production is placed in a more direct relationship with her

as she asks a multitude of questions which receive no answers from anyone else on stage. This

may inspire them to think more deeply about their own role to play in the relationships between

performers and audience that the production has been interrogating—and for non-Indigenous

audience members, perhaps about their own role in the kind of colonial oppression that has led to

Zitkala-Ša's distress as well.

In between repeatedly asking where her son and her violin have gone, Zitkala-Ša quotes

and refers to The Sun Dance Opera—the result of her collaboration with non-Indigenous composer

William F. Hanson, which the next chapter will analyze in more detail. While collaborating with

Hanson, Zitkala-Ša played Dakota melodies on the violin which Hanson adapted and incorporated

into his own compositions (Hanson 88); she also gave the opera’s romantic hero the name Ohiya,

after her son (“Duet” 104). In her monologue in the 2006 version of The Only Good Indian..., she

proudly describes the opera as a “spectacle...[for] cultured and educated audiences” (44), but when

music from the opera begins to play, her tone switches to despair: “I can’t find my violin. They’ve

taken it. They’ve taken everything—how much more can we endure?” (44). She calls out for Ohiya

and resolves to “find a way...to free my son” (44). In this moment, the play seems to be implying

that by making her violin music and her son’s name part of The Sun Dance Opera, Zitkala-Ša has

lost them—that once they have become part of a “spectacle” to entertain a primarily non-

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Indigenous audience, they no longer belong to her. The following chapter will address the question

of how much of her creative agency Zitkala-Ša had to sacrifice in this collaboration.

Despite the sadness in much of this scene, Zitkala-Ša concludes her monologue with an

assertion of the importance of her name and her Indigenous National identity: “Red Bird. I am

Dakota” (45). Pauline Johnson’s final words in the script are a similar assertion from one of the

poems she had earlier chosen not to recite; the excerpt includes the lines, “They but forget we

Indians owned the land / From ocean until ocean; that they stand / Upon a soil that centuries agone

/ Was our sole kingdom and our right alone” (qtd. in Turtle Gals, 2006, 46). A stage direction adds

that she, Zitkala-Ša, and Tsianina Redfeather sing “an honour song” (46) together as they exit the

stage, a concluding image that seems to represent solidarity between Indigenous women

potentially leading to a better future. And alongside the plotline of the predecessors, another major

element of the production emphasizes the importance of this solidarity in the face of violence.

1.4 “It’s never just a job.”

The continual risks of violence that Indigenous women performers face are highlighted in

all three versions of the production through a scene in which Michelle St. John—as herself in 2004

and 2006, and as the fictionalized Rachael in 2007—details a negative experience on the set of a

film in which she played a woman who was murdered. The 2007 version of the play is vague about

the details, and describes the role she played as that of a nameless victim (Turtle Gals, 2007, 35).

But as Justice also notes in his analysis (Why 178), the story is drawn from the real experiences

Michelle St. John had playing the role of Helen Betty Osborne (Cree) in the 1991 CBC mini-series

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Conspiracy of Silence. The 2004 and 2006 versions of the script are more direct about this, and

also mention Jani Lauzon’s role in the film as Osborne’s best friend (Turtle Gals, 2006, 11).

Lauzon explained the following when I asked her about the reasoning behind their decision to

remove these specifics from the final 2007 version of the play:

[We realized] that naming Helen would need to be handled delicately. Permission

from family, ceremony and honouring her in a specific way...[and] being broader

meant more inclusion. Helen was one of many. We wanted to honour them all by

including the details of the act and not the specifics of who. (Lauzon)

The final version of the play therefore addresses the tragedy of the multitude of missing and

murdered Indigenous women in the world in much more general terms, rather than maintaining a

focus on one individual. Nevertheless, this scene in the play was informed by Michelle St. John’s

experiences with the story of Helen Betty Osborne, and the more specific earlier versions of the

script also provide significant detail about the Turtle Gals’ approach to depicting violence against

Indigenous women, and their demonstration of how inextricable these injustices are from the lives

and careers of historical Indigenous women artists.

In the words of Mohawk scholar Beverly Jacobs, “Helen Betty Osborne...was killed

because she was an Aboriginal woman and because four white men25 thought she was ‘easy’” (17).

She was “a young Cree woman with hopes and dreams to become a teacher and to help her people”

25 As both the 2004 and 2006 versions of The Only Good Indian... note, one of Osborne’s four attackers also had some Cree background (2004, 11-12; 2006, 27-28). However, just as Jacobs does, the Turtle Gals also refer to the attackers in general as a group of “white guys” (2006, 11).

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(17) whose life was cut short by a horrific act of violence in 1971. Prejudice and incompetence

within the police force meant that “nothing was done for sixteen years” (18), despite widespread

knowledge about the identity of the murderers in the town of The Pas, Manitoba, and, “In the end,

only one of the [four] men was convicted and served any jail time” (18). Conspiracy of Silence

makes an attempt to address this egregious failure to bring Osborne’s killers to justice, yet it does

so by keeping the narrative focus on the police and one of the killers for the vast majority of its

three-hour runtime. Michelle St. John barely appears in the role of Helen Betty Osborne at all in

part one of two, her only discernible line of dialogue being “Let me go” before being dragged into

the murderers’ car (9:33). While some flashbacks in the second part do provide her with slightly

more screen time, the star of the film is still clearly a white actor playing a murderer, with much

of the story focusing on the effects that his crime had on his life. As with earlier scenes, such as

the “hecklers” criticizing Zitkala-Ša’s performance, St. John’s experience is an example of the

stage and screen’s orientation towards the interests and expectations of a white audience. St. John

comments on this directly in the 2006 version of The Only Good Indian...:

it was a missed opportunity for us as the general public, as other Native women, for

the audience at large, to get to know Betty for who she was, for her dreams and

hopes and aspirations and instead we got a story about 4 drunk white guys...It's not

right. (11)

Part of the creative impulse behind parts of the 2004 and 2006 versions of The Only Good Indian...

seems to have been to correct that missed opportunity to tell Osborne’s story—to “[do] better by

her” (28). Additionally, including this story alongside the Turtle Gals’ embodiments of their

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artistic predecessors emphasizes the grave stakes they all faced in their careers; all of them were

at risk of becoming the victims of such horrific violence, and many of the difficult choices they

made about how to present themselves on stage were likely tied to their struggles to keep

themselves safe. A century later, the Turtle Gals face the same struggle, and take a risk that their

predecessors could not in revealing it to their audience.

In both early versions of the play, St. John describes feeling a calling from Helen Betty

Osborne herself to tell her story. In 2004, she is the only one to embody her, and the only one on

stage in a harrowing scene that expresses the fear Osborne must have felt in her final moments.

She repeats the lines “40 below. Frozen gravel” (11-12) in between descriptions of the violence

that was perpetrated against the young woman. Lines of dialogue in the script are assigned to both

“Michelle” and “Betty” even though both are spoken by St. John (or by Jill Carter in the archival

recording), as she alternates between depicting Osborne’s death and describing her own emotional

reactions to the story (11-12). The Turtle Gals envision Osborne wishing not to be forgotten as she

died, with her final line being, “Choking...can't breathe...can't feel...Tell my story!” (12). The scene

ends with St. John apologizing to Osborne, saying that she wishes she could have done more to

follow these instructions (12). Her last line in the scene, specified as directed at the audience, is,

“It’s never just a job” (12), expressing the weight of the impact that embodying Osborne in

Conspiracy of Silence had on her.

The lines of the 2006 version of the scene are largely the same, but this time, St. John is

not alone. Falen Johnson and Cheri Maracle, in unison, are the ones who say the line, “It’s my

turn! They all talk about me but no one can speak for me” (27), the two of them both embodying

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Osborne at once. Jani Lauzon takes on the role of Osborne’s mother Justine, imploring the world

to give her “justice for [her] child” (26). And at the conclusion of the scene, all four women lift up

a mannequin that represents Osborne, expressing love for her in Cree and singing along with Cree

musician Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Until It’s Time For You to Go” (28). Through embodiment by

Michelle and the rest of the Turtle Gals, this scene in the 2006 version of The Only Good Indian...

gives a voice to one of countless Indigenous women throughout history whose voices have been

stolen, drowned out, ignored, or otherwise not heard. And it honours Helen Betty Osborne, not

only by telling her story as the Turtle Gals envision she would have wanted it told, but also by

imagining a version of it in which she does not die alone.

This scene in its entirety does not make it into the final 2007 production, but one story St.

John tells about a dummy on the film set is a constant across all three versions of the script. Each

one has a scene in which she describes the surreal and disturbing experience of seeing a prop made

with a latex mold of her face, “covered...with puncture wounds and fake blood” (2007, 36). She

sees this vision of herself as a mutilated corpse accompanied by four white male members of the

film crew (37). The parallels between this moment and the real assault that the dummy was created

to imitate are highlighted in the line, “Me, and four white men stood looking at her/it/me...the

body” (2004, 3, ellipsis in original). And in the middle of grappling with her complex feelings

about this disturbing sight, St. John is distracted by the realization that the dummy has no pubic

hair. When she speaks up, “the make-up guy” (37) explains that it was the producer who demanded

that the dummy meet this patriarchal beauty standard, saying, “don’t you know that Native women

don’t have pubic hair?” (37) In the 2004 and 2006 versions of the scene, the Turtle Gals play this

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line for dark and absurd humour. Michelle continues the story with the man saying, “You're always

supposed to match the body to the actor not the actor to the body, what am I supposed to do, hand

you a razor and tell you to shave?” (2006, 24), and the others joke about finding the producer so

they can “go kick his ass” (25), or at least “send him a pop up card for Hanukkah” (25). In 2004,

Monique Mojica even makes a sarcastic reference to another racist stereotype: “And Japanese

women have one sideways” (4). In these earlier versions of the production, Michelle’s story

becomes something that the Turtle Gals can laugh about together—a coping mechanism that Jill

Carter terms “outraged laughter” (“Repairing” 20) in reference to the work of Spiderwoman

Theater, another of the Turtle Gals’ predecessors.

But in 2007, the Turtle Gals instead emphasize a darker side to the incident, with the quote

from the producer being the last line before everyone repeats something that Rachael said at the

beginning: “it coulda been me” (37). Ending the scene on this more explicitly sombre note

emphasizes the fact that it is dehumanizing thinking like this unnamed producer’s which leads to

violence against Indigenous women, and that this is a threat the Turtle Gals, and all Indigenous

women, face every day—it could have been any one of them. This is further highlighted through

the way that all four of them participate in the story in the 2006 and 2007 versions, with lines that

describe the horror of seeing the dummy split between all four women:

Rachael:...Positioned the way she was found, covered in fake syrupy blood,

puncture wounds,/

Kaya: /Her

Mika: Its/

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Rachael: /my—hair matted and saturated.

Rebecca: Her

Kaya: Its/

Rachael: /my - head surrounded by a halo of blood soaked snow. (36-37)

These lines make it clear that it is not just Rachael, but all four of them who can envision

themselves as the dummy, and as the victims of violence. In her book about Indigenous theatre in

Canada, Yvette Nolan describes the significance of this scene and its relationship to the other

themes of the play as follows:

The ensemble work of the scene and the final words spoken by all—“it coulda been

me”—remind the viewer of the often dangerous and precarious existence led by

Indigenous women in this country and raise the stakes for these women to make a

living in their chosen profession, which may afford them a measure of security that

their Indigenous sisters lack. (2015, 49)

This perspective clarifies the connection that this story of violence has to the play’s focus on

historical Indigenous women performers. For all of the characters in the story—as well as the

performers themselves—the threat of this kind of colonialist violence is ever-present. While the

modern-day characters are sometimes critical of their predecessors for sacrificing artistic integrity

for commercial success—such as when Michelle St. John’s character in 2006 asks how Tsianina

Redfeather could “be so stupid” (8) as to give so much creative control to Cadman—this scene

adds further complexity to the audience’s understanding of why these women may have made

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those difficult decisions. The financial security of a consistent career may have been necessary to

protect them.

Nolan's description continues, “Out of this dark moment springs a song of hope” (49). In a

scene that appears to be a changed and evolved version of the “Until It’s Time For You To Go”

moment in the earlier production, all four women begin singing and then drumming,

“[transforming] the small circular stage, which until this point had served as a glass cage, into a

big drum” (50). This “honour song” (50) is dedicated to images of “our heroes” (50) who appear

on a projected screen—“Images of Native women happy, successful” (Turtle Gals, 2007, 38). The

list of the Turtle Gals’ heroes in the 2007 script includes their colleagues Monique Mojica and

Yvette Nolan, as well as other influential Indigenous women performers such as Buffy Sainte-

Marie and the members of Spiderwoman Theater (38). An image of this moment in the production,

which appears on the cover of Yvette Nolan’s Medicine Shows, shows the Turtle Gals seated in a

semicircle around the large drum. They are facing each other rather than the audience, providing

the appearance of a personal and ceremonial moment between the four of them that the audience

is invited to witness but not necessarily share. The images visible in the projector screen on the

cover show Lauzon’s daughter Tara Renwick, and Nolan’s mother Helen Thundercloud

(Algonquin).26 Like the other honour song sung by the predecessors in the 2006 version, this scene

emphasizes solidarity between Indigenous women across generations. Along the same lines as the

earlier scene of Zitkala-Ša’s violin performance, it resists settler notions of linear time, bringing

26 This information is stated on the back cover of the book. I have not been able to identify Tara Renwick's Nation.

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together a multitude of Indigenous women performers from different eras. The participation of

women in a drum circle can also be read as an adaptation and reclamation of Indigenous cultural

practices that are more associated with men, as some Nations typically provide women with a

separate role in this kind of ceremony while men do the drumming (M. Jacobs, 144-148).

Additionally, this image encapsulates the production’s re-orientation of the performers in

relationship to their audience. While they are still performing in front of an audience, they face

each other in the circle, singing to and with each other and generations before and after. As in the

ending of this final 2007 version, which portrays the contemporary characters collaborating to

build their own representation in media, the drum circle points to this kind of re-orientation as the

way to begin to heal from violence and trauma. While The Only Good Indian...portrays the harsh

realities of violence against Indigenous women, it is not without hope, as this song and its

accompanying images highlight the Indigenous women artists who are working together to bring

about a better future.

These are the processes by which Zitkala-Ša was brought to the present through The Only

Good Indian... and the work of the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble. Throughout their years of

creating, workshopping, and performing The Only Good Indian..., the performers and their artistic

collaborators took great risks in exposing many of the injustices facing Indigenous women through

their performance. In doing so, they also shed light on the parallel risks that were faced by Zitkala-

Ša and many other Indigenous women of her era. Michelle St. John's embodiment of Zitkala-Ša in

the production calls attention to the multitude of complexities regarding Indigenous women

performers’ self-presentation and orientation in relationship to largely non-Indigenous audiences,

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highlighting some of the many challenging factors that influenced Zitkala-Ša’s work. The conflict

the Turtle Gals envision between Zitkala-Ša and Pauline Johnson further emphasizes the fine line

that their artistic predecessors had to balance in order to speak their minds while maintaining their

careers and protecting themselves from violence. Their honouring of the victims of violence

against Indigenous women reveals the danger that all Indigenous women performers face, raising

the stakes whenever they appear on stage in sight of the violent gaze of colonialism. And through

their uniting of Indigenous women across generations in the production, the Turtle Gals encourage

solidarity and re-orientation towards each other—rather than towards the settler audience’s

expectations—in order to fight for better lives and better opportunities for all Indigenous women.

The inclusion and embodiment of Zitkala-Ša in this performance helps me to understand her work

in the context of the dangers faced by Indigenous women performers throughout history and into

the present day, as well as in relationship to the contemporary artists who keep her alive today.

Shaped by the perspective that the work of the Turtle Gals aided me in developing, the rest of this

dissertation will further analyze some of the complex ways Zitkala-Ša negotiated relationships

with audiences and collaborators, beginning with her partnership with a non-Indigenous composer

in the development of The Sun Dance Opera.

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Chapter 2: Zitkala-Ša’s Collaboration with William F. Hanson on The Sun Dance Opera

In the early 1910s, while living at the Uintah Ouray reservation in Utah with her husband

Raymond Bonnin (Yankton Dakota),27 Zitkala-Ša undertook work on the only theatrical

production of her career: The Sun Dance Opera. The opera was a collaboration with non-

Indigenous composer William F. Hanson, an alumnus of nearby Brigham Young University who

was fascinated by Ute culture. Hanson writes in Sun Dance Land—a manuscript which was

completed but never published, and which is held in his alma mater’s archives (Thompson)—that

when he set out to research the Ute people, he soon recognized that Indigenous voices were missing

from historical documents. He observes that the few sources he could find “had been written after

only superficial study, and usually after prejudice had influenced opinions and judgements” (1),

and focused on the perspectives of “crude frontiersmen or aggressive and acquisitive trespass

settlers” (2) rather than those of the Ute people themselves. Hanson is correct in identifying a

problem that many other settlers of his time period ignored; however, he describes it in order to

position his own work, which is still filtered through a patronizing colonial perspective, as the one

truly authentic depiction of “the Redman’s ideals” (2). He also writes that he was inspired by the

“childlike” (1) rituals of the Ute people, whose “culture had not been polluted by European

influences” (1). His attitudes seem to have been similar to those of many non-Indigenous

27 Raymond had been assigned a job at the reservation by the Indian Service, and he and Zitkala-Ša lived there from 1902 to 1916 (Dreams xviii). For details about the culture and history of the Ute people, on Uintah Ouray and elsewhere, see Being and Becoming Ute by Sondra G. Jones.

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ethnographers at the time, who saw their work as the only way of preserving the knowledges of a

so-called vanishing race, as they believed Indigenous peoples to be incapable of adapting for

survival in the modern world. These attitudes often resulted in extractive work which removed the

words and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples from their original contexts, as will be

discussed further in this dissertation’s third chapter.

Hanson includes very few details in his manuscript about the origins of the creative impulse

to write an opera focused on the Ute people, only briefly claiming that his studies led him to the

conclusion that “due to the vastness of the nature of the culture, the most efficient mode of

transcribing and interpreting the culture was in OPERA FORM” (2). However, the brief biography

of Hanson provided by the register of the archive that houses the manuscript includes the

information that he had already written one opera prior to receiving his master’s degree in 1907

(Thompson). This suggests that he may have been looking for material on which to base an opera

when he began his research on Ute culture, rather than simply being inspired by its “vastness.” Yet

according to Hanson, it was Zitkala-Ša’s idea to focus the opera on the Sun Dance, a practice

which the Ute had adopted from the Dakota (89).28 He also writes that in addition to playing

melodies for him on the violin (88), she “skeletoned the story” (85), “assisted and directed” (92)

28 Ahtahkakoop Cree scholar Cash Ahenakew provides the following detail on the Sun Dance ceremony: “the community gathers to renew their relationships with the land through specific rituals that are carried out towards a tree...For initiates who have pledged to dance, a Sun Dance involves abstaining from food and water for four days, prayers, offerings of tobacco, drumming, singing, sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies and, sometimes, piercing rituals. The piercing Sun Dance ceremonies use the tearing of flesh as an act of surrender of one's body and life-force to a non-human authority—the land-metabolism represented by the tree...interpretations about the meaning of the Sun Dance differ according to the visions and symbolic referents of different communities” (27-28).

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the first performances, and helped him form relationships with Ute people who were willing to

answer his questions about their culture and history. The final product of this collaboration was

first performed “February 20-21, 1913, in the Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah” (Hanson 44). This

chapter will situate Zitkala-Ša’s work on The Sun Dance Opera within its historical context in

order to build an understanding of the means that she found of expressing her creative agency

within the constraints of colonialism, as well as to highlight the role she played in establishing the

continuity of a legacy of Indigenous opera that continues to this day.

Prior to any further discussion, it is important to emphasize that while this chapter will

analyze some of the ways that The Sun Dance Opera blended elements of Dakota and Ute cultural

practices with settler styles of music and performance, I do not intend to characterize the opera as

in any way “inauthentic” in relation to its Indigenous influences, nor to enforce the harmful idea

of a binary that places Indigenous traditions in the past and excludes Indigenous peoples from a

colonial conception of the present. As Stephanie Nohelani Teves (Kanaka Maoli), Andrew Smith

(Cherokee), and Michelle H. Raheja (Seneca descent) explain, “Within colonialist

discourse...Native traditions are supposed to remain unchanging in order for them to be

‘authentic’” (233). The prevalence of this prejudicial belief is a major obstacle for many

Indigenous artists, “whose authenticity is repeatedly challenged or who may find themselves

hovering on the margins of expected styles of expression for Native peoples as defined by

[settlers]” (Levine 2). This binary relationship between over-simplified notions of “tradition” and

the settler-defined “modern” excludes Indigenous artists from engaging with multiple changing

cultural influences, despite the fact that “no culture conforms to an unchanging set of itemized

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traits, a fact that goes uncontested when the culture in question is the dominant one” (Raibmon 9).

It is also “closely related to other binaries, such as that between savage and civilized, reflecting

Western cultural norms that have been harmful to Native peoples” (Teves et al. 236). And

furthermore, as non-Indigenous scholar Mark Rifkin explains in his analysis of the impact of

colonialism on the concept of time, “the sense of time as simply marching forward in universal

synchrony” (Beyond 16) itself is imposed by the norms of settler cultures. Rifkin encourages

readers to take this into account in search of new “ways of engaging Indigenous historicity and

futurity—and of contesting settler epistemological privilege” (16). With all of this in mind, I will

follow the examples set by these scholars and others in aiming to eschew the concept and term

“traditional”—a word which, in the context of Indigenous musical expression, is “fraught with

problems...[and] cannot help but denote stasis rather than change, reversion rather than innovation”

(Troutman 21). Instead, I intend for my analysis of The Sun Dance Opera to celebrate the ways in

which Zitkala-Ša’s work embraced innovation and change even within the constraints of an early-

twentieth-century settler audience’s narrow perceptions of what Indigenous art could be.

2.1 The Historical Context of The Sun Dance Opera

The William F. Hanson Collection at Brigham Young University contains many clippings

of non-Indigenous press coverage of the opera’s first performances—many of which demonstrate

that the public perception of Zitkala-Ša and her work at the time was heavily influenced by these

settler stereotypes about Indigenous “authenticity.” For instance, one article directly praises the

opera for being “authentically Indian” (Chapman) and concludes that in spite of what the author

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perceives as a lack of narrative complexity, “it was definitely exciting to see a group of real Indians

do a real dance” (Chapman). The “real Indians” to whom the writer refers were Ute performers

from the Uintah Ouray reservation, who took on the ensemble roles in the opera; the lead

performers were non-Indigenous. The tone of this review suggests that its writer was less interested

in the details of the opera itself than in witnessing the spectacle of perceived “authenticity.” Many

articles also downplay Zitkala-Ša’s creative involvement in the opera—if they credit her at all,

which some do not—by characterizing her as some sort of assistant to Hanson (Merrill), whose

job was to “[restrain] the music when it departed from the aboriginal actuality” (“Braves”). The

constraints of the settler ideal of an “authentic Indian” occlude the possibility of Indigenous artists

having creative agency, instead positioning Zitkala-Ša as bound by the limits of imaginary

unchanging traditions. Sources including the previous two also consistently refer to her as “a full-

blooded Sioux,” which is technically incorrect; her father was white (Dreams xiii). The source of

this inaccurate information is unclear. It may have been how she presented herself at the time, or

it may have come from Hanson, as he also describes her that way in Sun Dance Land, despite

specifying a mixed heritage—“Sioux-French” (79)—for Raymond Bonnin. It may also have

simply been an assumption that various different reporters did not bother to fact-check, as it

supported their exoticized ideas about what the opera represented.

Several of the articles also pay special attention to one of the performers: a man most

commonly known as “Old Sioux,” who was over one hundred years old and had been taken in by

Zitkala-Ša and her husband (Hanson 82-83). One article with an especially prejudicial, exoticizing

tone calls him the “Sun Dance Star” and begins with the assertion that he does not “speak a word

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of English” (Armstrong), despite the fact that Hanson quotes him speaking English in Sun Dance

Land (107). The reporter alleges that the old man communicates in “gibberish and a few grunts”

(Armstrong), which Zitkala-Ša translates; presumably, if there is any truth in this account, he

would have been speaking a Siouan language such as Dakota, which the reporter did not perceive

as a language. This article is also one of several that highlight Old Sioux’s participation in what

they call “the Custer massacre” (Armstrong)—a misleading term for the Battle of Greasy Grass,

one which implies that Custer was a victim rather than the leader of oppressive colonizing forces.

This wording assists in painting a picture of Old Sioux as a former vicious warrior. The details of

this press coverage demonstrate that while the opera had some critical and commercial success,

the reactions of much of its non-Indigenous audience were influenced by stereotypical, exoticized

depictions of Indigenous cultures. At the same time, several other operas without Indigenous

creative involvement were intentionally capitalizing on settler audiences’ fascination with the so-

called “authentic Indian.”

In an essay on the operatic productions of the early twentieth-century American West,

Catherine Parsons Smith situates Sun Dance as one of seven “Indianist” operas, a trend which

began in 1907 and ended in 1918 (189). Some consideration of the other “Indianist” operas

provides more historical context for Zitkala-Ša’s work with Hanson, particularly with regards to

what audiences who were familiar with the trend may have expected. Furthermore, drawing

comparisons between operas of this type with and without Indigenous creative input can provide

insight into the ways that early twentieth-century Indigenous artists like Zitkala-Ša expressed their

creative agency. The first of these operas, Poia, is similar to Sun Dance in that both have pre-

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colonial settings and love triangle plots. However, Poia borrows much more from European myth

than from the stories of the Blackfoot people it portrays (“Operatic Skeleton” 2-3). The 1917

production Azora, Daughter of Montezuma was also set in the more distant past, while three

more—Natoma, The Sacrifice, and Narcissa: or, The Cost of Empire—took place in the early to

mid-nineteenth century (“American West” 189). Smith particularly contrasts Sun Dance with

Narcissa, a celebration of the efforts of historical white missionaries who attempted to convert the

Cayuse people to Christanity (189-92), as the two were produced farther West in the U.S. than the

others. The production Smith defines as the last Indianist opera, Shanewis, or The Robin Woman,

was the only one to be set in the twentieth century (189); it is also the only one other than Sun

Dance to have been created in part by an Indigenous artist.

The rest of these early twentieth-century representations of Indigenous peoples were

produced by non-Indigenous writers, composers, and performers, and followed in the footsteps of

“Cowboy-and-Indian” (187) narratives and the long “European tradition of operatic exoticism”

(187). The composer of Narcissa, for instance, did not collaborate with any Indigenous musicians,

instead simply inserting occasional “stock ‘Indian’ melodies” (193) into an otherwise typical

operatic score. While Zitkala-Ša’s contributions to the music of Sun Dance thus set it apart from

the other Indianist operas, the melodies she shared with Hanson would have nonetheless gone

through a process of “music idealization,” as described by Tara Browner (Choctaw). On the subject

of the relationships between Indigenous musicians and the many non-Indigenous ethnographers

who studied Indigenous music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Browner

explains:

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The scales of songs rarely fit into the Western tempered system, making initial

transcriptions approximate to begin with. Then, when these songs were “idealized”

and set for piano (usually the first step), they were even further altered to fit the

Western harmonic system. Therefore, by the time a song setting was performed

publicly, it often bore relatively little resemblance to its original incarnation other

than the general shape of the melody, and had often picked up a series of generic

“Indian”-sounding musical traits along the journey. (174)

The style of music that many settler audiences of the twentieth century came to recognize as

sounding “Indian” originated in this “idealization” process, 29 as well as in the interpretations and

additions of late-nineteenth-century non-Indigenous composers such as Alice Fletcher and John

Comfort Fillmore (175). And despite Zitkala-Ša’s creative input on the music of The Sun Dance

Opera, a similar system of approximation and alteration likely informed Hanson’s adaptations of

her contributions. Additionally, Zitkala-Ša herself was already translating the melodies to a

different instrument before performing them for Hanson. P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) notes that

“the nonfretted neck of the [violin] could allow for the tonal subtleties outside the tempered scalar

system” (Dreams 127), making it potentially more suited to playing Dakota music than other settler

instruments. Nonetheless, during the process of writing the opera, the music must have undergone

layers of translation described by Hafen as “like forcing a proverbial square peg into a round hole”

29 For a more in-depth analysis about the “standardized features and types” (Robinson 50) of music that the “Western” music canon trains settlers to listen for, see Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies.

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(126-27). Because of the unique challenges presented by this form of musical translation, the score

of The Sun Dance Opera represents a hybrid form of different musical styles. The melodies that

some non-Indigenous critics praised for conforming to their mistaken notions of Indigenous

“authenticity” were in fact the result of Zitkala-Ša and Hanson collaborating to create something

new that combined influences from multiple cultures. While this apparently went unnoticed by the

settler audiences of the early twentieth century, it forms an example of a point Paige Raibmon

makes in her interrogation of settler ideals of Indigenous “authenticity”: that Indigenous artists

have always “crafted tradition and continuity through repeated and contested use” (12) rather than

remaining bound to one strict idea of “tradition.”

One of Browner’s examples of music idealization is Shanewis, the only other Indianist

opera in which an Indigenous artist was creatively involved. A consideration of Shanewis

alongside Sun Dance can provide more insight into the creative expressions of early-twentieth-

century Indigenous women artists. Furthermore, as its premiere was in 1918, five years after that

of Sun Dance (“American West” 189), it may even provide an early example of another Indigenous

artist following in Zitkala-Ša’s footsteps. Composer Charles Wakefield Cadman had already built

a successful career on “‘idealizations’ of Indian melodies” (qtd. in Lomawaima 258) prior to the

creation of the opera. Yet Shanewis’s approach to depicting Indigenous peoples is markedly

different from the other, more stereotypical productions—most likely because of the creative

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involvement of Creek-Cherokee singer Tsianina Redfeather.30 Cadman and Tsianina,31 who was

also known as Tsianina Blackstone and sometimes billed on stage as “Princess Tsianina” (259),

began working together when she auditioned for him in 1913. Cadman and librettist Nelle Eberhart

based the opera on Tsianina’s outline of the story, and Tsianina eventually played the lead role

herself at the Hollywood Bowl after its initial successful run at the Metropolitan Opera (Browner

178-79). The plot centers around a Creek woman’s struggle to succeed in settler society, and her

eventual decision to reject it and “return to the traditions of her people” (178). For both Tsianina

and Zitkala-Ša, participating in the creation of Indianist operas seems to have allowed them to

assert some creative control over colonial depictions of their cultures. Browner comments on some

of the ways that Shanewis broke from the stereotypes of portrayals of Indigenous peoples in

American media; for instance, the romance in the story between an Indigenous woman and a white

man ends in the untimely death of the latter rather than the former (178). John W. Troutman

provides further analysis in his work on the creative expressions of early-twentieth-century

Indigenous musicians, highlighting a scene of a “‘modern’ Oklahoma powwow” (240) which

includes “modern dress, automobiles, and [a] jazz band” (240), representing “a significant

digression from the typical depictions of Indian dances and songs as constructed by Indianist

composers” (240). This portrayal of the merging of different cultural influences in modern

30 Tsianina Redfeather was also embodied by a member of the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble (Jani Lauzon [Métis]) in The Only Good Indian .... See chapter one for further analysis of this production.

31 I refer to Tsianina by her first name here not only because she used different last names at different points in her career, but also because that is the name by which her great-niece, Mvskoke/Creek scholar K. Tsianina Lomawaima, refers to her in her work (257).

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Indigenous peoples’ lives is a stark contrast with the exoticized so-called “authenticity” that the

audiences of Sun Dance were apparently so happy to see. Yet what this scene does have in common

with Zitkala-Ša and Hanson’s work is the performance of part of a significant ceremony for an

audience of mostly non-Indigenous people—something that some Indigenous performers,

especially today, may find objectionable.

2.2 Zitkala-Ša’s Resistance to Colonialism through Opera

In her book on contemporary Indigenous dance, Jacqueline Shea Murphy writes that “many

contemporary Native choreographers and dance companies...uphold a clear separation between

certain ritual practices and publicly presented stage dance” (201). The example she provides of

this separation comes from an experience that Henry Smith, “the non-Indian director of the Solaris

Lakota Sioux Indian Dance Theatre” (201), told Murphy about in a 1999 interview.32 Smith had

initially wanted to incorporate the Sun Dance into a production, but soon learned that “the

stage...would be an inappropriate place to perform this kind of religious ritual practice” (202).

According to Murphy, the Indigenous dancers who expressed discomfort with his idea compared

its spiritual significance to that of the Eucharist in order to emphasize that treating it as stage

entertainment would be “totally not allowed” (202). As a settler scholar, I certainly cannot presume

to understand the depth of the significance that the Sun Dance has for Indigenous peoples from

Nations that practice it—nor do I wish to impose any of the previously discussed problematic

32 Murphy's book does not note the date that Henry Smith's specific experience took place.

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notions of “authenticity” by implying that all Indigenous peoples share, or should share, one

unified opinion on acceptable ways to engage with this practice. However, in pursuit of further

insight into the creative processes behind The Sun Dance Opera and further understanding of the

ways Zitkala-Ša resisted colonial oppression through her work, I would like to briefly consider the

question of whether Zitkala-Ša’s beliefs about the Sun Dance were different from those of the late-

twentieth-century artists working with Solaris, or whether she simply thought that the opportunities

for resistance and representation brought to her by her work with Hanson made it worthwhile to

compromise. In order to consider this question, I will turn to the way the subject has been addressed

by an Indigenous scholar, Tara Browner (Choctaw).

Browner speculates that both Tsianina and Zitkala-Ša may have found subtle ways to steer

their non-Indigenous collaborators away from entirely accurate reproductions of important cultural

practices, in order to “[hide] what they deemed inappropriate from outsiders” (182). On the subject

of the aforementioned powwow scene, she points out that the Creek Nation’s equivalent would

have actually been “Stomp Dances...at sacred ceremonial grounds” (182). Tsianina may have

chosen to adapt a version of a different Nation’s ceremony rather than to place an imitation of

rituals that had more personal significance to her on the stage. Browner also explains that the

Lakota song “Ink-pa-ta” or “Inkpataya Tokiya,” which Sun Dance makes use of as a love theme

for Ohiya and Winona, can be interpreted within its cultural context as a song about a promiscuous

woman propositioning men sexually (182). Its comparatively chaste use in the opera suggests that

Hanson did not understand its levels of meaning, and that Zitkala-Ša may have intentionally kept

that knowledge from him. As Browner explains, she may have been attempting to create further

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separation between real Lakota music and the opera’s depiction of it—and additionally, this secret

may have been a source of humour for her and anyone else involved who understood Lakota.

Catherine Parsons Smith also provides supporting evidence to this argument when she highlights

the fact that Hanson was originally interested in the Bear Dance as the subject of an opera, and

Zitkala-Ša suggested the Sun Dance instead (“American West” 202). In Sun Dance Land, Hanson

also quotes her saying the following:

Let us keep the Sun Dance Opera in the Sioux vernacular. The Sioux is, of course,

our “first love.” Utes and a few other tribes just borrowed this festival, this national

religion, from our people. Mr. Bonnin and I would like to include old legends and

rituals from the Dakotas. (89)

The Ute performers in the opera would therefore have been enacting a ceremony that their Nation

had adopted fairly recently—and perhaps even a different version of it that was more similar to

the Dakota style than to theirs. Parsons Smith theorizes that the performers may have been more

comfortable with treating parts of this particular ceremony as entertainment for non-Indigenous

audiences than they would have been with “a long-established one of their own” (202). This could

be part of the reason that Zitkala-Ša steered Hanson in the Sun Dance direction.

Parsons Smith also notes that the Sun Dance having been outlawed at the time of the

opera’s production may have given it “the charm of the forbidden” (202). Not only was that a

potential source of appeal for the audience, but the Ute performers having the opportunity to take

part in some elements of the banned ritual on stage (“Duet” 104-05) made the opera a powerful

way of sustaining continuity and change in the face of oppression. As examined by scholars such

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as John W. Troutman and Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Indigenous peoples have a long history of

finding creative ways to resist oppressive laws against their ceremonial dances—a contentious

issue during Zitkala-Ša’s lifetime in particular. It was during her childhood, in 1883, that the

federally appointed “Indian agents” who worked as overseers on reservations were directed “to

establish ‘Courts of Indian Offenses’...to be staffed by ‘civilized’ Indians who would rule on Indian

cultural practices that the U.S. federal government deemed offensive” (Murphy 37-38). The first

offense listed was engaging in “the sun dance, scalp dance, or war dance, or any other similar

feast” (qtd. in Murphy 38); potential punishments for dancing included up to thirty days of

imprisonment (38). Many Indigenous people became especially afraid of breaking these laws after

the government responded to the popularity of the Ghost Dance by perpetrating the Wounded Knee

Massacre in 1890 (36). However, Troutman explains that many of the Indian agents charged with

enforcing the laws knew very little about the specifics of the banned dances, which meant that

Nations such as the Lakota could incorporate some elements of the Sun Dance into other events

without the agents realizing it (32). They were also able to negotiate permission to dance on

occasions that the agents found more appropriate to their own sensibilities, such as at celebrations

of the fourth of July (52). At the same time, a growing public interest in performances of

“Indianness,” such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, provided more opportunities for Indigenous

performers “to publicly assert their tribal identity” (35), despite working under the constraints of

colonial attitudes and expectations. Zitkala-Ša’s work on Sun Dance provided a way for her and

the Ute performers involved to similarly celebrate their distinct cultures in the face of violence.

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Hanson also comments on the laws against dancing and some means of resistance to them

in Sun Dance Land, telling the story of a new Indian agent who arrived at Uintah Ouray in 1914—

not long after the premiere of the opera—and was determined to enforce the laws against the Sun

Dance despite “the stubborn native resistance and noncompliance” (110) that had confounded his

predecessors’ attempts. The people of the Ute Nation continued to dance regardless of threats,

eventually compromising by agreeing to refer to the ceremony as a “Harvest Dance” instead (117-

18). The positive tone with which Hanson recounts this tale seems to suggest that if the Ute

performers in The Sun Dance Opera truly did see the opera as an opportunity for resistance to

oppression, he may have understood and sympathized with them.

Even one contemporary review of the opera—by a non-Indigenous writer presumably

addressing a non-Indigenous readership—acknowledges the laws against the ceremony it depicts,

with particularly patronizing wording:

This tribal rite of the Sioux and the Utes used to last for five days without food or

drink, and was an endurance test as well as a religious orgy. Nowadays, it is banned

by law in its original form, and only an emasculated and tawdry version is

performed annually for the benefit of white spectators. (“Wahoo!”)

This description seems to be a clear misunderstanding of the motivations of Indigenous dancers,

characterizing them as performing solely for white audiences and never for reasons of spirituality,

personal enjoyment, or cultural survival. Yet when read from a certain critical angle, in a sense it

demonstrates the success of those who found ways to resist oppression through dance. It seems

that in the case this writer is referring to, allowing some spectators to witness a modified version

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of the Sun Dance convinced those spectators that the dance was not nearly as threatening as they

had imagined. This willingness on the part of settler audiences to accept what they saw as an

“emasculated” version of an Indigenous cultural practice provides an example of what Homi

Bhabha terms “colonial mimicry”: “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of

difference that is almost the same but not quite” (126, emphasis in original). Yet while settlers

such as the author of the newspaper article depicted the changes to the dance as a loss of

“authenticity,” it is also important to recognize that as Raibmon discusses, “There was no single,

unified Aboriginal experience of true ‘authenticity’” (12). Indigenous cultures, like any others,

constantly change over time. In this case, making changes to important ceremonies and presenting

some versions of them on stage made it possible for Zitkala-Ša, Tsianina, and their contemporaries

to change the way some settlers perceived their traditions, making it safer to practice them, with

less fear of retaliation from those who were ignorant of their meaning and significance. Their

artistic interpretations of ceremonies like the Sun Dance contributed to their cultures’ survivance.

Another episode in Sun Dance Land, concerning the centenarian known as Old Sioux,

illustrates the level of creative freedom and emotional involvement that some of the performers

had in their segments of the production. However, the way that Hanson frames the event in his

manuscript also reveals some of the same harmful colonial attitudes as the newspaper reviews.

During one performance at Salt Lake Theatre, one of the non-Indigenous performers’ recreations

of an “old Sioux ritual, taught him by Zitkala Sa” (101) was apparently so moving to the old man

that he emerged from backstage and sang an unplanned solo, which Hanson describes as “a

spontaneous outburst from the heart of the real” (101). Hanson was initially concerned that this

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disruption of the planned program had “ruined the show” (100)—but as the other performers and

members of the audience alike were impressed (102), a solo for Old Sioux was incorporated into

later performances as well (105). That the elderly performer was moved to improvisational self-

expression by the opera, and that he was subsequently awarded more time for his solo act as the

production continued, seems to support the possibility that performance in The Sun Dance Opera

did provide opportunities for Indigenous performers to engage in their own ceremonies and assert

some creative agency. Yet at the same time, Hanson's description places focus on the “intensely

effective” (101) singing of the non-Indigenous lead, crediting him with creating the conditions that

led to Old Sioux’s performance. Hanson’s diction also includes many connotations of violence

and “savagery,” as he writes that Old Sioux was “uncontrollably excited...and literally stole the

audience” (101, emphasis added). He does not praise Old Sioux for his personal creativity, instead

positioning him as a conduit for forces outside of his control; he even claims that the Indigenous

performers in the chorus “involuntarily repeated” (102, emphasis added) some of Old Sioux’s

song, as if he cannot imagine the possibility that any of them chose to participate of their own free

will. Like the newspaper articles that characterized Old Sioux as incoherent and Zitkala-Ša as

merely an arbiter of “authenticity,” Hanson does not attribute any real creative agency to

Indigenous artists. Furthermore, the subtitle he chooses for the section of Sun Dance Land that

relates this incident is “Old Sioux, Extemporaneous” (100)—an illustration of Mark Rifkin’s point

that from a colonial perspective, “Native people(s) do not so much exist within the flow of time as

erupt from it as an anomaly, one usually understood as emanating from a bygone era” (Beyond

vii). Hanson appears to interpret the performance of Old Sioux and the chorus members as a relic

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of an unchanging past, rather than as an example of the continued relevance of older Indigenous

music to contemporary collective self-expression. Analysis of this passage reveals that while

Hanson may have been more sympathetic to the issues facing Indigenous peoples than some other

settlers of his time, and while his work on the opera may have provided some opportunities for

Indigenous creative expression that did not exist elsewhere, these relatively positive qualities

should not be overstated. Zitkala-Ša would have likely still had to be subtle in any expression of

anti-colonialism that she might have imbued into her art during their collaboration—and despite

that limitation, it seems that she may have been successful in doing so.

In The Sun Dance Opera, Zitkala-Ša also seems to have taken the opportunity to resist the

heteronormativity of settler society, through the inclusion of the character Hebo, a mischievous

figure who hampers the villainous Sweet Singer’s efforts to win Winona’s affection at every turn.

Upon first encountering Hebo, Sweet Singer mistakes him for Winona because of his feminine

appearance (Dreams 134). In her footnote on this scene, Hafen explains, “Hebo is a heyoka, or

contrary, doing the opposite of what is expected” (158); for more detail and cultural context, she

refers to the book Singing for a Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux by Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing

Rock Sioux). Alongside Deloria’s own writing about his family history, the 1999 book includes

annotations on The People of Tipi Sapa, a 1918 book that a white missionary named Sarah Emilia

Olden wrote about Deloria’s grandfather, also known as Philip Joseph Deloria (V. Deloria Jr. 3).

Like many texts written by white researchers about Indigenous peoples at the time, Olden’s

retellings of Tipi Sapa’s stories are filtered through her own colonial perspective and include some

misinterpretations. Deloria explains in the introduction to his intertextual work that his goal was

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“to bring together what Sarah Olden recorded and the teachings of [his] family elders, in effect to

write the book they wished she had written” (5). Interestingly, while I cannot be certain whether

Zitkala-Ša ever read The People of Tipi Sapa, which was published in the thirtieth year of her life,

she was definitely aware of its existence. A letter written on July 15, 1920 by State Historical

Society of North Dakota curator Melvin R. Gilmore asks if she has read it, and acknowledges its

inaccuracies:

It was made by Miss Olden from talking with Rev. Deloria and writing down what

he had to say. But you see there was so much that was so well understood by him

that it seemed commonplace and therefore he omitted much that should be said, but

she knew so little that she was unable to detect the gaps and to ask the necessary

questions. It should be filled out, and you could easily do that, and in so doing bring

out much, probably, that would be profitable to your purpose. (Gilmore)

Unfortunately, if Zitkala-Ša ever penned a reply to this particular inquiry, a copy of it did not

survive to be included in the Brigham Young University archives.

In her book, Olden recounts a story from Tipi Sapa about a person named Big Voice who

seemed to go out of his way to subvert what people expected of him. He wore an unusual hairstyle,

“very long on one side” (185) and shorter on the other, sat backwards on his horse, and even

sometimes said the exact opposite of what he meant; those who knew him well understood him,

and would do the same in response (185-86). Deloria explains in his annotations, “Miss Olden was

mistaken in assuming that the ‘contrary’ behavior of certain men was merely a childish game”

(186). What she failed to understand was the spiritual motivation behind it. Deloria summarizes,

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“Basically the idea was that if the individuals were going to receive special powers, the spirits

required them to set themselves apart from the rest of the people by engaging in strange behavior

that was far enough from the norm to be noticed” (186-87). Hebo is apparently following the same

or a similar practice to that which motivated Big Voice.33 In addition to dressing in a typically

feminine manner, the song Hebo sings about himself expresses his commitment to always doing

the opposite of what people expect, regardless of risk: “‘They cried, ‘Run Eastward, Hebo.’ / West

I turned and ran into the foe” (Dreams 135). Understanding this cultural context for his actions

makes it clear that a defiance of heteronormative gender roles is an important aspect of his

identity—making him a character that in today’s language we can understand as Two-Spirit.

As Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee) et al. explain in the introduction to Queer Indigenous

Studies, the word “Two-Spirit” emerged in the 1990s as a way to displace terms which non-

Indigenous anthropologists had historically misinterpreted and used out of their original cultural

contexts in order to discuss Indigenous peoples whose identities fell outside of the heteronormative

binaries of gender and sexuality (10-12). The term’s usage can also be a critique of the binary

between the past and present, as “many Indigenous GLBTQ2 people define Two-Spirit identity as

at once a point of continuity with tribal traditions and a statement of contemporary intertribal

identity and politics, thus showing that the term can not be drawn along an analytical distinction

33 I am following the example P. Jane Hafen sets in Dreams and Thunder by turning to Deloria for information on the role of the “contrary.” However, the members of the Deloria family on whom the book Singing for a Spirit focuses were part of the Yanktonais Nation, which Deloria describes as “a group of bands once closely related to the Yanktons but now separate from them” (30). Because of that separation, there are likely aspects of the culture Deloria describes that differ from the Yankton cultural practices Zitkala-Ša would have grown up with.

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between ‘traditional’ and ‘nontraditional’” (14). Driskill et al. also comment on the overlap and

connections between Two-Spirit and queer identities, writing that they find both terms useful for

analysis, and that “when linked, queer and Two-Spirit invite critiquing heteronormativity as a

colonial project, and decolonizing Indigenous knowledges of gender and sexuality as one result of

that critique” (3). While my analysis of the significance of the character Hebo will rely on some

queer scholarship by non-Indigenous writers, I also want to emphasize the importance of the term

Two-Spirit and the role that it plays in the project of dismantling the heteronormative ideals

imposed by colonialism.

One previous scholar who has applied queer theory to Zitkala-Ša’s works is Mark Rifkin,

who discusses colonialism's “splintering of tribal territory into single-family households”

(“Romancing” 29), enforcing a heteronormative family structure that discounts the importance of

kinship in Dakota society. He analyzes the way that Zitkala-Ša’s short stories “The Trial Path” and

“A Warrior’s Daughter” subtly resist that attempt at eradication of diverse families and identities

by presenting a form of romance that “does not mark an isolating passion between individuals;

rather, it highlights the ways that couples remain intimately entwined in the web of social relations

and responsibilities organized through kinship networks” (29). As he explains, the narrative in

“The Trial Path” may begin with a love triangle inspiring a murder, but as it continues, it focuses

less on the romance element of the plot and more on the family of the murdered man forgiving the

murderer and accepting him as another son—an example of “the capaciousness of Dakota family

to absorb new members along lines dissociated from procreation and hetereogendered pairing”

(38). The narrator of the story—the woman in the love triangle, who went on to marry the

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murderer—considers both of the men to be her granddaughter’s grandfathers, and also emphasizes

the importance of a horse that played a role in the story, extending the bonds of kinship to animals

as well (39-40). “The Warrior’s Daughter” further expresses the importance and utility of kinship

through a tale about a young woman named Tusee who disguises herself as a member of a rival

tribe in order to save her captive lover. While the story does not make any explicit argument about

kinship, Rifkin argues that Tusee is only able to succeed in her rescue plot because of her family’s

non-settler-normative structure. He points out that the beginning of the story introduces an old man

who was once Tusee’s father’s captive, but who chose not to leave after earning his freedom and

was instead adopted into the family (42). The tribe that captures Tusee’s lover is implicitly the one

to which her adoptive uncle formerly belonged, and her disguise is only effective because she can

speak their language, which she must have learned from him (44). Rifkin concludes:

Rather than initiating a process of breaking away from her family and tribe to create

an independent household, as in the romance plot of federal policy, Tusee’s reunion

with her lover reaffirms her identity as Dakota and underscores the fact that

expansive notions of family suffuse all Dakota relationships, providing a shared

conceptual and political basis for individual and collective action. (44)

Both of these stories demonstrate that inclusive and varying family structures provide advantages

that normative society’s understanding of what constitutes a family does not. They make it more

possible to heal after tragedy, they give children more opportunities to gain potentially life-saving

knowledge, and they keep all members of a community deeply connected to each other. Through

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“The Trial Path” and “A Warrior’s Daughter,” Zitkala-Ša asserts the importance of Dakota kinship

structures, and questions the colonial assumption that there is only one kind of family.34

The main romance plot of The Sun Dance Opera forms a stark contrast with these two

narratives, centering as it does around the kind of love triangle that is more in line with the federal

policy Rifkin discusses. The three young lovers in the opera are a Sioux35 woman named Winona,

a hero from the same Nation named Ohiya—the same name as Zitkala-Ša’s son (“Duet” 104)—

and a Shoshone villain named Sweet Singer, who has fled his own Nation in disgrace (Dreams

131). Both men hope to prove their worth as husbands by enduring the trials of the Sun Dance

(146-47), and Ohiya is the one who emerges victorious in the end. Unlike the resolution of “The

Trial Path,” which incorporates both rivals into their love interest’s family structure, Sweet Singer

is apparently entirely forgotten by Ohiya and Winona once the Sun Dance has brought them

together; he does not appear or even merit a mention in the finale (150-51). And while “A

Warrior’s Daughter” illustrates the benefits of merging families across different Nations, Sweet

Singer’s oft-repeated ambition to “leave [his] land [and] join the Sioux” (148) is apparently

unsuccessful—there is nothing in the text to suggest that he would still be accepted into Winona’s

Nation after failing to win her heart through ceremony. Despite the more subversive elements of

34 Another Indigenous writer of Zitkala-Ša’s era whose work expressed the value of non-heteronormative family structures was John M. Oskison (Cherokee); see the first chapter of Nez Perce scholar Beth H. Piatote’s Domestic Subjects for further analysis.

35 As addressed in the introduction, according to Marlene R. Atleo/?eh ?eh naa tuu kwiss (Ahousaht) et al., the word “Sioux” is “a French corruption of an enemy-name used by the Ojibwe” (63), and it is much more appropriate to refer to someone by “band...or location...or familial group” (63); for this reason, I avoid using it to describe Zitkala-Ša’s heritage. However, in this case it is the word that the libretto of The Sun Dance Opera uses to refer to its hero and heroine, with no other specifics.

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some of Zitkala-Ša’s other works, The Sun Dance Opera’s conclusion seems to support the

colonial ideal that romance should be between one man and one woman with the same cultural

background.

Rifkin highlights the many non-heteronormative aspects of Dakota society that Zitkala-

Ša’s short stories also leave out, and suggests that she may be “strategically [simplifying] Yankton

gender and sexuality, making tradition more palatable to a white audience while effacing elements

that might be more objectionable to them” (“Romancing” 45). I am wary of this aspect of the

analysis, as there are some problems inherent in the overemphasis on strategy that pervades many

non-Indigenous critics’ understandings of the works of Zitkala-Ša and other Indigenous artists. As

I have indicated throughout this chapter, there are a multitude of complex factors that may have

influenced Zitkala-Ša’s decisions; as Paige Raibmon explains, “reducing Aboriginal action to

strategy alone misses some important truths” (12) and risks implying a lack of agency. However,

Rifkin’s argument about possible strategic motivations in this case is one that I find convincing.

In Rifkin’s view, Zitkala-Ša seems to avoid depicting the historical existence and acceptance in

Dakota society of people who were assigned male at birth, but took on “a non-masculine gender

status associated with, among other things, a vision in which the person is called to this status, the

adoption of alternate clothing, and the performance of specialized roles in religious ritual and child

care” (46). While Rifkin describes these people using the term “winkte,” his description of them

is clearly similar to Deloria’s explanation of the role of the “contrary” which Hebo fills in The Sun

Dance Opera. Rifkin argues that Zitkala-Ša intentionally leaves this identity out of her portrayal

of Dakota culture in the story “The Soft-Hearted Sioux.”

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The opening scene of “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” establishes that the unnamed protagonist’s

parents and grandparents expect him to bring home a wife and prove himself as a strong hunter

and warrior (Stories 109-11). At age sixteen, he feels pressured by these expectations and worries

that he will disappoint his family (111). Shortly after, he is sent to a residential school, where he

learns about “the soft heart of Christ” (112) and is discouraged from violence. To his family’s

dismay, he does not live up to their masculine ideal when he returns after ten years away and

cannot hunt to provide them with food; his sick and hungry father scorns him, saying, “your soft

heart has unfitted you for everything!” (119-20). His eventual clumsy attempt to save his father by

killing a white man’s cow leads only to a tragic ending involving multiple deaths (121-23). The

social commentary this story makes is much more explicit than in the other two: it argues against

the residential school system by presenting a scenario in which staying at home and learning from

one’s family would clearly have been of much greater benefit.

However, Rifkin asserts that as alternative gender roles were historically “an

acknowledged and valued social option” (48) for Dakota people, the family of a “soft-hearted”

person like the protagonist would not have really treated them as a failure. There would always

have been other valued roles in Dakota society that a man who does not want to be a hunter could

fill instead. He argues that this story “relies on the erasure” (48) of those roles in order to express

its anti-colonial message, and concludes, “Zitkala-Ša offers a truncated representation of Dakota

gender identities that screens out forms of eroticism and romantic attachment that might trouble

white readers” (48). Rifkin’s in-depth analyses of “The Trial Path” and “A Warrior’s Daughter”

demonstrate an apparent commitment on Zitkala-Ša’s part to depict in her short stories family

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structures that resist the heteropatriarchal norm, and yet none of those stories directly represent

any departure from that norm in terms of gender or sexuality, even when such diversity was

historically accepted within the stories’ settings. However, Rifkin’s article focuses on American

Indian Stories, and does not address the inclusion of a Two-Spirit character in The Sun Dance

Opera. If he is correct that the lack of Two-Spirit representation in Zitkala-Ša’s short stories is

intentional and strategic—a choice made in order to avoid scrutiny and facilitate simplified

arguments—then why was that strategy no longer necessary in The Sun Dance Opera?

It is possible that the medium of opera itself, in contrast to the short story, allowed for

greater freedom of diverse representation. In particular, the opera genre has historically featured

frequent blurring of gender roles, which Sam Abel highlights in his book about gender and

sexuality in opera. Abel argues that opera in general is queer, “standing in opposition to

mainstream, normalized constructions of desire” (65). He highlights its history of subversion of

typical societal standards, dedicating one chapter to the ways the stereotypical “fat lady” opera

singer defies normative ideals of femininity, and another to the tragic and transgressive history of

castrati—singers who were castrated as young boys in order to preserve their soprano voices into

adulthood (132). Abel argues that castrati singers were so beloved in the eighteenth century, not

only for their voices, but because audiences were fascinated by “their marginality as neither male

nor female and...their defiance of traditional sexual categories” (136). He also notes that some of

them further blurred gender categories by playing female roles in drag (136). While the castrati

tradition died out many years prior to The Sun Dance Opera, it would not have been entirely

forgotten; Abel describes recordings of “the last known castrato” (133) singing in 1902 and 1904,

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only a decade before Hanson and Zitkala-Ša’s collaboration. This historical example of non-

normative gender roles in the world of opera could have still been an influence on the composers

and librettists of the twentieth century.

In the subsequent chapter, “Women-As-Men in Opera,” Abel further demonstrates that

female singers dressing in drag to play male roles is so common in opera that “the strangeness of

their crossdressing virtually disappears for the regular operagoer” (147). He illustrates this with an

anecdote about a friend he took to see Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro asking him, “Was that supposed

to be a man? The woman who sang the number about being in love with every woman she meets...I

think it was a woman—wasn’t it?” (146). As a seasoned opera fan, Abel was “taken aback” (146)

by his friend’s confusion; he was used to recognizing the “breeches roles” that the audience is

meant to read as male, and had forgotten how strange that might seem to a newcomer. These male

characters played by women are not presented as comedic in the same way that drag performances

often are in other media, and neither do they strive for realism; they are simply “a familiar part of

the landscape” (147) of opera that audiences rarely question. In opera, a performer’s physical

characteristics or vocal register need not confine them to expressions of one specific gender role.

One of the examples of this that Abel provides is “the gender-ambiguous cross-dressed

mezzo” (159) Octavian in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 opera Der

Rosenkavalier. Octavian, the hero of the story, is a “marriageable nobleman” (159) played by a

woman, following in the tradition of Mozart and others; Der Rosenkavalier also further plays with

gender roles by including the plot element of Octavian at one point disguising himself as a woman

(160). Abel writes that “even in the midst of this category crisis, audiences have willingly

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embraced Rosenkavalier and found a way to normalize its dizzying gender play” (160). What may

be seen as subversive in other media is normal and accepted in the world of opera. Wayne

Koestenbaum also discusses Octavian in his semi-autobiographical text about the relationship

between opera and its community of gay male fans. In the book's final chapter, which summarizes

a multitude of “Queer Moments in Opera,” he highlights the significance of Octavian presenting

Sophie with a silver rose, and—with reference to the imagery of Gertrude Stein—interprets the

rose as a symbol of the introduction of “a third term, a third sex, into the two-pronged gender

system” (218). Der Rosenkavalier, with all of its complex expressions of gender, was written in

1911 (Abel 159)—just two years before the premiere of The Sun Dance Opera. Considering this

historical context alongside the arguments of Rifkin, it seems possible that while the medium of

short stories confined Zitkala-Ša to only a few subtle expressions of alternative kinship structures,

the queer nature of opera opened the door for her to be more direct and explicit in depicting some

of the ways that Dakota society’s understanding of gender, sexuality, and relationships historically

differed from that of the colonial world.

2.3 Zitkala-Ša’s Survivance through Contemporary Indigenous Opera

In his book, Koestenbaum characterizes opera as a dying art—if not an already dead one.

Two of the subtitles in the book’s penultimate chapter are “The End of Opera #1” (192) and “The

End of Opera #2” (193); in the latter section, he declares that Richard Strauss’s 1942 opera

Capriccio “seems to mark the nearly final stage of opera’s prolonged termination” (193). Catherine

Parsons Smith situates the end of the Indianist opera trend even earlier, in 1918. However, a

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continuing analysis of the composition of opera in Canada—and particularly of how it has depicted

and involved Indigenous peoples—calls both of those arguments into question. To begin with, the

“Indianist” opera trend clearly still held influence in Canada as late as 1967, when two non-

Indigenous men—Harry Somers and Mavor Moore—chose nineteenth-century Métis leader Louis

Riel as the subject of the opera that the Canadian Opera Company had commissioned from them

for Canada’s centennial celebration. Jean Teillet (Métis) writes that “no Métis or Riel family

members were consulted” (30) about the project, “which stumbled from beginning to end over its

crude portrayal of Riel, the colonial bias, and the offensive stereotypes” (30). Teillet goes on to

explain that the opera’s depiction of “Riel as a mystical madman” (34) serves to support a flimsy

argument that his execution by the Canadian government in 1885 was “necessary for the good of

the nation” (31). She also points out that Moore “lifted [a song] from the Nisga’a” (34) while

claiming all the work as his own, and ultimately argues that the opera deserves to be forgotten

entirely—not only for its “cringe-worthy” (34) libretto, but also for its “harsh, unappealing, and

tortured” (34) music. All of these criticisms echo those that Smith levels at the similar works of

composers earlier in the century, demonstrating that Somers and Moore’s Louis Riel fits into the

same mold as other “Indianist” opera.

Yet despite all of the flaws that Teillet outlines, Louis Riel has more recently been

reclaimed as part of a growing movement of opera by Indigenous performers. When the Canadian

Opera Company decided to revive the opera for Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017, director Peter

Hinton “made it his goal to include Métis voices...by working closely with cultural advisors”

(Koval 66) and “campaigned for Indigenous representation among the cast” (66). Performers

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involved in the production included Métis and Saugeen Ojibwe singer Joanna Burt as Riel’s sister,

Blackfoot dancer Justin Many Fingers in a choreographed sequence depicting a buffalo hunt, and

Métis actor Cole Alvis in a new spoken role as the Activist, who “takes to the stage before the first

act and delivers a land acknowledgement” (67). Jani Lauzon (Métis), the former Turtle Gals

Performance Ensemble member who embodied Tsianina Redfeather in The Only Good Indian...,

also appeared as the Folksinger, “a role recorded on magnetic tape for the original

production...[and] sung by Harry Somers” (67). Replacing the recorded voice of the opera’s white

male composer with the living presence of an Indigenous woman performer is a powerful symbol

of the opera’s reclamation and recontextualization. In my interview with her, Lauzon expressed

her belief that the Louis Riel revival was successful in “[creating] a dialogue that continues to this

day and [opening] awareness to inclusivity that the COC had never considered before” (Lauzon).

Furthermore, Louis Riel is far from the only opera that has been recently performed by

Indigenous artists in Canada. Toronto’s Native Earth Performing Arts company in particular has

produced several Indigenous operas over the past decade, such as Giiwedin by Spy Dénommé-

Welch (Anishinaabe) and Catherine Magowan in 2010 (“Giiwedin”), I Call myself Princess by

Jani Lauzon (Métis) in 2018 (“I Call myself Princess”), and Shanawdithit by Yvette Nolan

(Algonquin) and Dean Burry in 2019 (“Shanawdithit”). Another company in Toronto,

Soundstreams, also recently premiered a production called Two Odysseys which combines operatic

works by both Cree and Sámi artists (H.W.C. Lee). Unlike the Indianist operas of the past, to

which Indigenous artists were only able to contribute within the confines of limited collaborations

with settlers, groups such as Native Earth Performing Arts and Soundstreams have Indigenous

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artists in full creative control. And these contemporary productions not only blend Indigenous and

European modes of storytelling and performance, but also often add even more musical genres to

the mix. The composers of Giiwedin, which follows one extraordinarily long-lived character

named Noodin-Kwe through two centuries of resisting colonialism, “chose Baroque music as a

base because that was the European musical mainstream when Noodin-Kwe’s story begins”

(Citron), and combined it with elements of pop music as well as Indigenous styles. And one

Toronto Star reviewer described Shanawdithit, which tells the true story of a Beothuk woman who

survived the massacre of her people, as “a fascinating and arresting mix of styles, ranging from

soundscapes that recall nature to minimalism to a sort of post-Apocalyptic Viennese ballroom”

(Terauds). These creative hybrid compositions show that the genre of opera is not only alive, but

is also growing and innovating in the hands of contemporary Indigenous artists.

As demonstrated by the relative lack of critical attention it has hitherto received, The Sun

Dance Opera has not survived within the public consciousness. Hanson produced a revival of the

opera in New York in 1938 without Zitkala-Ša’s creative involvement; while documents in the

Brigham Young University archives show that he mailed her a flyer advertising it along with an

invitation to attend, the performances did not take place until after her death. Much of the text of

the flyer reinforces harmful colonial attitudes, promoting the opera as “the romance of a vanishing

race” (2) and a “ceremonial rescued from oblivion” (2). Hanson also made extensive changes to

the story and the music, adding a new subplot involving “magical ‘Love-Leaves’” (“American

West” 199) and, in an extension of the ways in which he earlier and more subtly denied creative

agency to Indigenous artists, writing out the sections that had originally involved Ute performers.

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Smith writes that the revival was not as successful as the initial run decades earlier, and that “New

York critics had no trouble pointing out the awkward disconnect between the ‘ethnological’ and

the ‘popular’ sections of the production” (206). The Indianist opera trend was likely becoming less

popular, and settler audiences of the time may not have seen much value in the production beyond

the waning appeal of alleged “authenticity.”

Despite its lack of longevity, a closer look at the complex historical and cultural contexts

behind Hanson and Zitkala-Ša's original collaboration on The Sun Dance Opera reveals that it has

a much deeper and more layered significance than most of its fellow Indianist operas. As part of

the creative process behind the opera, Zitkala-Ša had to make many difficult decisions about how

to portray Dakota and Ute cultures for a mostly non-Indigenous audience. And not only did she

succeed in creating a production that was successful in its time, but she also seems to have found

ways to incorporate elements of banned ceremonies, and to take advantage of the opera genre’s

history of blurring gender categories in order to depict a Two-Spirit character. The Sun Dance

Opera is therefore a valuable historical example of how Indigenous artists in the early twentieth

century were able to resist colonialism through their work. Furthermore, Zitkala-Ša—alongside

Tsianina Redfeather—was one of the first to merge Indigenous and operatic music and

performance styles, and contemporary Indigenous artists such as those who have worked with

Native Earth Performing Arts carry on that work today. This legacy is another form of Zitkala-

Ša’s survivance.

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Chapter 3: Zitkala-Ša’s Activist Collaborations on “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians” and The Petition of the NCAI

In a significant 2013 interview, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake

Simpson—in response to questions from non-Indigenous activist and filmmaker Naomi Klein—

characterizes colonial oppression as rooted in issues of extraction (Simpson 75). The most obvious

way to understand the term “extraction” is in reference to the literal and physical resource

extraction which colonial governments have repeatedly forced Indigenous peoples off their lands

to undertake; however, Simpson also imbues the term with a much deeper and broader meaning.

Under colonialism and capitalism, she explains, all aspects of Indigenous peoples’ lives, cultures,

and relationships are treated as resources to be extracted. Alongside lands, plants, and animals,

“culture and knowledge is a resource” (75), and “children are a resource because they are the

potential to grow, maintain, and uphold the extraction-assimilation system” (75). Colonialism’s

continued removal of Indigenous children from their parents, and of Indigenous knowledges from

their original contexts, is another side to the same kind of extraction that has removed Indigenous

peoples from their lands and damaged the environment. Simpson continues, “extracting is

stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that

extraction has” (75). Extraction, as defined by Simpson, is therefore the main issue at hand in

Indigenous people’s ongoing fight for their rights, and resistance to extraction of all kinds can be

read into the heart of Zitkala-Ša’s activism—the subject of this chapter.

Political activism was a major part of Zitkala-Ša’s work throughout her entire adult life. In

1896, at the age of twenty, she won second place in an oratorical contest with a speech that P. Jane

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Hafen (Taos Pueblo) describes as “a stinging indictment of white society and hypocritical

Christianity” (Dreams xvi).36 As discussed in the previous chapter, many of her short stories

contain both implicit and explicit political commentary, and her work on The Sun Dance Opera

subtly resisted colonial oppression while also giving several Ute performers the opportunity to

express their creative agency as well. In 1914, the year after the opera’s premiere, Zitkala-Ša began

to focus on the activist elements of her career even more explicitly when she joined the advisory

board of the Society of American Indians (“Help” 200). She would go on to become the society’s

secretary in 1916, as well as the editor of its American Indian Magazine in 1918 (201-203). She

also published several articles alongside her editorial notes in American Indian Magazine,

including one that detailed her community service on the Ute reservation, and the numerous social

issues the Ute people she worked with were facing. In 1926, she and her husband Raymond Bonnin

(Yankton Dakota) co-founded their own activist organization: the National Council of American

Indians, for which the two of them respectively served as president and executive secretary (205).

In a brief description of the council's origins, Zitkala-Ša wrote that a lack of organization had

previously made it especially difficult for various delegates of different Nations “to procure redress

for their many grievances” (“How the NCAI Came Into Being”) in separate attempts to negotiate

with the American federal government. The NCAI was formed with the support of many of these

delegates in order to take a more organized approach, with its biggest focus being the goal of “all

the tribes...reunited under the rights of citizenship” (“How the NCAI Came Into Being”). While

36 This was the same oratorical contest at which some audience members responded to her performance by holding up a racist banner; see the introduction for further detail and analysis.

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they often lacked funding, Zitkala-Ša remained dedicated to the cause, spending much of her time

over the following years carrying on correspondences with politicians and representatives of many

different Nations, and traveling the United States in order to give speeches and testify before

Congress about Indigenous peoples’ rights (209-212). She remained president until her death in

1938, after which Raymond Bonnin struggled to keep the organization alive; Hafen writes that

“the NCAI really did depend on her leadership” (“Help” 214), and when historical texts discuss it,

“it is nearly always associated with her name” (214). However short-lived the NCAI was, it

influenced many other Indigenous activists, such as the similarly named National Congress of

American Indians, which was founded six years after Zitkala-Ša’s death and remains an active

organization to this day (214).

This chapter will focus on two activist texts that Zitkala-Ša collaborated on writing with

multiple other authors in the mid-1920s: the pamphlet “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy

of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery” and The Petition of the

National Council of American Indians to the Senate of the United States of America Assembled.

Among Zitkala-Ša’s body of work, these two texts stand out as explicitly activist in their direct

address of the American government and clear demands for specific reforms. However, they

should not be considered as entirely dissimilar to her fictional works, which consistently address

issues of injustices against Indigenous peoples and could also be termed “activist” in their own

right. Analysis of these two texts will show that many of the rhetorical strategies Zitkala-Ša used

in her work with the Indian Rights Association and the National Council of American Indians build

upon those which were already present in her earlier writing in different genres. The Oklahoma

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pamphlet is largely centered on physical resource extraction, while the Petition of the NCAI has a

much broader focus and covers issues of extraction in many forms. In both cases, I read Zitkala-

Ša as crafting strategies to not only educate non-Indigenous readers about these issues, but also

resist the processes of extraction by bringing Indigenous knowledges back into their proper

contexts. This chapter will also seek more in-depth knowledge about what contributions Zitkala-

Ša made to both collaborations, and the effects of the different approaches each group of writers

took to combining their talents. It will consider how the differences in collaboration style relate to

the difference in dynamic of Zitkala-Ša working with non-Indigenous writers on the pamphlet and

Indigenous writers on the petition. Just as Zitkala-Ša, in my interpretation, is working to make her

audience aware of the contexts and relationships that are important to understanding Indigenous

knowledges and cultures, readers of her work should also take into account the contexts within

which she wrote, and the relationships that underpin that work. Finally, this chapter will examine

some of the contemporary non-Indigenous press responses to Zitkala-Ša’s activist work. Much of

this press coverage demonstrates that she was continually fighting against extractivist attitudes,

yet at the same time, other articles provide examples of the ways in which she succeeded in

bringing more attention to her causes as an activist.

3.1 “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians”

Zitkala-Ša’s collaboration on “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians” took place in 1923 and

1924, in between her period of working with the Society of American Indians and her co-founding

of the NCAI (“Help” 204-205). She and her collaborators, Matthew K. Sniffen and Charles H.

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Fabens, both of whom were non-Indigenous (Wilkinson 34), each represented a different

organization; Sniffen was the secretary of the Indian Rights Association, while Fabens was a

lawyer working with the American Indian Defense Association, and Zitkala-Ša was at the time a

member of “the Welfare Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs” (“Poor Rich

Indians” 225). The three of them spent five weeks on research in Oklahoma before making their

report on the oppression that the people of the “Five Civilized Tribes” were facing at the hands of

malicious government agents (225). The term “Five Civilized Tribes” referred to “the Cherokee,

Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek or Muskogee, and Seminole nations” (Debo 3), whom the American

government had forced into living in a portion of Oklahoma during the mid-nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries (ix-x).37 When the discovery of oil on much of the land that had been allotted

to these five Nations made it unexpectedly valuable, Indigenous landowners became the targets of

a variety of fraudulent schemes. Groups of corrupt “county judges, guardians, attorneys, bankers,

[and] merchants” (“Poor Rich Indians” 226) regularly conspired to have wealthy Indigenous

people declared incompetent, so that non-Indigenous guardians could take over the management

of their estates and use their money for their own purposes.

The pamphlet illustrates the frequent abuse of the guardianship system by juxtaposing the

examples of two young Creek women whom a county judge considered incapable of handling their

own finances: Susanna Dacon and Munnie Bear (235-236). Both women had high monthly

incomes from oil leases, and Susanna Dacon regularly spent most of hers on luxuries such as

37 Settlers referred to them as such because they considered them to be more “civilized” than other Nations by colonial standards of assimilation. For instance, some members of these Nations seemed comparatively less opposed than others to converting to Christianity and sending their children to residential schools (Roberts Seppi 881).

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traveling with friends, while Munnie Bear carefully saved her money, only spending some of it on

practical purchases for her farm (235-236). The judge assigned guardians to both of them on the

basis of their financial habits, and the pamphlet highlights the absurdity of the two cases by

comparing them: “The principle of Munnie Bear’s case seems to be that if she never spent any

money, she did not know the value of it, and the principle of Susanna Dacon’s case would seem

to be that if she always spent money, she did not know the value of it” (236). No matter what the

circumstances of the wealthy members of the “Five Civilized Tribes” were, the courts seemed to

consistently find excuses to declare them incompetent and assign the management of their estates

to non-Indigenous guardians. These women were only two of many other victims of this system

of oppression whose stories Zitkala-Ša, along with Fabens and Siffen, uncovered during her time

in Oklahoma.

In a 2013 essay, Elizabeth Wilkinson analyzes the rhetorical strategies Zitkala-Ša and her

collaborators use to persuade the readers of the pamphlet, and compares them to Zitkala-Ša’s

earlier autohistorical works. In particular, Wilkinson focuses on one section of the pamphlet which

is attributed to Zitkala-Ša personally, rather than to the whole group of three activists. While the

rest of the text makes no distinction between the authors, the introduction of the section subtitled

“Regardless of Sex or Age” reads, “There are some phrases of our investigation that can be

presented best by a feminine mind, and we leave it to Mrs. Bonnin to describe the following three

cases” (“Poor Rich Indians” 240). Those cases are those of Millie Naharkey (Creek), Ledcie Stechi

(Choctaw), and Martha Axe Roberts (Shawnee), and Zitkala-Ša speaks in the first-person for

roughly a quarter of the pamphlet, detailing the multiple forms of abuse these young Indigenous

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women faced. She begins with a long excerpt from an Oklahoma newspaper, which details

eighteen-year-old Naharkey’s kidnapping and coercion into signing away her land by several men

working for the Gladys Belle Oil Company (240-243); additionally, while neither the newspaper

nor Zitkala-Ša makes this explicit, it is implied that Naharkey was sexually assaulted (Wilkinson

40). Wilkinson notes that in quoting extensively from a well-known newspaper, Zitkala-Ša

“positions herself and the readers side by side: both are audience” (40). Furthermore, “she removes

potential prejudices that a white audience might presume” (40) by letting the information about

Naharkey’s abuse come from the trusted source of a well-known newspaper, rather than accusing

the criminals herself. By avoiding presenting herself as an authority, she makes it less likely that

non-Indigenous readers of the pamphlet will question the facts of the issue, and more likely that

they will sympathize with Naharkey.

Once the newspaper article concludes, Zitkala-Ša adopts a more personal and emotional

tone in recounting her own meeting with Naharkey. She describes her reaction to hearing the young

woman share what happened to her, writing, “I grew dumb at the horrible things she rehearsed”

(“Poor Rich Indians” 243), but as Wilkinson highlights, she does not relate the details of their

conversation. Instead, she briefly notes that Naharkey’s case is on “official record at Union

Agency, Muskogee” (243), before continuing to describe the comforting embrace she offered the

traumatized woman at the conclusion of her story. Wilkinson explains that after reading through

the quotations from the newspaper article, many readers would likely be expecting to learn

Naharkey’s own side of the story next; Zitkala-Ša’s refusal to reveal it not only subverts their

expectations, but also protects Naharkey from further victimization. As Wilkinson writes, “She

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won’t hold her up to the scorn that in the early twentieth century came with being the victim of

rape, and she won’t fall into the trap of creating a sexually charged ‘savage’ to feed into

stereotypes” (42). The way that Zitkala-Ša presents—and in this particular section, does not

present—Millie Naharkey’s story appears to be a careful negotiation, navigating the potential

reactions of non-Indigenous readers in order to encourage their sympathies and avoid anything

that might play into any prejudicial expectations they might have. In naming the Muskogee Union

Agency, Zitkala-Ša does provide her audience with a choice; they could “seek out those details

that fulfill base desires” (42) in the official records themselves. However, when faced with the sad

and emotionally honest description of Zitkala-Ša’s meeting with Naharkey, it seems much more

likely that, as Wilkinson writes, they will be “steered toward feeling for Millie almost as they

might one of their own children” (42), adopting the same parental position that Zitkala-Ša did

when she tried to comfort her.

Wilkinson’s analysis of this section focuses primarily on several examples of different

kinds of silences in the text. She points out that Zitkala-Ša emphasizes her own shocked silence in

response to Naharkey’s story, writing that she “grew dumb at the horrible things [Naharkey]

rehearsed” (243) and “Mutely...put [her] arms around her” (243) when she could think of nothing

to say. Wilkinson writes that this description may cause readers to empathize and experience a

shocked silence of their own; she furthermore compares it to the effect created by the earlier

excerpt from the newspaper article, which also puts Zitkala-Ša and the reader in “the shared

position of ‘listening’” (43). Finally, in the conclusion of the section, Zitkala-Ša uses punctuation

to create what Wilkinson describes as a “rhetorical pause—an actual moment of silence woven

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into the fabric of the narrative” (44): “Her terrified screams brought no help then,—but now, as

surely as this tale of horror reaches the friends of humanity, swift action must be taken to punish

those guilty of such cruelty against helpless little Millie Naharkey, an Indian girl of Oklahoma”

(“Poor Rich Indians” 243). The dash following the comma encourages readers to stop for longer

than they would have if there was only one punctuation mark, and therefore to take time to consider

the injustice that Millie Naharkey and many other Indigenous women face, and what they might

be able to do to help in the future. To build on the points made by Wilkinson, I would also like to

highlight that this presentation of Naharkey’s story forms another example of Zitkala-Ša’s

resistance to extraction. At every turn, she emphasizes the surrounding context of Naharkey’s

trauma, and brings it into the perspective of how it affects her community, and how Naharkey’s

relationships with other Indigenous women such as Zitkala-Ša can help her to heal. In the absence

of detail about the assault itself, it is likely that readers will remember these important contexts

and relationships, rather than removing the story from its surrounding meaning.

Wilkinson connects these uses of silence in the pamphlet to those in Zitkala-Ša's earlier

autohistorical works, arguing that silence in the short stories also functions to “[move] readers

from their unconsciously white, Euro-American alliance to, instead, a political alignment with

Native peoples” (35). Particularly relevant to her presentation of Millie Naharkey’s case in the

pamphlet is the opening of “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” which describes the sad silence

of Zitkala-Ša’s mother, Táte I Yóhin Win (Yankton Dakota). The young Zitkala-Ša in the story

asks her mother why she is crying, only to be rebuked with the words, “Hush; my little daughter

must never talk about my tears” (Stories 7). In addition to the image of the child being silenced,

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Wilkinson writes that this moment of “delayed discourse” (45), putting off the revelation of the

reasoning behind Táte I Yóhin Win’s silence until later, mirrors that which Zitkala-Ša’s uses to

engender sympathy toward Millie Naharkey years later. The audience becomes “aligned with

[Zitkala-Ša] in their desire for an explanation” (46) which they are not yet given, similar to the

pamphlet’s resistance to providing the details of Naharkey’s assault. Additionally, in both cases,

Zitkala-Ša emphasizes the relationships with other Indigenous women who provide emotional

support to each other. Once again, this emphasis, alongside a resistance to describing the specifics

of the trauma being discussed, makes readers more likely to remember the importance of those

relationships than to draw certain details out of their original context. Furthermore, Wilkinson

notes that when the narrative eventually explains that it is colonial oppression which makes Táte I

Yóhin Win cry, the indictment that “the paleface has stolen our lands” (Stories 10) comes in a

quotation from Táte I Yóhin Win rather than in the narration. Like her use of the newspaper article

in the pamphlet, Zitkala-Ša avoids positioning herself as an authority on the subject, and instead

allows some of the strongest criticisms of the actions of settlers to come from another source

(Wilkinson 45-47). This example illustrates a common thread of similar activist strategies

throughout Zitkala-Ša’s work in different genres throughout her life; later in this chapter, analysis

of her work with the NCAI will further exemplify some of the many ways in which she continued

to build on all of her past writing across the varied course of her career.

Returning to the Oklahoma pamphlet, Zitkala-Ša begins her description of the second of

the three cases with yet more imagery relating to sound and its attempted silencing: “The

smothered cries of the Indians for rescue from legalized plunder comes in a chorus from all parts

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of Eastern Oklahoma” (243). This next case involves the tragic death of a young Choctaw girl,

Ledcie Stechi. Stechi spent her short life in poverty despite having inherited several relatives’

valuable lands, because her non-Indigenous guardian would only give her and her grandmother a

severely limited allowance (243-44). At seven years old, she spent five weeks in medical treatment

for malnourishment and malaria; her health seemed to recover, but she died just over a month later,

after being removed to the custody of her guardian (244). Her grandmother, who had heard no

concerns about Stechi’s health from the guardian, was shocked by her death and suspected that she

had been poisoned (245). Certainly many of the “grafters” (244) and “speculators” (245) who took

advantage of the guardianship system stood to benefit from the girl’s death, and many of them

harassed the bereaved old woman—whom the pamphlet does not name—about what would

happen to her late granddaughter’s property. Zitkala-Ša condemns these predators with an

especially harrowing description: “Some of them sent flowers to be placed on the grave of her,

who though but a child, had known only of poisonous thorns. The floral offerings were too late for

the child of sorrows, but they were made by hypocrites who hoped thereby to play upon the heart

of the aged grandmother” (245). Similar to the earlier shift from the newspaper quotes to Zitkala-

Ša’s own personal experience, this dramatic passage stands out against the matter-of-fact tone of

much of the rest of the pamphlet. It emphasizes not only the tragedy of the young girl’s death, but

also the unfeeling nature of those who seek to profit from it, drawing readers to sympathize with

Stechi’s grandmother as well as with any other potential victims of these criminals.

Zitkala-Ša also seems to carefully present the details of Stechi’s story in a manner that may

have been designed to align with the opinions of non-Indigenous readers. She writes that when

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Stechi initially recovered from malaria, “she was placed by an employee of the Indian Service in

the Wheelock Academy, an Indian school” (244), where she stayed only briefly before her

guardian removed her. Zitkala-Ša seems to present the guardian’s choice to take the child away as

another example of his harmful treatment of her, claiming that at Wheelock Academy, “she would

have had good care” (244). Wheelock Academy was “an all-girls boarding school established in

1832” to which “Choctaw girls were sent...to learn domestic skills like cooking and cleaning

house” (Baker 30)—one of many “boarding schools designed to destroy tribal nations and strip

Native children of their cultures, languages and religions” (Katanski 2). Non-Indigenous scholar

Amelia V. Katanski writes in her analysis of the impact these schools had on Indigenous writers,

“Many students lost their lives as the result of intense physical abuse and neglect, infectious

diseases that attacked them in their dormitories, or severe emotional battery and trauma” (13).

Former Wheelock students such as Mary Edna Watson (Choctaw) have reported suffering severe

punishments during their time there:

I was put in closets. I was paddled. At night, I was put in the halls and a line was

drawn up higher than I could stand. You had to tiptoe, but you couldn’t get your

finger away from that line. ’Cause they’d come along, if you dipped down just a

little, they’d paddle you...It was because they didn’t want me to talk Choctaw. (qtd.

in Dolezal 2)

This kind of abuse, aimed at eradicating all Indigenous cultural influence on the children, was

commonplace. Zitkala-Ša herself criticized the residential school system in many of her earlier

works—most famously in her autohistorical story “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” which

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drew on her own traumatic experiences at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, including the

“cruel neglect of our physical ills” (Stories 67) that led to the death of one of her friends. It seems

clear not only that Ledcie Stechi would almost certainly not have been in “good care” if she had

remained at Wheelock, but that Zitkala-Ša would have been aware of that. Both residential schools

and the guardianships in Oklahoma were violent, oppressive systems, the impact of which the

average non-Indigenous reader of Zitkala-Ša’s work at the time may not have entirely understood.

Throughout her entire career, Zitkala-Ša worked to make non-Indigenous audiences aware of this

ongoing violence, and of their complicit relationships to these systems of oppression. Succeeding

in that goal was especially difficult, as many non-Indigenous readers’ initial reactions would likely

be to deny these truths. In presenting the case of Ledcie Stechi from this angle, Zitkala-Ša appears

to be choosing to focus on one issue at a time, leaving out relevant criticism of residential schools

in service of taking every opportunity she has to engender non-Indigenous readers’ sympathies for

the victims of the corrupt guardianship system in Oklahoma.

The description of the third and final case in Zitkala-Ša’s section of the pamphlet continues

the thematic emphasis on silence, repeating twice that the courts “would not hear” (247, 248) the

sad story of Martha Axe Roberts. Martha’s guardian lied to her about how much money she should

rightfully have owned, withholding it even when she asked for help to find a doctor for her sick

baby, who died at fourteen months old (246). In court, the guardian claimed that Roberts could not

be trusted with money because she was mentally ill, with “no sense...of right and wrong” (247).

At this point, Zitkala-Ša speaks in the first-person again, writing that she set out to meet Roberts

herself because she wondered if “there might be some foundation for this official statement against

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her that she was crazy” (247). This appears to be another point at which, similar to the shared

“listening” of the newspaper article, Zitkala-Ša strategically aligns herself with her non-Indigenous

audience. As she was an Indigenous woman herself, and she was immersed in research about the

multitude of injustices of the guardianship system, it seems probable that Zitkala-Ša would have

been immediately suspicious of any non-Indigenous guardian’s claims that an Indigenous woman

was not mentally competent enough to handle her own finances. However, she claims to have

initially entertained the notion that Roberts really did need a guardian, and writes that she only

concluded that Roberts was “perfectly sane” (248) after spending hours in conversation with her

about her experiences. In framing the story this way, Zitkala-Ša seems once more to avoid

positioning herself as an authority; rather than simply stating directly that Martha Axe Roberts did

not need a guardian, she brings readers along with her on a journey to find out the truth together.

This may have been more persuasive to some non-Indigenous readers, who might have initially

been more inclined to believe the guardian over Roberts herself.

Additionally, recent scholars have advocated against the use of the seemingly objective

third-person in journalism—especially in instances of cross-cultural reporting, when the

assumption of authority that perspective confers “can contribute to the unjust dominance of a

Western viewpoint” (Avieson 171). Creative non-fiction which instead emphasizes the author’s

subjective viewpoint, and “situates the author within their own cultural space, as fellow subject,

available for analysis” (172), can encourage readers to engage with the material in much more

positive and productive ways. Zitkala-Ša models this kind of dismantling of “god-like authorial

authority” (172) in her own cross-cultural communication with non-Indigenous people in her

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audience, and with Indigenous women from Nations other than her own. And in the conclusion of

this section, she returns to imagery of silence once more, writing that in the corrupt court systems

of Oklahoma, “the Indian is legally bound and gagged” (248). Her final sentence before the

pamphlet returns to the collective voice of all three collaborators, “The human cry of this Shawnee

woman is a call to America for defence and protection” (248), pleads with her audience not to let

Indigenous women’s voices be silenced any longer.

The Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin collection at Brigham Young University’s archives

contains a typed manuscript titled “Oklahoma Indians, by Gertrude Bonnin” which appears to be

a draft of this pamphlet. While there is little information in the archive about the document’s origin,

it seems likely that it was Zitkala-Ša’s individual contribution to the pamphlet, which would later

be edited and combined with sections written by Fabens and Sniffen. For instance, the document

in the archive opens with a quotation from “a white resident of Oklahoma” (“Oklahoma Indians”

1) expressing sympathy with the Indigenous victims of government exploitation; this same

quotation does also appear in the published pamphlet (228), but not until after a new introductory

section that is absent from the “Oklahoma Indians” manuscript. There are also many details in the

manuscript which appear to have been condensed for the final version, such as the case of a

Choctaw woman named Christine Bennett, which takes up several pages in the document in the

archives (20-22), but only appears in one paragraph of the pamphlet (253), among a list of multiple

summarized examples. Comparison of the two texts reveals many other instances of information

from portions of the manuscript being apparently modified, edited, and incorporated into the final

pamphlet. Yet despite all the changes between this apparent draft and the finished product, the

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section that describes the cases of Millie Naharkey, Ledcie Stechi, and Martha Axe Roberts is

almost entirely unaltered, save for some reordering of paragraphs. Assuming that Zitkala-Ša did

write this manuscript by herself prior to engaging in further collaborative work with Fabens and

Sniffen, the lack of modification to this section would suggest that the pamphlet’s attribution of it

to Zitkala-Ša individually is not merely a rhetorical strategy. Where other parts of the pamphlet

appear to have been written more collaboratively based on the differences between them and what

appears to be Zitkala-Ša’s draft, it seems that Faben and Sniffen really did “leave it to Mrs.

Bonnin” (“Poor Rich Indians” 240) to handle some of the more sensitive aspects of cases involving

the abuse of young Indigenous women. Perhaps the two of them understood that these three

Indigenous women’s stories would best be told by another Indigenous woman, and that no

contribution from non-Indigenous men was necessary. If so, there would appear to be a stark

difference in the amount of respect paid to Zitkala-Ša’s contributions in this collaboration as

opposed to her previous collaboration with William F. Hanson on The Sun Dance Opera. While

as discussed in the previous chapter, Hanson’s later revival of the opera made further modifications

to Zitkala-Ša’s work without her involvement, Fabens and Sniffen instead highlighted the

importance of her individual voice. The next section of this chapter will analyze yet another

approach to collaboration, in which a different context and a different relationship between

Zitkala-Ša and later collaborative partners allowed her to choose not to highlight her own voice,

instead speaking as a collective alongside other Indigenous activists.

Zitkala-Ša’s work on “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians” was successful in promoting legal

and social change. While P. Jane Hafen explains that Congress was initially resistant and “slow to

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respond” (“Help” 205), the report eventually convinced the congressional Indian Affairs

Committee to undertake an investigation of the department in Oklahoma (“Favor Investigation”).

Hafen adds that this “prompted the Meriam Report of 1928, which opened the door for the reforms

that would follow in the next decade” (205). The Meriam Report—officially titled The Problem of

Indian Administration but often informally named after lead investigator Lewis Meriam—was an

872-page survey which “declared the federal government’s longstanding policy of allotment and

assimilation an abject failure that had created tremendous economic hardship on reservations

across the country” (Shreve). Zitkala-Ša also directly testified in support of funding for this

investigation in a “Survey of Conditions of the Indians Pursuant to S. Res. 341, A Resolution

Providing for a General Survey of the Condition of the Indians in the United States, and for Other

Purposes,” reiterating “her concerns about the status of Indians” (Help 219-220) and recounting

some more of her experiences visiting and working with multiple Nations. Tribal College Journal

editor Bradley Shreve writes that the Meriam Report “led to major changes in federal Indian

policy,” and that while there still were—and continue to be—many issues with those policies, “the

federal government finally seemed to recognize that...a new approach rooted in self-determination,

tribal sovereignty, and cultural revitalization was necessary” (Shreve). Zitkala-Ša and her

collaborators deserve partial credit for prompting this recognition by shedding light on the depth

of the problems facing Indigenous peoples in Oklahoma.

Some contemporary non-Indigenous newspapers also covered the content of the pamphlet

and its impact, potentially opening readers’ eyes to injustices of which they had previously been

ignorant. These responses from settler readers of the pamphlet demonstrate that Zitkala-Ša’s

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rhetorical strategies, which I read as anticipating the reactions of this audience, were successful in

achieving their goal; they seem to have drawn readers to sympathize with and support the rights

of Indigenous peoples. For instance, one 1924 article titled “Wealthy Indians Prey of Lawyers”

reported that “the estates of the five civilized tribes are being shamelessly and openly robbed”

(“Wealthy Indians”), crediting the pamphlet with inspiring further investigation into the issue and

adding that “the Oklahoma Bar association [had] announced its opposition to the system in a public

report” (“Wealthy Indians”). In the same year, another paper described “the opening session of the

Society of Oklahoma Indians” (Associated Press), a new Indigenous association that held a

convention to address issues including “the financial and educational rights” (Associated Press) of

Indigenous peoples. The article includes the detail that Zitkala-Ša—albeit incorrectly titled as

“Miss” Gertrude Bonnin—was present at the convention to make a report on her research, and

states that she was “largely responsible for the proposed congressional investigation of Indian

affairs in Oklahoma” (Associated Press). As further analysis of contemporary press coverage later

in this chapter will show, this article is rare in its acknowledgement of the political impact of

Zitkala-Ša’s activist work. Most other appearances of her name in non-Indigenous newspapers are

accompanied by demeaning stereotypes and downplaying of her accomplishments; the fact that

even one journalist was able to celebrate her activism within that atmosphere seems like a

testament to the importance of her work in Oklahoma.

Furthermore, the text remains relevant in modern investigations of the injustices that

Indigenous peoples have historically faced in America; yet at the same time as demonstrating its

continued importance, one modern example of its influence is also an example of the continued

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settler tendency towards rhetorical extraction. One of the texts listed in Time magazine’s “Top 10

Non-Fiction Books of 2017,” David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and

the Birth of the FBI, draws heavily on “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians” in order to illustrate the

abuse of the guardianship system—an issue which was heavily intertwined with the series of

murders of Osage people in the 1920s on which the book focuses. Grann describes the 1924

investigation that the Indian Rights Association undertook, and summarizes the sad story of

Martha Axe Roberts’ loss of her child (154-156). He even quotes directly from the end of Zitkala-

Ša’s section of the pamphlet. However, he does not name Martha Axe Roberts, referring to her

only as “a widow” (156). Furthermore, he shortens the original quotation “The human cry of this

Shawnee woman is a call to America for defence and protection” (“Poor Rich Indians” 248) to

simply “The human cry of this...woman is a call to America” (qtd. in Grann 156, ellipsis in

original), and also does not name Zitkala-Ša or her collaborators individually. Zitkala-Ša’s

description of Martha Axe Roberts’s “human cry” originally specified that she was a “Shawnee

woman,” emphasizing the importance of Indigenous National identity; additionally, this section of

the pamphlet is especially meaningful because it was written not by the white men involved in the

investigation, but by Zitkala-Ša, a Yankton Dakota woman forging connections with women from

other Nations and fighting for the rights of all Indigenous women in the United States. These

relationships are central to Zitkala-Ša’s activism, and something she herself emphasized in the

pamphlet through her descriptions of her meetings with Millie Naharkey and Martha Axe Roberts.

Extracting her words from their original context, as many other non-Indigenous researchers have

done to the words of Indigenous people throughout the history of colonialism, robs them of much

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of their value. This extractive use of Zitkala-Ša’s work sadly demonstrates that despite the lasting

significance of her writing and activism, many settlers still do not give her the credit and respect

that she deserves.

3.2 The Petition of the NCAI

Zitkala-Ša collaborated on explicitly activist writing again—this time exclusively with

other Indigenous writers—in 1926, with The Petition of the National Council of American Indians

to the Senate of the United States of America Assembled. The NCAI had the support of Delaware

Senator Thomas F. Bayard, who presented the petition to its primary audience, the United States

Congress, in April of 1926 (Taylor 128);38 Zitkala-Ša and Raymond Bonnin also circulated the

document among their Indigenous friends and allies throughout the country. As Michael P. Taylor

explains in his dissertation on the history of collaborative Indigenous political writing,39 “the

Council’s Petition identifies Gertrude Bonnin, acting as Council President, explicitly as the author”

(124); however, it is very likely that other members of the council, including Raymond Bonnin,

contributed. Taylor refers to Hafen, who notes that at the time the petition was written, “Raymond

was well experienced by taking law classes and working with Congress” (“Help” 206), and likely

38 The full text of the petition was entered into the Congressional Record, at Bayard’s request, on April 24th, 1926 (United States Congress 8152-58). However, the record does not include any further information about Congress’s immediate reaction beyond referring the petition to the Committee on Indian Affairs.

39 Some of Taylor’s analysis of Zitkala-Ša’s work with the NCAI has also been recently published as “Conational Networks: Reconstituting Indigenous Solidarity through the Works of Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin.”

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deserves credit for some of the petition’s “legal rhetorical voice” (206). The petition also positions

itself within a long history of collective writing by Indigenous organizations by referencing the

Indian National Confederacy. Also known as the United Indian Nations, the Confederacy, which

submitted their own petition to Congress in 1786, included delegates from several different

Nations and was “perhaps the most flexible and far-reaching political network of chiefs,

clanmothers, and faith keepers” (Taylor 117). The NCAI aligns itself with this earlier collaborative

group when they reference the Confederacy’s petition in the introduction to their own, criticizing

Congress for refusing the invitation to “kindle one great Council Fire” (3) and negotiate with them.

In doing so, they seem to position themselves as successors to a group that valued collaboration

across multiple Indigenous Nations. Based on this evidence, Taylor argues, “attributing sole

authorship of the Petition to the President was surely more strategic than accurately reflective of

its process of composition” (124). Assuming that Hafen and Taylor are correct in their evaluations,

the petition is therefore the result of another collaboration between Zitkala-Ša and others—and

unlike her previous collaborations on The Sun Dance Opera and “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians,”

here all of her collaborators are also Indigenous writers.

Taylor’s work also shows that the NCAI was not the only Indigenous activist group

engaged in collective petition-writing in the early- to mid-twentieth-century; the Alaska Native

Brotherhood/Sisterhood and the Hawaiian Indigenous organization Hui Aloha ‘Āina, to name two

examples, were engaging in similar methods as well (132-149). Furthermore, Indigenous

petitioning has a very long history, as examined in more detail by Lisa Brooks (Abenaki), also

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cited in Taylor’s work.40 Brooks traces some of the origins of Indigenous political writing to

wampum: beads that were woven “into strings and belts that represented the binds between nations,

recorded communal narratives and commitments, and enacted renewal and change” (9). She also

analyzes some collectively written petitions that were earlier than that of the Indian National

Confederacy, such as an awikhigan—a piece of writing on birch bark—that a group of Abenaki

writers posted outside of an English settler fort in 1747 (13). While writing on birch bark may not

fall into the settler normative standards of how to present a petition, the awikhigan bears many

similarities to the later writing of groups like the NCAI. Its protest against mistreatment of

Indigenous peoples is signed with four names followed by a clarification that they are also writing

“on behalf of others” (qtd. in Brooks 14), similar to the NCAI’s identification of Zitkala-Ša as

president and author despite the petition’s collaborative nature. And along the same lines as the

NCAI’s complex negotiation of audience expectations, Brooks writes that the authors of the

awikhigan demonstrated “familiarity with the submissive form demanded of colonial

instructors...[and] mastered that rhetoric only to subvert it” (43). She adds that this 1747 petition

“may be the first piece of American Indian protest literature” (43), forming a new genre which the

members of many other Indigenous activist groups would go on to adapt over the next two

centuries and beyond. These written petitions of course also draw on the long history of Indigenous

oratory, and many other Indigenous activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

continued to protest through speech and storytelling as well. One notable example among them

40 See also Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior’s The People and The Word and Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice’s “A Relevant Resonance: Considering the Study of Indigenous National Literatures.”

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was Simon Pokagon (Powatomi), who took the opportunity to speak at the 1893 World’s

Columbian Exposition to provide “A Red Man’s Rebuke,” reminding his audience of mostly

settlers that the land on which they were celebrating had been stolen from his people (Vigil 1-2).

His bold statement was influential to the generation of Indigenous activists, including Zitkala-Ša,

who followed him (2-3), and the work of the NCAI builds on that influence as well as many others.

The Petition of the NCAI, which is available at the Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin

Collection in Brigham Young University’s archives, begins with an overview of the history of

colonialism in the United States. It highlights the fact that the American government refused to

recognize the petitions of the Indian National Confederacy in 1783, instead negotiating several

different treaties with different Nations, which made it especially complex and difficult for any of

them to work together towards a common cause (3-4). It goes on to summarize many of the

injustices faced by Indigenous peoples throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

focusing especially on multiple instances of forcible removal from their lands, and including

lengthy quotations from historical sessions of Congress as supporting evidence (9-11). Following

this introduction, the petition organizes its arguments for widespread reform of the systems of

government relating to Indigenous peoples into three sections. The first one demonstrates that

“Congress has denied to the Indian citizens a legal remedy for their wrongs” (13) by making the

legal system especially complex and difficult to negotiate for Indigenous people. The second

section describes several instances in which these legal complexities have made it impossible for

Indigenous Nations to regain control over their own lands—such as the St. Regis tribe, whom the

state of New York claimed were “without legal capacity to sue” (21). The third section moves

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away from the specifics of legal cases and reiterates the severity of many of the broad socio-

economic injustices facing Indigenous peoples, once again summarizing some of the major events

in American history in order to illustrate that these issues were caused by colonialism and that they

have been continually ignored or exacerbated by the American government.

Three particular rhetorical strategies that the NCAI uses stand out throughout their petition:

their use of questions, their choices of supporting evidence, and their portrayal of the American

government as a parental figure to Indigenous peoples. First, the petition poses questions to the

United States Congress several times. Some of them may be asked in earnest expectation of an

answer regarding something that the members of the NCAI are unsure about; for instance, one

passage describes a specific legal case and asks whether Congress had previously been aware of it

or not (19-20). However, several more, especially those which are asked in succession toward the

end of its final section, are worded in a manner which heavily implies their expected answers, such

as, “Does it do any good, is it any excuse, to say that these Indians [living in poverty] are

improvident, and that if they had not leased but had cultivated their lands intelligently, they would

be well provided?” (33), and, “Is it not only too obvious that justice for our people demands more

than reservations and implements and police to see that they are not disturbed in their

possessions?” (33). The tone and diction of these questions demands answers that agree with the

arguments of the NCAI: that of course it does not do any good to blame Indigenous people for

their socio-economic situation, and that of course it is obvious that there can be no justice without

major changes to government policy. Rather than stating these views directly, however, the

petition asks these rhetorical questions in order to force their audience to come to those conclusions

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by themselves. Just as in the pamphlet, the strategies Zitkala-Ša and her collaborators use here are

those which anticipate a non-Indigenous readership’s likely response, and guide those readers

toward a specific emotional reaction. Rather than simply stating the facts and the writers’ opinions,

rhetorical questions position the audience in relation to what they are learning from the text.

Additionally, this technique can be read as drawing on Indigenous storytelling practices; scholars

such as Basil H. Johnston (Ojibwe) have expressed that the oral stories told to children in

Indigenous cultures typically refrain from stating clear lessons or morals, instead more subtly

guiding the listeners to draw the appropriate conclusions, and encouraging the development of the

analytic skills necessary to do so (“How Do We” 46). This rhetorical approach will be discussed

in more depth in relation to Zitkala-Ša’s textual adaptations of orature in the next chapter.

The petition also often selects quotes from white men in positions of authority in order to

support its arguments, even in cases when such supporting evidence may seem entirely

unnecessary to a modern reader. For instance, near the beginning of the final section, the petition

describes some differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures, and explains how

harmful colonial impositions of differing cultural values have been for Indigenous people. In order

to illustrate this point, the NCAI quotes “the Rt. Rev Hugh L. Burleson, Bishop of South Dakota,

an eminent Christian worker among our people” (25). Burleston speaks about observing a lack of

individualism in Indigenous societies, claiming, “The Indian’s point of view is that of the group;

his relation to and his responsibility for the group” (qtd. in Petition 25). The petition follows this

quotation with an argument about how colonialism has disrupted these important societal

structures in Indigenous Nations. The Burleston quotation seems superfluous from a modern

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perspective, as no doubt the members of the NCAI could have provided the so-called “Indian’s

point of view” themselves, without any need for external sources. But by quoting from a respected

non-Indigenous man rather than positioning themselves as the experts, the NCAI may have been

more successful in persuading a non-Indigenous audience. This careful selection of supporting

evidence is similar to Zitkala-Ša’s use of the newspaper article in describing the abuse of Millie

Naharkey in “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians,” and once more positions Zitkala-Ša and her non-

Indigenous readers in a relationship of equality.

Additionally, Taylor highlights the petition’s use of “congressional paternalism” (121),

especially in its final section. As Taylor explains, the petition quotes at length “from a report by

Reverend Jedidiah Morse submitted to Congress in 1820” (121) which describes Indigenous

peoples as weak and helpless, entirely unable to support themselves without the American

government’s assistance. Morse even directly refers to Indigenous people as “‘children’ of the

Government” (qtd. in Petition 29-30), and argues that it is because of this allegedly childlike nature

that the government should help them. The NCAI does not argue against this extremely patronizing

viewpoint, and instead expresses the opinion that the government should act as a parent to

Indigenous peoples and take “responsibility for our helpless race” (31). Taylor notes that this kind

of rhetoric was “common in the writings of Indigenous intellectuals and progressive activists

throughout the early twentieth century” (121), and that the NCAI uses it to argue that “Congress

has been a negligent, abusive parent” (122), and that following the petition’s recommendations

will make it a better one. Appealing to these common, patronizing viewpoints of Indigenous

peoples may have made it easier to persuade some non-Indigenous readers. This possibly strategic

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negotiation of a settler audience’s views and expectations is once again similar to Zitkala-Ša’s

work on the Oklahoma pamphlet, such as her apparently incongruous expression of support for

residential schools in the case of Ledcie Stechi. It also envisions a different notion of guardianship

than that of the system which Zitkala-Ša previously criticized. While the pamphlet argued that the

Indigenous peoples of Oklahoma should be free from the abuse of controlling, authoritarian

guardians, the petition proposes that another kind of guardian—one who is instead a benevolent

protector—could be an important ally.

Along similar lines, despite its harsh critique of many of the actions of the American

government, the NCAI occasionally portrays specific American politicians in a much more

sympathetic light. They write that George Washington “counselled the Congress and the states

against the folly and the injustice” (4) of their treatment of Indigenous peoples. They also quote

him promising to protect Indigenous peoples “in all [their] just rights” (6), and refer to him as “The

Great Grandfather” (6) in honour of that pledge. Similarly, they give Ulysses S. Grant credit for

being “a friend of the Indians” (11), and they refer to Abraham Lincoln, whom they allege had

intended to “reform the Indian system” (35) before his death, as “the great American humanitarian”

(35). The petition’s overall critical tone towards the actions of the American government is

tempered by this occasional praise of individual past presidents, whom the authors position as

having been in agreement with their arguments despite the violent and oppressive acts these men

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historically committed.41 This may have drawn more sympathy from the members of the Congress

to whom the petition was addressed. The NCAI avoids making themselves appear overly hostile

to Congress, and these historical figures whom they position as the friends of Indigenous people

are men whom the members of Congress are likely to admire. By making the case that listening to

their demands is a way to follow in the footsteps of Washington, Grant, and Lincoln, the NCAI

may have won over more of their non-Indigenous audience than they would have if their portrayals

of past presidents were more critical. This is another example of Zitkala-Ša’s apparent anticipation

of audience reactions—in this case, in conjunction with the other members of the NCAI, all of

them working together to frame the just causes they are fighting for in as palatable a manner as

possible.

While—as Taylor and Hafen noted—the legal elements of much of the petition are likely

due to Raymond Bonnin’s participation in the collaboration, the document’s conclusion seems to

instead draw on more of Zitkala-Ša’s other work across a variety of genres. It refers specifically

to the issues of the “so-called Five Civilized Tribes” (38), among whom she, Fabens, and Sniffen

spent time while researching for “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians,” and it also notes that many

Indigenous people served in the first world war—a group which included Raymond Bonnin.

Zitkala-Ša discusses her husband's military service in several of the articles and editorial notes she

wrote during her tenure as editor of The American Indian Magazine in 1918 and 1919, connecting

41 George Washington, for instance, ordered the destruction of the Haudenosaunee people’s crops during the American Revolution, earning the nickname of “Town Destroyer” (Brooks 116)—a far cry from “Great Grandfather”.

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it to the issue of American citizenship for Indigenous peoples. In one article, she tells a personal

anecdote in which she told a white woman that her husband, “a member of the great Sioux

Nation...[was] a volunteer in Uncle Sam’s Army” (“America” 165), only for the woman to reply,

“You are an Indian! Well, I knew when I first saw you that you must be a foreigner” (165). The

rest of the article is a description of Zitkala-Ša’s strong emotional response to this statement. She

emphasizes the immense sacrifices that many Indigenous people—both soldiers and civilians—

made during the war, and asks another rhetorical question, “When shall the Red Man be deemed

worthy of full citizenship if not now?” (166). The petition similarly uses the military service of

Indigenous peoples as evidence to support the idea that they are capable of self-government,

arguing that if “they were deemed trustworthy by the Government that employed them” (38), then

the government has no reason not to continue to trust them to be responsible. Furthermore, the

penultimate paragraph of the petition adopts a much more literary tone than the largely more

legalistic discourse that preceded it:

A time there was when the protest of our race against injustice was voiced in the

war cries that rose from the primeval forest. No less audibly shall this protest

resound through the hills and values of our Fatherland, echoing the far-carrying

appeals of justice and reason, never to be silenced until the pledge of the Nation,

made to us by The Great Grandfather, and sealed by our blood on the fields of

France, is redeemed. (42)

The imagery of this quotation is similar to that in the speech “Side by Side,” with which Zitkala-

Ša “won second place in the Indiana state oratorical contest” (Vigil 167) as a student at Earlham

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College in 1896. As Kiara M. Vigil (Dakota/Apache) writes, the speech “relies on romantic

symbols (‘we come from mountain fastnesses’) and paternalistic tropes (‘seeking the White Man’s

ways’)...so Bonnin can maneuver these metaphors to connect...issues of cultural belonging to a

biting critique” (167). Alongside her collaborators thirty years later, Zitkala-Ša seems to be using

the same techniques that she perfected over her long career, with similarly romantic images of

“cries...from the primeval forest” (Petition 42) and repetition of the earlier paternalistic admiration

of “The Great Grandfather.” The repeated imagery of voices and silence is also similar to Zitkala-

Ša’s writing in “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians”; the description of “cries” appealing for justice,

for instance, echoes that of Martha Axe Roberts’s “cry...for defence and protection” (248).

However, the tone at the end of the petition has become much more assertive than that of the

pamphlet. Instead of simply appealing to the audience to listen to the Indigenous voices that have

been silenced in the past, the NCAI states that their voices are “never to be silenced” again. While

both the Oklahoma pamphlet and the NCAI’s petition request action from the American

government, the Indigenous collective voice of the petition makes it clearer that Indigenous activist

work will continue with or without congressional support.

Even in this section of the petition, the style of which suggests that it was written primarily

by Zitkala-Ša, she never speaks in the first-person singular. Unlike “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich

Indians,” the Petition of the NCAI retains a collective voice throughout. From its early declaration

that “the National Council of American Indians, on behalf of the Indian citizens of the United

States, addresses this, its petition, to the Senate of the United States Assembled” (1), to its closing

request, “we humbly petition the Senate and pray that our grievances be considered” (42, emphasis

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added), the petition makes it clear that all of its words are those of the entire group. The only aspect

of it that identifies an individual author at all is the signature of the president on the final page,42 a

detail which is easily overshadowed by the consistently collective tone of the rest of the document.

This marks a distinct difference between Zitkala-Ša’s collaborations with Indigenous and non-

Indigenous co-authors. While in the Oklahoma pamphlet, Fabens and Sniffen allow one section to

spotlight her individual voice, the members of the National Council of American Indians remain

united in one voice speaking for the entire group. Zitkala-Ša’s voice is significant in the pamphlet,

when as the sole Indigenous and female member of the small group, she was closer to the issues

at hand than her co-writers; for the other two to step away and “leave it to” her appears to be

respectful of the sensitive nature of their subject and of the perspective she has that they do not

share. However, no such dynamic was at play in the writing process of the petition, when an

organization made up entirely of Indigenous people collaborated to address the issues that were

facing all of them across a variety of Nations. This allows for the entire NCAI to speak with one

voice, emphasizing the importance of the relationships between many different Indigenous

activists over the work of any individual. While much of this analysis has focused on Zitkala-Ša’s

contributions to the petition, it is also crucial to understand the pamphlet within its context as the

writing of a collective, following in the footsteps of other organizations such as the Indian National

42 The carbon copy of the petition available at Brigham Young University has no signature, with only the word “President” beneath the signature line indicating that Zitkala-Ša would have been the one to sign it (42). The version in the Congressional Record shows that, at least on the copy of the petition given to Bayard, she signed it with her English married name; the copied text of the petition concludes with “by Gertrude Bonnin, President” (8158).

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Confederacy in uniting activists across multiple Indigenous Nations to work toward their shared

goals.

Looking back to The Sun Dance Opera as well as the Oklahoma pamphlet, it is clear that

the multiple collaborations over the course of Zitkala-Ša’s career differed greatly based on the

contexts and relationships involved. In the case of the opera, while Zitkala-Ša and Hanson appear

to have been creative partners from early in the process, and consistently worked together on

several elements of the production, many of her contributions appear to have been shaped and

altered in order to suit Hanson’s goals. For instance, the Dakota music she played for him on the

violin was further “idealized” to suit his orchestral arrangements, and the plot that her ideas were

integral to developing was later changed without her involvement in the 1938 revival. Hanson also

ceased to credit her in this later production, and many newspapers of the time also failed to name

her, or downplayed her importance to the creative process. While she appears to have been able to

find some ways to assert creative agency—as well as provide valuable opportunities for Indigenous

performers—in the opera’s original run, these benefits seem to have come at a cost. In contrast,

Fabens and Sniffen appear to have been much more respectful of Zitkala-Ša and her work on the

Oklahoma pamphlet, allowing her to speak for herself about the issues she was best-equipped to

address and acknowledging her expertise on the subject. Some newspapers also followed suit as a

result, giving her individual credit for inspiring further investigation into the injustices being

perpetrated in Oklahoma, even in an era when such positive press coverage of an Indigenous

woman’s work was rare. Yet the Petition of the NCAI takes yet another approach, where Zitkala-

Ša—while named as one of the central figures in the organization—allows her own voice to blend

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with those of others in a collectively written document that aims to speak for the whole

organization. This style of collaboration is made possible by the shared perspectives and

experiences of the group, all of whom present themselves as on equal footing and in total

agreement when it comes to the issues facing Indigenous peoples in the United States. In her

collaborations with non-Indigenous men, Zitkala-Ša’s contributions were either minimized or set

apart. But when she collaborates with a group of other Indigenous writers and activists, she seems

to be able to more successfully integrate her work with that of her colleagues to form a cohesive

whole in which it is emphasized that all voices are heard, drawing on collaborative approaches to

both oral and written expression that are central to the cultures of many Indigenous Nations.

After collaborating on writing the petition, Zitkala-Ša and Raymond Bonnin embarked on

a “15,415-mile tour through Native America” (Taylor 109), distributing ten thousand copies of it

among different Nations. They also circulated it through wider non-Indigenous audiences through

further assistance from Senator Bayard, as well as through Zitkala-Ša’s connections with several

women’s clubs (109-110). Hafen writes that Zitkala-Ša went on to “engage in federal Indian

policies” (“Help” 210) in several ways over the following years, including testifying in court

alongside Raymond Bonnin about issues including “violations of Indian rights under a proposed

reservation courts bill...[and] claims for Ute lands and forests” (210). She also continued to

correspond with many other Indigenous people and organizations throughout the United States,

often using her experience and authority as the president of the NCAI to intervene in specific issues

on her contacts’ behalf (211). The petition formed the foundation for this career of activism that

she continued for the rest of her life. Furthermore, as Taylor states, one of the purposes of the

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petition seems to have been to generally “hold Congress responsible for past and present treaty

agreements, and identify ongoing injustices against American Indians” (115). In having the

petition presented to Congress and entered, in full, into the Congressional record, the NCAI

succeeded in this goal. Even if the petition did not immediately convince Congress to make any

direct changes, they were still forced to face the truth about many injustices in which they were

complicit, and to listen to the powerful collective voice of the NCAI.

3.3 Response to Zitkala-Ša’s Activism in Non-Indigenous Media

Taylor also analyzes some of the contemporary non-Indigenous newspaper responses to

the work of the NCAI, which, like the articles on The Sun Dance Opera discussed in the previous

chapter, are rife with demeaning stereotypes. Taylor describes two contrasting, yet similarly

harmful, categories into which the newspaper articles tend to fall: those which “portrayed the

Council as...unilaterally assimilated” (130) into normative American society, and those which saw

them as “stereotypically ‘traditional’” (130) instead. In the former category were articles with titles

such as “Red Men take Up Civilized Ways” (qtd. in Taylor 130), which ignored all history of

Indigenous political organization in order to portray the NCAI as solely influenced by white

American society, while in the latter category were articles that inaccurately referred to Zitkala-Ša

as a “princess,” depicting her authority over the council as part of an imagined “traditional”

hierarchy (131). These articles once more illustrate the colonial notion of a binary between

simplified ideas of “tradition” and the present. When the actions of the NCAI appear “modern” to

some non-Indigenous journalists, they imagine that its members have entirely cast aside

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“tradition,” as their limited understanding of Indigenous cultures does not include the “tribal

intellectual, activist, [and] sociopolitical traditions” (130) that informed the NCAI’s practice. Yet

at the same time, others saw the NCAI—and especially Zitkala-Ša herself—as belonging in the

past, portraying them with patronizing stereotypes and disregarding the contemporary relevance

of their activism. Taylor’s research does not appear to have uncovered any non-Indigenous press

coverage which managed to break from this binary and acknowledge the NCAI as a group that

belonged to the present at the same time as building on the work of other Indigenous activists of

the past.

Articles like those that Taylor describes were written about Zitkala-Ša throughout her

entire activist career, and his argument about how press coverage attempted to contain her work

within the familiar reductive binary can also be further applied to more newspaper stories from

other periods of her life. In my archival research, I found that many articles seem to have been

preoccupied with her appearance and the notion that she was some kind of Indigenous royalty, and

descriptions that treat her as an amusing novelty often take up more space on the page than

engagement with her ideas. One such article from 1921 describes Zitkala-Ša as having “fought her

way out” (“Spirit”) of the “most primitive...mode of life” (“Spirit”) she was raised in, before going

on to dedicate several sentences of description to her facial features, hair colour, and “charming

personality” (“Spirit”). The article only briefly mentions her activist work, describing it as a

mission to “lift [Indigenous people] out of their misery, the result of ignorance” (“Spirit”), and

giving very few specifics as to how she plans to accomplish that goal. Even the wording of the

article’s title betrays colonial biases; it refers to Zitkala-Ša as a “Great Influence in Progress of

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Her Own Race,” implying first of all that Indigenous peoples are in need of “progress,” and second

of all that most of them are incapable of influencing “progress” by themselves. Another article

announces an upcoming event at which Zitkala-Ša would be speaking with the title “Women to

Hear Indian Princess,” and condenses her entire writing career to Old Indian Legends, leaving out

any of her later activist publications or other work. Both of these articles, among many others, also

refer to the tenuous claim that she was “directly descended from one of the greatest Indian chiefs

of the past, Sitting Bull” (“Women to Hear”), which appears to be an attempt to play into exoticized

“savage” stereotypes further by drawing an association between her and the famous warrior. Other

articles invent completely fictitious relations for her, such as one which calls her the “daughter of

a Sioux chief” (“Praises”) and another which claims that she is “married to a white man” (“Uplift

of Race”), when Raymond Bonnin was also Yankton Dakota. Questionable details such as these

are regularly afforded more attention in the articles than any in-depth descriptions of Zitkala-Ša’s

works and accomplishments.

This kind of press coverage does even more harm than simply enforcing stereotypes; it also

undermines the relationship that Zitkala-Ša seems to be working to generate in her non-Indigenous

readership. Through strategies such as her quotations from newspaper articles in the Oklahoma

pamphlet, Zitkala-Ša works to position herself as similar to her audience, an equal who is learning

about the issues alongside them. Articles which exoticize her Indigenous heritage and describe her

as royalty instead depict her as someone the average settler reader of the time may not relate to,

and may even see as belonging in the past rather than the present. If these images take hold in the

minds of her readers, they risk making her work less effective. The articles also mischaracterize

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her relationship with other Indigenous people in her community when they describe her as

separated from others by her education, her activism, or an imagined rank or title. To refer once

more to the work of Philip J. Deloria, they characterize her as “an unexpected anomaly” (5), and

in doing so reinforce readers’ pre-existing expectations about Indigenous people. Rather than truly

confronting audiences with the truth that the stereotypical beliefs colonialism has produced in their

minds are wrong, they instead position Zitkala-Ša as a rare exception to those rules, thereby

reassuring readers that they need not adjust their expectations to suit her apparently anomalous

existence. Yet in contrast to what these articles imply, Zitkala-Ša was not simply one exceptional

individual working alone in order to bring about some ideal of “progress” on the rest of her

community’s behalf; she was working alongside and in collaboration with a multitude of other

Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous allies, all of whose contributions and whose varying

approaches to addressing societal issues were important and valued. Removing her work from this

context, and those relationships that defined it, is yet another example of extraction.

Despite this lack of respect paid to her activism by the mainstream media, Zitkala-Ša’s

work with organizations including the Society of American Indians, the Indian Rights Association,

and the National Council of American Indians led to advancements in the cause of Indigenous

peoples’ rights. Her collaboration with Charles H. Faben and Matthew K. Sniffen revealed severe

government corruption in Oklahoma, prompting an investigation of the state’s Indian Affairs

department and eventual legal reforms through such channels as the 1928 Meriam Report, which

urged the American government to recognize the importance of “self-determination [and] tribal

sovereignty” (Shreve) for Indigenous peoples. Non-Indigenous newspapers also responded,

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reporting on events in Oklahoma with such direct statements as “the estates of the five civilized

tribes are being shamelessly and openly robbed” (“Wealthy Indians”), potentially opening the eyes

of many readers who had previously been unaware of such injustices occurring. Additionally, her

later collaboration with Raymond Bonnin and other members of the NCAI brought many of the

issues facing Indigenous peoples to the attention of the United States Congress, and played an

important role in the ongoing history of collective Indigenous petition writing.

It is important to place these collaborative works within their proper contexts, both in terms

of the connected historical events, and in terms of the relationships and influences that were

integral to their creation. As the extractive use of her words in Killers of the Flower Moon

exemplifies, Zitkala-Ša’s explicitly activist work loses much of its meaning and significance when

read without such surrounding knowledge. Both “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians” and The Petition

of the NCAI were shaped by the differing relationships that their co-writers had with each other,

and—particularly in the latter case—by the history of Indigenous cultural practices, both oral and

written, regarding protest and petitions. Names such as those of Millie Naharkey, who bravely

allowed Zitkala-Ša to share her story, and Simon Pokagon, whose strong anti-colonial statements

aided in giving other Indigenous activists the courage to speak up, should not be left out of the

conversation. Neither should the contemporary readers of these works, both Indigenous and non-

Indigenous, with whom Zitkala-Ša used varying rhetorical styles to form relationships, and whose

responses were a part of shaping other readers’ reactions. Zitkala-Ša resisted colonial extraction at

every turn, bringing readers into awareness of their relationships with the knowledge they learned,

and emphasizing the importance of the relationships she formed with others throughout her

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research and writing processes. And through learning about the deep interconnectedness of those

relationships and the collaborative work they shaped, readers of today can form an understanding

of the way that Zitkala-Ša’s predecessors in Indigenous activism have a presence in her work—

just as Zitkala-Ša’s presence can be felt in the works of Indigenous activists today who have

followed in her footsteps. The networks of readers and activists which Zitkala-Ša contributed to

building, through the multiple forms of rhetoric that are produced by different forms of

collaboration, are integral to her ongoing survivance.

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Chapter 4: Zitkala-Ša’s Adaptation of Oral Storytelling in “The Witch Woman” and “Squirrel Man and His Double”

In a study of Indigenous writers and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, Dakota/Apache scholar Kiara M. Vigil characterizes the period as a time when the

primary challenge these intellectuals faced was that of “how to claim their rights as modern,

American citizens who wanted to use citizenship to intervene in the affairs of a government that

had already been intervening in Native peoples' affairs for far too long” (3). Additionally, these

intellectuals were often expected to “perform Indianness only in terms of...a past as largely

imagined by white audiences who romanticized the ‘noble savage’ figure” (3), and therefore

frequently had to balance playing to those expectations in some way while at the same time

advancing their goals. Vigil’s book focuses on the way that Zitkala-Ša and three of her

contemporaries—Charles Eastman (Santee Dakota), Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai-Apache), and

Luther Standing Bear (Sicangu and Oglala Lakota)—navigated these complexities during their

fights for the rights of Indigenous peoples. Of her own approach to research, Vigil writes,

“Examining all four of these individuals in detail, while also attending to their points of intersection

and disjuncture, reveals the different strategies Native intellectuals used as public figures during

the early twentieth century” (9-10). She describes her work as a “collective cultural biography”

(11), approaching the works of these four writers from the context of the networks within which

their ideas circulated, and the common goals for which they all fought in similar but varying ways.

This perspective allows for them to be “studied as individuals and also read together to give us a

new picture of the history of Indian intellectuals...during the early twentieth century” (11). In this

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chapter, I follow Vigil’s approach by comparing Zitkala-Ša’s adaptations of oral narratives with

those of another of her contemporaries: Seneca writer and historian Arthur C. Parker, who was at

one time Zitkala-Ša's friend and colleague. I particularly focus on Parker and Zitkala-Ša's different

adaptations of similar narratives, examining Zitkala-Ša's rhetorical emphasis on the agency of

female characters and the unique dangers those women face—elements which appear less central

to the story as told by Parker. In doing so, I hope to understand some of the challenges that early

twentieth-century Indigenous writers navigated in the difficult task of translating culturally

specific oral stories into textual forms that would reach a varied audience of Indigenous and settler

readers alike.

I also bring to this analysis questions and emphases accruing throughout this dissertation.

The narratives on which this chapter concentrates are centrally concerned with decoding right

kinship relations. Repeatedly, Zitkala-Ša’s autohistorical, fictional, and political stories show an

Indigenous woman or girl being faced with false relations—from the boarding-school teachers in

American Indian Stories to the false nephews in “The Widespread Enigma of Blue-Star Woman”

to the Creek girls’ corrupt guardians in “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians.” In each of these

instances, women and girls encounter groups of people who present themselves as caring,

protective, and often parental figures, and who claim to be taking care of the women and acting in

their best interests. Yet this feigned benevolence turns out to be a facade concealing a dangerous,

manipulative, and violent nature; the teachers abuse and neglect their students, the “nephews” are

con men, and the guardians are only after money and perpetuate further abuse and perhaps even

murder to get it. Zitkala-Ša’s adaptations of the double narrative appear to be another approach, in

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another genre, to depicting the danger posed to Indigenous women by those who would offer false

kinship—and in this story, that danger takes on a more clearly sexual nature. The threat and

actuality of violence against Indigenous women and children haunts these narratives—as it has

haunted the work under discussion in this dissertation from Michelle St. John’s performance

onwards. I am conscious, then, that in small textual details lie high representational stakes. In

comparing detailed shifts in the telling of relationships, actions, and motivations among the

characters in the tales discussed in this chapter, I am also tracing shifts in the relationships between

the authors, their anticipated audiences, and myself as reader. Additionally, through my

comparison of Zitkala-Ša’s versions of the story with that of Arthur C. Parker, I examine the

varying narratives’ approaches to the agency of the central female character, and consider how

some of the contexts influencing these adaptations may have been different for the two

contemporaries. This comparison serves to highlight some of the complexities that Indigenous

writers navigated in translating oral storytelling in the tumultuous times of the early twentieth

century.

4.1 Some Context—on Orature and Written Narrative

In the time that Zitkala-Ša and Parker were adapting their cultures’ oral stories into written

English, many such stories were also being published in heavily editorialized form by non-

Indigenous ethnographers, who were often motivated by colonial beliefs that Indigenous cultural

practices would soon die out and must therefore be preserved for posterity. They accordingly

positioned the stories they learned from Indigenous storytellers as relics from a rapidly vanishing

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past. One example is the works of Franz Boas, an influential anthropologist who published several

texts about his research on Indigenous peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As Cherokee scholar Christopher B. Teuton writes, Boas imposed his own standards about

structure and format on the stories he collected, as well as “carefully editing his texts to excise

references to the present” (169). He was uninterested in “aiding Indigenous peoples in their

struggle against colonialism” (169) with his work, seeking only to record “myths and traditions”

(qtd. in Teuton 169) that he assumed would soon inevitably be “eclipsed by modernity” (169).

These altered reproductions of oral narratives thus removed them from the contexts that gave them

much of their meaning. Teuton explains:

The provenance of an Indigenous story affects the phenomenological weight of the

narrative and establishes the context of its interpretation. Indigenous oral narratives

may belong to one person, a family, or community; they may also be passed down,

owned, purchased, and created. Stories may affirm one’s place in a social structure

and assert sociopolitical rights and inheritances. And, unlike much of Western

literature, Indigenous oral narratives rarely sunder material from the spiritual, thus

imposing separations between fact and fiction, fantasy and reality. (172)

These characteristics firmly resist settler expectations about literature, and rather than attempt to

learn about these cultural differences and develop new ways to adapt Indigenous stories into other

mediums, ethnographers like Boas simply edited the stories in their collections to force them to fit

their own preconceived ideals. And the anthologies produced according to these colonial

approaches shaped public opinions of Indigenous literature in largely negative ways. Ojibwe

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scholar Basil H. Johnston has similarly expressed that such “indifferent and inferior translation”

(“Is That All” 113) has led to a widespread idea that Indigenous literature “has little of importance

to offer to the larger white culture” (113). It was attitudes like these that Zitkala-Ša, Arthur C.

Parker, and their contemporaries had to contend with in their attempts to assert the importance and

relevance of their cultural practices through writing.

Non-Indigenous scholar Sophie McCall has also addressed many of the issues that have

historically arisen from story collections like those of Boas, as well as later “told-to” narratives

that filtered Indigenous people’s stories through the perspectives of non-Indigenous editors. One

such issue she addresses is the fact that editors often “[published] versions of Aboriginal oral

expression under their own name” (205), demonstrating that Indigenous storytellers “historically

have had little control over the outcome of their participation in the collaborative project” (205).

Many Indigenous scholars have criticized these extractive practices, tying them to issues of

cultural appropriation which can be linked to “the expropriation of land” (205). However, McCall

also argues that “told-to narrative forms” (206) need not be entirely dismissed, as many other

Indigenous artists have more recently “developed new approaches to textualizing oral traditions”

(206) alongside collaborators with a variety of cultural backgrounds, adapting and reinventing

dialogic forms of storytelling in ways “that counteract ethnographic traditions and that re-imagine

the struggle for Aboriginal sovereignty” (206). She furthermore argues that historical told-to

narratives are worthy of more serious study, and encourages analysis of the ways in which

“relations of authority are contested, negotiated, and recreated” (18) through the creative processes

behind collaborative adaptations of stories told orally. One of her examples is the work of Lee

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Maracle (Sto:lo), who created a “Native-to-Native, woman-to-woman told-to narrative (104) in

the 1988 story “Rusty,” attempting to “reconfigure the told-to interaction and to change or at least

mitigate some of the asymmetries of ethnographic life narratives” (104). Zitkala-Ša’s work can be

read as engaging in some of the same reconfigurations, as she adapted and retold stories she heard

from other Indigenous women in her writing across several genres, including her collaboration on

“Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians.”43 As McCall expresses, this kind of writing has the potential to

be collaborative rather than appropriative, and to express and adapt Indigenous cultural practices

in ways that single-authored texts cannot. This perspective will also inform this chapter’s analysis

of Zitkala-Ša’s adaptations of oral narratives she heard from others.

4.2 Some Context—on Zitkala-Ša’s Friendship with Arthur C. Parker

Understanding the relationship between Zitkala-Ša and Arthur C. Parker can provide some

more insight into the context of their separate adaptations of similar narratives. This relationship

has been analyzed by non-Indigenous scholar James H. Cox in his book on Indigenous political

writing of the twentieth century. As Cox explains, both Parker and Zitkala-Ša were members of

the Society of American Indians—an Indigenous activist group which was founded in 1911—and

Parker was the first editor of the Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians (33), which

would later be renamed American Indian Magazine (26). Some of the priorities Parker emphasized

in his editorials were “equal access to all levels of education and U.S. citizenship for all Native

43 See section one of chapter three.

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people” (34); however, he also expressed support for the colonial ideals of “assimilation” to some

extent, placing some individual responsibility on other Indigenous people to “‘awaken’ and

‘improve’ themselves” (34) in order to achieve these goals. He even sometimes “distance[d]

himself rhetorically” (36) from other Indigenous people in his advocations of blending into settler-

normative society, with editorials that made statements such as “to bring about the civilization we

desire to the Indian people...we must make the social life of the reservation the same as that found

in communities we are pleased to call civilized” (qtd. in Cox 36). Cox writes that, in contrast,

Zitkala-Ša’s work as a writer and contributing editor to the journal—beginning in 1915 (37)—

“more stridently condemned injustice and corruption” (34) than that of Parker. For instance, her

poem “The Indian’s Awakening,” published in the magazine’s 1915-16 volume, co-opts the

language of assimilationist views into a harsh critique of the residential school system. The

“awakening” the speaker of the poem finds is not in colonial education, which “brings no

admittance” (“Awakening” 57) to settler society, but instead in discarding those pressures and

reconnecting with ancestors and the land by the end of the poem (59). Because of its clear critique

of the common refrain that Indigenous people needed to progress toward “a racial ‘awakening’”

(Cox 40), Cox reads the poem as a “forceful challenge to Parker’s editorials and other articles in

the magazine such as the award-winning essays written by boarding school students about the

value of their educations” (39). The poem's explicit resistance to colonialism and the ideals of

assimilation sets the views that Zitkala-Ša was willing to state publicly apart from those expressed

by her colleagues in the publications of the SAI.

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Despite these apparent differences in their political views and approaches to editorial work,

correspondence between Parker and Zitkala-Ša during this period indicates that their relationship

was a friendly one. As Tadeusz Lewandowski writes in his biography of Zitkala-Ša, the two of

them began exchanging letters in 1915, when Parker was the secretary-treasurer of the SAI as well

as the editor of the journal (103). They discussed ideas about how to provide Indigenous people

living on reservations with better access to education, and Parker supported Zitkala-Ša becoming

a contributing editor and beginning to publish her work in the journal (103-05). In 1916, when

Parker was elected president of the SAI, Zitkala-Ša took over his previous role as secretary (113),

and the two continued to correspond about writing and activism, “addressing each other...as ‘Dear

Seneca President’ and ‘Dear Sioux Secretary’” (122). This friendship and working relationship,

however, eventually came to an end amidst a series of conflicts within the SAI. As Cox writes,

“increasing factionalism” (41) in the organization was beginning to frustrate Parker at around the

same time that Zitkala-Ša was focusing much of the journal’s coverage on issues facing the Dakota

Nation specifically.44 In 1918, she and fellow Dakota writer and activist Charles Eastman

organized a conference in South Dakota; Parker chose not to attend and was subsequently “ousted

as president” (42), with Zitkala-Ša “assuming the editorship” (qtd. in Cox 42) of the journal shortly

after. Cox’s analysis finds further evidence of the conflicts between the two editors’ views in the

issues under Zitkala-Ša's control. For instance, while “in an effort to keep his intellectual focus on

the future ‘awakening’ of his race, [Parker] rarely mentioned older generations” (44), Zitkala-Ša’s

44 Non-Indigenous scholar Lucy Maddox also discusses some of Zitkala-Ša’s focus on “specific local issues” (102) in contrast to the rest of the SAI in her book Citizen Indians.

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first editorial is followed by an article she wrote called “Indian Gifts to Civilized Man,” which

calls upon the rest of America to thank Indigenous people for passing on their knowledge about

crop-growing and food preservation (“Gifts” 115), as well as for the “undaunted self-sacrifice”

(116) of the many Indigenous men who volunteered to fight in the First World War. Rather than

advocating for Indigenous people to assimilate into settler society, she argues instead that so-called

“civilized man” should be more grateful to the contributions Indigenous people have already made

to their survival. Zitkala-Ša’s apparent “greater willingness to honor Indigenous beliefs” (Cox 44)

publicly in comparison to Parker is another difference which may inform their separate approaches

to adapting similar stories.

Some of these differences between Parker and Zitkala-Ša have also been analyzed by non-

Indigenous scholar Jill Terry Rudy, who compares the introduction of Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian

Legends to Parker’s Seneca Myths and Folk Tales. Originally published in 1901, Old Indian

Legends is a collection of several Dakota stories, many centering around the trickster Iktomi. It

may be that Zitkala-Ša’s draft of the double story had been intended for inclusion in this volume.

Seneca Myths and Folk Tales, on the other hand, was published in 1923, five years after the

apparent dissolution of Parker and Zitkala-Ša’s friendship. In the introduction to Old Indian

Legends, Zitkala-Ša asserts the importance of the included stories’ origins in Dakota culture,

describing the storytellers who shared them with her and arguing that their “sincerity of

belief...demands a little respect” (Legends vi). Additionally, rather than framing these storytelling

practices as separate from settler literature, she makes a case for such legends’ inclusion in a

general American canon, writing, “The old legends of America belong quite as much to the blue-

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eyed little patriot as to the black-haired aborigine” (vi). Rudy reads this statement as an “appeal to

universal values” (14), and describes its tone as “conciliatory” (14) in regards to a potential settler

audience. Yet at the same time, it can also be understood as a powerful argument for settler scholars

to expand our definitions of literature to encompass the oral storytelling of a wider variety of

cultures. Another complex line in the introduction reads, “These legends are relics of our country’s

once virgin soil” (Legends vi). As Rudy also acknowledges, Zitkala-Ša’s use of the word “once”

shapes the sentence into a potential critique of colonialism, as it could be a subtle reference to the

damage that settlers have since done to the land that is so integral to the stories (14). At the same

time, the word “relics” appears to position the stories as artifacts of the past. Non-Indigenous

scholar Ruth Spack writes, “To a turn-of-the-century Anglo audience, the term ‘relics’...may have

denoted only remnants: surviving traces of a people believed to be vanishing from the American

landscape” (45). Some settler readers might therefore have interpreted this sentence to be in

accordance with romanticized images of the “vanishing Indian.” Yet this is not the only

connotation the word “relics” could have, as it also conveys imagery of sanctity and spiritual

significance, and could therefore additionally be read as an expression of the stories’ deep

meanings to Indigenous peoples. The complexities of this sentence make it clear that Zitkala-Ša’s

introduction to Old Indian Legends is layered with multiple nuances and would likely have been

interpreted in different ways by different parts of her readership.

Parker’s introduction to his book also emphasizes the importance of the land and the people

living on it (15-16), describing the content of the collection as “the unwritten literature of the

Seneca Indians who still live in their ancestral domain in western New York” (qtd. in Rudy 15).

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However, he also puts some more distance between himself and the storytellers, positioning

himself “as a collector sponsored by educational institutions” (15) rather than directly as a

participating member in the culture from which the stories originate. When he does briefly refer

to his own experiences of hearing oral storytelling in his childhood, he writes in the third-person,

opening his preface with, “The author of this collection of Seneca folk-tales cannot remember

when he first began to hear the wonder stories of the ancient days” (Parker ix). This forms a clear

contrast with Zitkala-Ša’s introduction, which more specifically positions her and her own identity

in phrases like, “In both Dakotas, North and South, I have often listened to the same story told

over again by a new story-teller” (Legends v). As further analysis will show, the difference in how

these two authors frame their work as collectors and adapters of stories also plays a part in shaping

their approaches to the material itself. Zitkala-Ša and Arthur C. Parker were contemporaries who

faced the same challenges in their careers. As Vigil writes, the Indigenous intellectuals of their era

were forced to navigate fighting for their rights at the same time as performing “Indianness” in a

way which settler audiences would understand and respond to. Their differing strategies for

handling those challenges may have eventually driven a rift between them, but they shared similar

goals and influenced each other in their pursuit of them. This context about their relationship can

aid in providing a deeper understanding of their adaptations of similar stories—a task which the

rest of this chapter will now undertake.

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4.3 The Story Versions Under Review

In 2001, the book Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera, edited

by P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) posthumously published many works of Zitkala-Ša's that had not

seen major circulation during her lifetime. Among these works are two variations on one story.

The first is handwritten by Zitkala-Ša in the Dakota language. The collection includes a literal

translation into English by Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux translator Gary Cavender, titled

“Squirrel Man and His Double,” which gives readers (such as me) who do not read Dakota access

to this version. The second, titled “The Witch Woman,” is also based on the Dakota-language

material—in this case, according to Hafen, as “shaped and retold” by Zitkala-Ša herself (71).

While neither version had ever been published prior to Hafen’s anthology, it seems that Zitkala-

Ša’s goal in “shaping and retelling” the story into English may have at one point been to seek

publication, as she had with her retellings of other Dakota stories in Old Indian Legends, American

Indian Stories, and several magazines. Both Zitkala-Ša’s handwritten Dakota version of the story

and her typed English version are available in the Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin Collection of

the Brigham Young University Archives, and a handwritten note at the top of the latter seems to

attribute the story to someone else. It is difficult to identify exactly who told the story to Zitkala-

Ša, as the note contains only a first name in somewhat unclear handwriting.45 Yet it is significant

45 Given some context from other documents in the archives, I believe that the note may say “Tavia’s story.” Tavia was evidently the name of a friend of Zitkala-Ša’s who worked with the Illinois Federation of Women's Clubs, and the two corresponded throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, often discussing their activist work and addressing

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in its simple implication that the story was shared with her by another person, likely through oral

narrative which she transcribed. This information suggests that Zitkala-Ša’s version of this story

is one that was created collaboratively, drawing on oral tradition and reconfiguring the power

dynamics of the typical told-to narratives of the time, similarly to the works analyzed by McCall.

To compare these two versions, I will refer to Gary Cavender’s more closely literal

translation of the Dakota manuscript as “the Dakota version” or by its title “Squirrel Man and His

Double” and Zitkala-Ša’s English-language reshaping of the Dakota manuscript as “the English

version” or by its title “The Witch Woman.” Both versions of the story share the same general

plotline, about a young woman who is attacked by—and later helps to defeat—a villainous man

who appears to be identical to her brother. However, there are some notable differences between

the diction and the details of the events in each. Hafen writes that in addition to including some

“verbal cues and stylistics” (77) typical of orature, the “Squirrel Man and His Double” story seems

intended to “[socialize] hearers to the incest taboo” (77). She speculates that this potentially

sensitive subject matter was the reason Zitkala-Ša chose to adapt a slightly different version into

English rather than translating it more directly. In her English retelling, she “removed some of the

verbal cues that indicate the oral nature of the story” (71) and also “softened some of the sexual

and physical threat that is more apparent in the original language version” (71). The resulting

English version, while recognizably the same narrative, is notably different in tone and in the

each other as “dearest sister” (Zitkala-Ša [1931]). However, I cannot definitively connect Tavia to the double story, as the handwriting in the note is difficult enough to discern that it could plausibly say a different name instead.

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specifics of some of its events. These differences have also been analyzed by Ruth Spack, in a

2006 essay which analyzes Zitkala-Ša’s translation choices within the context of the linguistic

educations she received both in the Dakota community and at residential school, and positions the

tale as an example of the importance of translingual stories in the history of literature written in

the United States (58-59). What neither Hafen’s nor Spack’s commentaries address, however, is

that Zitkala-Ša was also not the only Indigenous writer of her era to adapt this narrative. Arthur C.

Parker’s 1923 anthology Seneca Myths and Folk Tales tells another version of the same story under

the title “A Youth’s Double Abuses His Sister.” Like the Dakota “Squirrel Man and His Double,”

Parker’s story is more explicit about the villainous double’s attempted sexual assault of the sister

(290). However, it is also markedly different from either of Zitkala-Ša’s tellings in several ways.

In considering what might be learned from comparing Zitkala-Ša’s and Parker’s handling

of these narratives, I first must acknowledge the likelihood that they were working from different

sources. Zitkala-Ša’s handwritten version of “Squirrel Man and His Double” was in Dakota, and

the translator commented, “The story sounds like what my grandmother used to tell me when I

was a baby” (77)—two details which strongly suggest that the story was Dakota in origin.

Additionally, some similar elements can also be recognized in a different story adapted by another

of Zitkala-Ša’s contemporaries and fellow Yankton Dakota, Ella Cara Deloria.46 Yet Parker

46 Deloria’s translation of a story she titles “Incest” is largely different from Zitkala-Ša’s double story, but contains some similarities in general plot elements. As further analysis will examine in greater detail, Zitkala-Ša’s double story involves an attempted sexual assault on a woman by a man who looks like her brother; depending on the version of the story, the woman attempts one or more different ways of altering the man’s appearance in order to find out if her brother will return home with the same identifying mark. Deloria’s “Incest” involves an attempted sexual assault on a man by a mysterious woman whom he cannot recognize in the darkness; by marking her face with paint he is able

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positions his similar story as Seneca, and another version of it appears in the 1918 text Seneca

Fiction, Legends, and Myths, edited by non-Indigenous ethnographer Jeremiah Curtin and

Tuscarora and Oneida linguist J.N.B. Hewitt. And according to an introduction to a later edition

of Parker’s book, Parker was aware of Curtin and Hewitt’s work but did not draw on it as a source

for his own, preferring to “preserve the literary integrity of his own materials” (xiv). Furthermore,

as later analysis will examine in more detail, his version of the story includes several major events

which Curtin and Hewitt’s does not. This combined evidence makes it seem likely that multiple

variants of the same narrative had been historically shared among the Dakota and Seneca (and

perhaps additional) Nations, with Zitkala-Ša and Parker each separately adapting the different

versions with which they were familiar. Differences in source material might well explain some

differences in each author’s retelling. Nevertheless, a comparison of the stories can still illuminate

some of the different rhetorical strategies that Zitkala-Ša and Parker adopted in adapting

Indigenous oral narratives into written English text.

It is also vital not to oversimplify the issue into a question of which English version is

closer to the Dakota or Seneca “original,” as it would be erroneous to describe any oral narrative

as having a singular “original” version at all. As Oglala Sioux scholar Delphine Red Shirt states,

it is inaccurate to view “oral tradition-based narrative as or like ‘fixed’ text” (48). Rather than

relying on memory alone, oral storytellers are continually engaged in a creative process of

to later identify the culprit as his sister (176-177). The stories diverge into completely different events from there, but their beginnings seem to have been built on similar structural foundations.

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composing a new version of a story based on repeated elements, formulas, and themes (26)— and

Zitkala-Ša and Parker engage in a similar process when they retell these stories in their own words.

Tlingit scholar Nora Marks Dauenhauer has similarly emphasized that “there is no single ‘correct’

version in oral literature” (8), and that “In contrast to a fixed text, we should expect variation

among versions by different tradition-bearers as well as from one performance to another by the

same tradition-bearer” (8). Therefore, neither writer’s adaptation of the story should be perceived

as either more or less “authentic” than the other,47 but rather as differing examples of early

twentieth-century Indigenous writers’ adaptations of multiple cultural influences in storytelling.

Both writers had to take a multitude of complex factors into account when retelling this story for

publication—including but certainly not limited to the difficulties of translating oral stories into

written ones, potential concerns about what would appeal to—and perhaps what should be

protected from—readers from more dominant cultures, and a desire to preserve some of the stories’

ritual significance. Analyzing these three versions of the same story in detail can provide insight

into the creative decisions involved in Zitkala-Ša’s English-language writings, as well as bring to

light many of the choices early twentieth-century Indigenous writers had to make throughout those

ongoing processes of negotiation. As non-Indigenous scholar Lucy Maddox writes in making

another comparison between the work of Zitkala-Ša and some of her contemporaries, “Because

[they] address their work to a primarily non-Native audience, considering the similar issues they

choose to introduce to that audience is instructive. The differences in their approaches and their

47 See also earlier chapters, such as the introduction to chapter two, for further analysis of the problems inherent in questioning the so-called “authenticity” of the works of Indigenous artists.

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messages, however, are even more instructive” (126). In tracing in detail Zitkala-Ša’s and Arthur

C. Parker’s different approaches to similar stories, four kinds of processes are detectable to me,

reading closely from a non-Dakota speaking, non-Indigenous position. Some details are legible as

designed to meet the expectations of a settler audience regarding Indigenous peoples; some seem

shaped to re-present action and relations in terms of Euro-American cultural forms; some remind

readers of Indigenous cultural continuities and connections embedded in these stories; and some

alternately protect and expose the threat of sexualized violence within kinship groups. In addition,

I find myself reading for representations of women’s power as it emerges differently across the

three versions.

4.3.1 “Squirrel Man and His Double”

“Squirrel Man and His Double,” as translated from Zitkala-Ša’s written Dakota version by

Gary Cavender, begins with the simple sentence, “A young man lives with his younger sister”

(77). The audience is not provided with names or much other information about this brother and

sister, except that the brother is a skilled hunter, and that he and his sister are therefore “not in

need” (77) of food and live a happy life. This brief introduction also specifies that “The animals

[that the brother hunted] roamed free” (77)—a detail which seems to place its setting prior to

colonialism. Similar to Zitkala-Ša's reference to the “once virgin soil” (Legends v) in the

introduction to Old Indian Legends, this line can be read as providing a subtle critique of the

damage that settlers have done to the environment and to Indigenous peoples’ ways of life. The

brother and sister are able to live happily together because of the brother’s freedom to hunt the

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abundant and thriving animal population near their home—a freedom which had been taken away

by the time that Zitkala-Ša was writing.

The main conflict of the story is also introduced early, with its inciting incident summarized

in only one sentence:

And here after the young man, her brother, went hunting, a young man came while

the young lady was home alone and made advances to her and halfway through he

attacked her and was trying to make her lie down with him; she cried and resisted,

they say. (77-79)

This sentence illustrates both of the main characteristics of this story that Hafen indicates as absent

from its English retelling: its clear depiction of attempted rape and incest, and its equally clear

origins in orature. The fact that this man—who is soon after described to look exactly like the older

brother—“made advances to” the sister and “was trying to make her lie down with him” makes it

clear that the attempted assault was of a sexual nature. The sentence’s conclusion with “they say”

also positions the story as one which has been told repeatedly by multiple people, and which the

narrator is repeating as heard from another source. As Spack comments, this “links the narrator to

past storytellers” (54),48 establishing a history and network of Indigenous community which is lost

in the English retelling, just as the double’s intentions toward the sister will also become less clear.

48 See also Julian Rice’s analysis of the work of Ella Cara Deloria, which examines the many meanings of Dakota phrases that translate to “they say” in more detail (84-85).

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The double returns and attempts to assault the sister twice more. Both times, the sister

fights him off and insists that her real brother would not “do disrespectful things” (Dreams 79) to

her; yet, because the double appears identical to the brother in every way but behaviour, she is

unsure what to believe. Finally, she decides on a plan to figure out whether her attacker is really

her brother, and splits a piece of the eagle feather the double wears in his hair apart to make a

distinguishing mark (79). However, when the real brother returns, the eagle feather in his hair is

also marked in the same way, which he claims happened when it got caught on “some underbrush”

(80). This event devastates the sister even further, as she now believes that the brother and his

double are one and the same. When the brother notices how sad she is, he asks what happened,

and she finally tells him, “you have treated me very disrespectfully and have made me very sad

and ashamed” (80). The brother reacts as if he already suspected the existence of his double,

immediately replying “that is not me” (80) and formulating a plan to hide so that he can catch the

double next time he appears. However, in this version of the story, he never directly states that he

already knows about his double, or explains very much to his sister beyond the details of his plan.

This may be because the original oral story was intended for an audience who was already familiar

with similar stories and concepts and therefore needed no direct explanation of the double’s

existence. Some level of ambiguity is common in Indigenous oral narratives; for instance, non-

Indigenous scholar Julie Cruikshank has observed, “Indigenous people who grow up immersed in

oral tradition frequently suggest that their narratives are better understood by absorbing the

successive personal messages revealed to listeners in repeated tellings” (4). Ojibwe scholar Basil

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H. Johnston expresses similar sentiments in his description of the education of Indigenous children

through storytelling, writing the following:

It was for the child and each individual to seek that morsel of understanding and to

draw his own inferences and start fashioning his being and his world. And in letting

the listener interpret his stories in his own way and according to the scope of his

intellect, the storyteller and the elders of the tribe trusted in the common sense of

the child to draw interpretations that were both reasonable and sensible. (“How Do

We” 46)

Unlike the fables of some other cultures, which are written to teach children lessons more directly,

the listeners of Indigenous oral storytelling learn to infer their own meanings. The original

audience of the Dakota version of the story might therefore not expect the same kind of direct

explanation of its ambiguous elements as settler readers, in addition to having more cultural

context to aid in their interpretation.

In the final confrontation with the double, the sister shows her physical strength once again,

grabbing him by his hair and restraining him until her real brother can join the fight (80-81). As

planned earlier, the brother shouts to his sister “The one on top is me!” (81) once the two men have

fallen to the ground; the double imitates him, saying “The one lying underneath is me” (81), but

the sister is not fooled. She knows that the one who spoke first must be the real brother, and she

kills the double with an ax (81). However, her final victory against the abusive double is not the

end of the story. His death sets another chain of events in motion, during which—on the advice of

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some animals and a giant—the good brother and his sister must try to deceive the double’s mother

into believing her son is still alive (81-83). Their plans eventually go awry, but with the help of

their new allies—most instrumentally, the giant, who stomps on the ground and creates a crevasse

that the double’s mother falls into—the second villain is also defeated and the brother and sister

are safe once more (85). The last lines of the story once again reaffirm its oral nature:

That is the end. Cousin, I will tell one again but it is just a common story, they say.

The first people story is what they say, cousin. It is not a folk tale but is an oral

tradition, they say. (85)

These conversational lines position the narrator as someone repeating a familiar story to a relative.

As Spack observes, the statement that they will next tell another story “perpetuates the ongoing

vibrancy of the storytelling ritual” (55) as something which continues beyond the conclusion of

one narrative. Additionally, these words affirm these stories as unique to the “first people” who

lived on the land where they take place. The repetition of the words “they say” once more

emphasizes the story’s place in a culture that has told and retold iterations of the same narrative

over countless years. The assertion that this story is “not a folk tale” also sets it apart from the

legends of other, non-Indigenous cultures, assigning a special importance to the “oral tradition” of

the Dakota people from whom the story originates. While comparisons can be drawn between this

narrative and those of European folklore traditions—particularly relating to its use of a “double”

character along the same lines of the concept of a “doppelganger”—past scholars’ conflation of

Indigenous oral storytelling with the folklore of non-Indigenous cultures has historically

contributed to simplified, colonial-influenced viewpoints that extract stories from their original

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contexts. For instance, Rudy criticizes past folklore scholars for their lack of “awareness of

relational perspectives” (3), which means that their work “sometimes overlooks the imperatives of

relational communities to maintain relationships and neglects how those communities use folklore

for community well-being and outreach to others” (3). The story’s concluding emphasis on its

difference from other folk tales appears to be a gesture of resistance to that kind of extractive study.

“Squirrel Man and His Double,” then, is a story of a clearly oral nature, which focuses on

the immediate action without stopping to provide much background context. It is also direct about

its portrayal of attempted sexual assault with incestual overtones, and the woman who suffers this

assault shows strength and agency in fighting back against her abuser, playing an instrumental role

in his defeat with the help of her brother. As close reading of two separate retellings of the story

will show, these elements are not always present when authors reshape the tale for an English-

language, potentially non-Indigenous readership. The next section will highlight the variety of

creative choices that Zitkala-Ša made in her adaptation, transforming the narrative in many ways

which make it more suited to a different medium and audience, while at the same time maintaining

the basic elements of the structure of the Dakota version of the story.

4.3.2 “The Witch Woman”

“The Witch Woman” begins very differently from “Squirrel Man and His Double.” While

the latter immediately introduced the central brother and sister without providing very much detail

about them beyond their relationship to each other, the opening sentence of “The Witch Woman”

reads, “In a village of the Dakotas there lived a very beautiful young girl who was the daughter of

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the head chief” (71). This information about her family seems original to this version of the story—

and the added detail that she is the daughter of the chief brings to mind the popular “romanticized

construction” (McClure 31) of the “Indian princess” that was central to many settlers’ conceptions

of Indigenous women at the time. Like many other Indigenous women writers and performers of

the same era,49 Zitkala-Ša may be making careful use of that stereotype in order to play to audience

expectations, providing readers with a familiar and recognizable type of character rather than a

protagonist they know nothing about. Continuing along the same lines, we learn that the chief is

trying to find a suitable husband for his daughter, and that she is so opposed to this arranged

marriage that she repeatedly tries to run away from home and hides herself “among some willows”

(71). Because of this, people begin to call her “Hides-in-Willows” (71). While earning new names

at various points in life is an important element of many Indigenous cultures (Atleo et al. 59), this

particular instance of a woman whose description fits a “princess” archetype being given a name

that seems to mock her for her socially unconventional actions also recalls the events of some well-

known European folk tales. For instance, one of the most recognizable fairy tale princesses,

Cinderella, is named as such by her cruel stepsisters because she “sleep[s] on the hearth, in among

the ashes and the cinders” (Pullman 117). Spack makes a similar observation in her analysis,

writing that this English adaptation adds “a more romantic, fairy tale-like opening that introduces

a character who would fulfill the desire and expectation of the turn-of-the-century Anglo audience

for an exotic Indian princess” (55). Zitkala-Ša may have chosen to draw elements from stories that

49 See, for example, the numbers and range of popular Indigenous women performers documented in Christine Bold’s “Vaudeville Indians.”

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settler readers would already know in inventing this new episode and the name Hides-in-Willows,

further molding the tale into something they would find more familiar than the Dakota oral version.

Additionally, providing the sister with a name marks her as an important character, and makes her

easier to distinguish from others.

The story continues with Hides-in-Willows finally escaping from her family and arriving

at the tepee of a man who “seemed a very proper person” (72). She offers to marry him in exchange

for safety and security, and when he responds that he has no desire to get married at all, she instead

suggests, “let me be your younger sister, and call you tibdo” (72). The Dakota word “tibdo” also

appears in the untranslated handwritten version in the Brigham Young University archives,

demonstrating that Zitkala-Ša’s English adaptation of the tale incorporated specific details from

the prior version. Spack suggests that leaving this word untranslated while also providing a

definition for it may be one way that Zitkala-Ša “fills in some cultural gaps, explaining things to

her Anglo audience for which a Dakota audience would need no explanation” (55). The man agrees

to the proposal, and Hides-in-Willows moves in with him and his bear companion who helps him

on his hunts.

As discussed in the second chapter, several other works of Zitkala-Ša’s also demonstrate

“the capaciousness of Dakota family to absorb new members along lines dissociated from

procreation and hetereogendered pairing” (Rifkin, “Romancing” 38). Just as the family in “The

Trial Path” adopted a new son after the death of their first one, and the protagonist of “A Warrior’s

Daughter” grew up with an uncle who had originally been a prisoner from another Nation, Zitkala-

Ša here depicts a family formed from bonds the characters choose to make, with two people who

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have no biological relation deciding to become brother and sister. The Dakota version of the story

did not specify whether the central brother and sister had been born siblings or adopted each other

as siblings later in life, yet its intended audience would likely have been conscious of the fact that

either one was a possibility. One effect of Zitkala-Ša’s choice to add this specific detail is that the

threat of incestual sexual assault presented in the Dakota-language story (as Hafen notes) is much

less explicit in her English-language version (71). Emphasizing that there is no biological

relationship between Hides-in-Willows and the villainous double may be one way of softening

content that settler readers might find too shocking for publication; such an audience might be less

likely to consider it incest if the twins are clearly not the protagonist’s “real” brothers.50 It is also

possible to read this change as a move by Zitkala-Ša to protect her culture from settler voyeurism.

Along the same lines, there is never any confusion about who is responsible for the

attempted assault on the sister in this version of the story. Before leaving her alone for the first

time, Hides-in-Willows’s new brother warns her, “Beware of Iktomi, who will come to fool you

in some ways. Remember the red earring which I wear in my left ear. This you must do because I

have a twin brother who resembles me closely” (72). This quotation dramatically alters the tone of

the double’s subsequent assault on the sister. Unlike in the Dakota version, which focuses on the

sister’s anguish and confusion about the possibility that her own brother is the one abusing her,

the English version establishes the existence of this villain from the beginning. The audience is

50 Considering this possibility raises the question of whether the oral narrative's intended audience would have necessarily considered the assault to be incestual either, when they might have also inferred the lack of biological relationship between the sister and the double.

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therefore reassured, before the double even appears in his own right, that there is no intimate

familial abuse occurring—the one who attempts to assault the protagonist is a stranger to her, and

they additionally bear no biological relationship. However, it risks over-simplifying the narrative

to understand the double and his relationship to the brother in only such literal terms. This is one

place where, without conflating Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural expression, it is thought-

provoking to note clear similarities between the double in this story and the concept of the

“doppelganger” in European folklore traditions—and Zitkala-Ša is far from the only Indigenous

author whose work displays this potential overlap in symbolism. As recently as the 1996 novel

Reservation Blues, for instance, Spokane-Coeur d'Alene author Sherman Alexie comments

directly on the role that the doppelganger can play in Indigenous storytelling, characterizing the

doppelgangers who appear in his novel not only as “twins” and “shadows,” but “White shadows”

(qtd. in Jorgensen 19, emphasis added) in particular. Alexie pairs each of his Indigenous characters

with one such shadow, to “serve as foils to each other, reflecting and elucidating the personality

differences” (Jorgensen 20). Similar doubles to the ones in the stories under review also appear in

the oral storytelling practices of a variety of Indigenous Nations; for instance, one collection of

Indigenous stories credits an Omaha storyteller with sharing a tale about “Two-Face” (“Birth of

the Twins”), a malicious double-faced creature whose arrival to do harm to a family is precipitated

by the birth of twins. It is important to consider the symbolism behind the double character, and

the connection between that symbolism and a variety of other tales from both Indigenous and non-

Indigenous cultures, rather than merely understanding him as a literal twin of the brother character.

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Another detail Zitkala-Ša changes here is the brother's identifying accessory—what was an

eagle feather in the Dakota version becomes an earring in the English. In some ways, the removal

of the feather appears to resist settler stereotypes of Indigenous people. While the deep spiritual

meanings of eagle feathers within Indigenous communities were not widely appreciated by non-

Indigenous audiences, they had come to expect feathers worn on headbands and headdresses as a

typical feature, in that period and beyond, of idealized portraits of the imagined “Indian.” Yet

several other layers of meaning are possible as well, especially when one considers the potential

interpretation of the earring as a symbol for the emotional bond and familial relationship between

the brother and sister. While cultural practices regarding earrings would of course vary between

different Nations, it is nonetheless potentially illuminating to consider another short story in which

earrings are a significant symbol for familial bonds: “Beading Lesson” by contemporary Nez Perce

author and scholar Beth Piatote. Piatote’s story centers around an Indigenous woman passing her

knowledge and skills down to the next generation by teaching her niece to bead a pair of earrings.

As they work, the woman explains the deep personal meaning that the beadwork has to her, as well

as the role it plays in bringing a community together. She tells her niece about volunteering in a

prison and teaching Indigenous inmates, who are separated from their families and communities,

to bead jewelry they can give as gifts to their loved ones when they visit (47-48). Yet she also

emphasizes how difficult the beadwork can be to fix as it gradually deteriorates over time—a

parallel to the damaged relationship with her sister that she hopes to rebuild. The story concludes

with her hoping that her skill with beaded jewelry will help repair that relationship as well, as she

asks her niece, “You think your mama would ever want to learn something from her big sister? I

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got a lot of students...I just keep thinkin’ if I stay around long enough, everyone’s goin’ to come

back and ask me, even your mama” (50). Despite this story being written a century after Zitkala-

Ša’s adaptation of the double story, and by a woman from a different Nation, I read a similar

meaning into Zitkala-Ša’s use of the symbol of an earring here; its significance will become even

clearer later on in the story.

Another new element which appears original to this version of the tale is the brother’s

warning about the Dakota trickster figure Iktomi. As non-Indigenous scholar Jeanne Smith

explains in an analysis of Zitkala-Ša’s depiction of tricksters, “Iktomi...takes his name from the

spider, a creature that travels seemingly anywhere: through air, on water, underground, on land”

(46). A “vital part of Lakota tradition” (46), the trickster character Iktomi is similarly versatile and

malleable, “frequently changing forms, donning disguises, breaking cultural taboos and natural

laws, defying even death” (46). Iktomi plays no role in either “Squirrel Man and His Double” or

Parker’s “A Youth’s Double Abuses His Sister,” but he does appear in the majority of the tales

Zitkala-Ša presents in the 1901 anthology Old Indian Legends. In this book, he is often portrayed

attempting to trick others, only to end up being further tricked himself out of the spoils of his

earlier schemes—such as in the opening story, “Iktomi and the Ducks” (3-15), where he lures a

group of ducks to their death, and then becomes trapped by a tree branch while a passing pack of

wolves eat the ducks before he can. Another story includes a warning about him that closely

parallels what the brother says to his sister in “The Witch Woman”; the first lines the title character

speaks at the beginning of “Mans̈tin, The Rabbit” are, “Grandmother, beware of Iktomi! Do not

let him lure you into some cunning trap. I am going to the North country on a long hunt” (145).

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Just as in “The Witch Woman,” a male character warns a female relative that Iktomi may visit and

try to trick her while he is gone. Whether this warning proves relevant to Mans̈tin’s grandmother

is not made clear in the story, which continues following the perspective of Mans̈tin on his hunt

instead of his grandmother at home. Yet in “The Witch Woman,” the first character to arrive at

Hides-in-Willows’s door once her brother leaves is explicitly identified as Iktomi, disguised as “a

fine young man” (72). She is “not deceived” (73), and immediately shuts the door; Iktomi does

not appear in the story again.

As this addition to the story appears so minor, it raises the question of why Zitkala-Ša felt

it was nonetheless important to add to her English retelling. As Labrador Métis scholar Kristina

Fagan explains in an introduction to a collection of works on the subject, the importance of

tricksters in Indigenous storytelling has historically been oversimplified and overemphasized by

non-Indigenous readers and critics. This kind of audience tends to conflate the variety of culturally

specific tricksters from different Nations’ stories into one imagined ideal of “the trickster” that

they read as central to Indigenous worldviews (3-4), and to further misapply the label of “trickster”

to other distinct characters and to Indigenous authors themselves (7-8). Through adding an

appearance of a trickster to a story in which he had previously not been present, Zitkala-Ša could

have been appealing to this non-Indigenous fascination with trickster narratives like those she told

in Old Indian Legends. Equally, the reference reminds the reader that this tale is connected to a

larger body of Dakota—and more broadly Indigenous—narratives and cultural relations. At the

same time, this reference to Iktomi ensures that a reader will recognize some important cultural

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distinctions—here, specifically that Iktomi and the villainous double are different figures—rather

than assuming that any character who attempts to deceive someone is Iktomi in disguise.

Smith’s analysis also provides another possibility: that Zitkala-Ša’s depictions of Iktomi

emphasize “his potential for destruction, especially when infringement from an outside colonizing

force threatens the Lakota culture in which Iktomi traditionally moves” (49). She points to the

story “Dance in a Buffalo Skull,” from Old Indian Legends, as one example in which the writer

“aligns Iktomi with cultural threat” (49). As Smith explains:

The tale retells a traditional Iktomi story in which the trickster hears dancing and

shouting coming from a buffalo skull at night. Peering into a lighted eye socket, he

finds field mice dancing inside. As he thrusts his head into the skull to try to join

them, they scatter, and he is left dancing ridiculously, trying to pry the skull from

his head. In Zitkala-Ša’s version, the comic ending of the tale is entirely dropped

as the story is told from the point of view of the field mice. (49)

While other storytellers may share this narrative as a comic episode of Iktomi’s misadventures,

Zitkala-Ša instead focuses on the terror that the unsuspecting field mice feel when they see his

glowing eyes peering in at them; she does not even reveal that the intruder is only the foolish

Iktomi trying to join the dance, instead leaving readers to imagine a predator with violent designs

on the vulnerable creatures (49). Smith reads this more ominous vision of Iktomi as “a vast,

impersonal, nearly invisible force sweeping over the plains, much like American expansion west”

(49-50). When considering this interpretation as a thread that runs through Zitkala-Ša’s other

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works, the appearance of Iktomi in “The Witch Woman” can therefore be read as yet another

reminder that Indigenous women face a multitude of violent threats in their daily lives, from the

direct personal violence that the double represents to the intangible forces of oppression embodied

by a particular version of Iktomi.

Shortly after the trickster’s brief visit, “another man...[who] looked so much like her

brother that she would have been deceived had he worn a red earring” (73, emphasis added)

appears. Unlike in the Dakota version of the story, she is able to recognize the double immediately

because of the warning her brother gave her as well as the missing red earring. This iteration of

the double’s assault also lacks the clearly sexual implications of the other version. Readers are told

that the double “acted very badly and abused her” (73), but given no further detail. While the

connotations of the word “abuse” may still lead some readers toward an interpretation of the assault

as a sexual one, it remains much more ambiguous here than in the Dakota version. Instead, the

double’s primary goal appears to be to find the real brother, whose location the sister will not give

up. He leaves her with a warning that when he returns in four days, she “had better see that [his]

brother is found” (73). Spack suggests that in addition to making the story less disturbing,

obscuring the explicitly sexual nature of the assault may have been a way to avoid potentially

reinforcing harmful stereotypes about Indigenous men (57). The entire period of the sister’s

sadness and confusion from the Dakota version, during which the double returned while she was

alone several times, is also omitted in the English adaptation. This may be partially because the

formulaic pattern in the oral narrative served as a tool to “aid a...narrator in rapid composition”

(26) of a narrative based on familiar patterns and themes; such a tool is no longer necessary in a

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written adaptation. Instead, the sister immediately tells her brother what happened when he returns

from his hunt, and the brother vows to fight the double when he returns, reminding his sister, “if

there shall be any cause for you to interfere, remember that I wear the red earring” (73). This

condensed version of the timeline leaves out one of the chances the sister had to fight back against

the double in the Dakota version, when she split his eagle feather in an attempt to determine his

identity. It also positions the conflict as between the brother and the double alone, as the brother’s

use of the word “if” indicates that he does not necessarily expect his sister to have cause to

intervene. This is a marked difference from the Dakota version of the tale, in which the brother

and sister made plans about how to handle the battle together.

The fight scene between the brother and his double bears some subtle differences from the

Dakota version as well. The basic structure of events follows the same pattern: the double arrives

wearing the same accessory as the brother to make them more difficult to tell apart, and both the

brother and the double urge the sister to kill the other one, but the sister is able to figure out which

one is her real brother and deal the final blow to the villainous double. However, while in the

Dakota version the two men were wrestling when the sister intervened, in the English version, she

does not emerge from her hiding place until they have been fighting for so long that they are both

lying “upon the ground from exhaustion” (73). This puts the sister in less danger from the double

once more; one effect is that the female figure is more distanced from violent action, but her agency

seems, to me, to be lessened in the process. Additionally, in the Dakota version, the sister knew

that her brother was the one who spoke to her first, because they had planned out what he would

say to her in advance. However, in English, there is no such detail; after both the brother and his

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double call out the same words, “Kill this one, sister” (73), the sister concludes, “I will strike the

one who does not speak like my brother” (73). This seems to imply that there is a distinct enough

difference in the two men’s voices that she can tell them apart, once again erasing some of the

confusion that the sister experienced in the earlier version and making it less ambiguous whether

she made the right choice.

Another new element is also introduced to the story after the fight, wherein the double’s

cremated corpse transforms into a tempting assortment of “fine ornaments, pearls, shells, bracelets

and necklaces” (73) which the brother warns his sister not to touch. She ignores his advice and

takes a pair of earrings, which causes her to become ill; however, she is quickly cured by her

brother’s bear companion (74). The image of the earring, which earlier symbolized the bond

between the sister and the brother, reappears here in what reads as a final effort by the dying double

to cause harm to the sister once more. Just as he did when he was alive, he presents a twisted

imitation of the brother’s love for his sister, meant to lure her into danger. And just as the brother

saved his sister by confronting the double, now the animal who forms another part of their family

and community is able to save her again. To my reading, this scene reinforces the story’s themes

of the importance of kinship, as well as the danger posed by those who would falsely claim kinship

with intent to harm Indigenous women. After this brief incident, the rest of the story continues

similarly to the Dakota version again, with the brother and sister visiting the double’s mother and

attempting to hide the truth of the double’s death. However, in this version the brother explicitly

addresses the mother as “my mother” (74)—unlike in the Dakota story, in which she seemed to be

the mother of solely the double and not his kindhearted counterpart. This is in accordance with the

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brother’s acknowledgement of the double as “my twin brother” (73) in the English version,

whereas the nature of their relationship was more ambiguous in the Dakota.

Furthermore, just as the previously unnamed sister is given the name Hides-in-Willows in

the English version, the giant who helps her and her brother in this second part of their quest is

now specifically identified as Iya (74). Iya is another character who also appears in Old Indian

Legends, disguising himself as a baby in an attempt to infiltrate and then devour a whole camp of

people in “Iya, the Camp-Eater” (131-141). When the giant reveals his true form in that story, he

has trouble balancing his massive body on “a pair of thin legs far too small for their burden” (140).

Upon his introduction in “The Witch Woman,” the narration similarly describes Iya as a “huge

giant, whose body is so stuffed with eating that his spindle legs can scarcely carry him about” (74).

Again Zitkala-Ša’s addition of this name and physical detail reminds (or teaches) her English-

language audience that this figure carries with him a larger cultural context—one with which the

Dakota version seems to assume its audience is already familiar.

Significantly, Zitkala-Ša’s version of “Iya, the Camp-Eater” is another one that differs from

her contemporaries’ adaptations of the same tale; a closer analysis of her depiction of Iya can

therefore provide further insight into her strategies of adapting oral storytelling to written narrative.

As Jeanne Smith notes in her analysis of Old Indian Legends, “Iya, the Camp-Eater” typically also

involves Iktomi in “a heroic role” (49)—yet Zitkala-Ša omits his presence entirely. Both Charles

Eastman’s Wigwam Evenings and Ella Cara Deloria’s Dakota Texts include versions of the story

in which Iktomi (or “Unktomee” in the former) allies with the people of the camp that the giant is

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targeting, using trickery to defeat him and save them (58).51 In Zitkala-Ša’s “Iya, the Camp-Eater,”

on the other hand, it is the young woman who had initially adopted the baby Iya who sees through

his disguise, and eventually convinces her family to heed the danger (Legends 138). Smith argues

that Iktomi’s absence from this version of the tale is due to the helpful and sympathetic role he

typically plays in it; she reads Zitkala-Ša as leaving out depictions of that side of him so as not to

contradict his more negative characterization in her other tales. Yet in addition to that, just as in

“The Witch Woman,” Zitkala-Ša’s “Iya, the Camp-Eater” appears to me to focus on female agency

and the dangers of false kinship, centering as it does on a female protagonist and her struggle

against the monster who tricked his way into her family.

Returning to “The Witch Woman,” the crack that Iya makes in the Earth at the end of this

version of the story creates a river. The last two lines of this version of the story are, “The river

still runs a great distance. It is the Minisose, the Missouri” (76). This element of creation myth was

not present in the Dakota version, and as Spack also comments (56), may possibly be another

appeal to the interests of settler readers by providing a clear conclusion with connections to a

recognizable place. This sort of change was common to the translations and adaptations of many

Indigenous stories at the time. Ojibwe scholar Basil H. Johnston provides another example in his

retelling and analysis of “The Weeping Pine,” a deep and complex narrative which “owing to

shoddy translation...has been presented as an explanation for the origin of pine trees” (“Is That

51 “Twelfth Evening: Eya the Devourer” (Eastman 107-114) and “Iktomi conquers Iya, the eater” (E.C. Deloria 1-8) respectively.

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All” 117). Seeking to eliminate ambiguity and conclude stories with clear lessons or morals, many

non-Indigenous ethnographers reframed the stories they collected as creation myths, and Zitkala-

Ša appears to be working and reworking some of the assumptions and expectations engendered by

such ethnographies.

As this close reading of Zitkala-Ša’s retelling of the story shows, she makes a variety of

choices throughout that shape “The Witch Woman” into a notably different story from “Squirrel

Man and His Double.” The most obvious of these are the removal of oral cues and the adjustments

to potentially disturbing content which Hafen notes in her introduction to the translation, yet they

are far from the only changes. Interwoven throughout the narrative are a variety of new details

which were not present in the Dakota, such as the name Hides-in-Willows and its origin, the

warning about and brief appearance of Iktomi, and the concluding creation of the Missouri River.

While part of the reason for the addition of some of these details may have been the anticipated

reaction of settler readers, there is clearly a deep creative process behind this retelling of the story

which speaks to much more complex motivations and inspirations. Some new aspects of the story

appear to focus more centrally on the feelings and motivations of the central female character.

However, while her agency is highlighted in some ways, it also seems potentially lessened by the

changes this version of the story makes to the confrontation with the double. At the same time,

other elements appear to more strongly emphasize the dangers posed by men who would claim

false kinship to Indigenous women. Far from merely translating and making minor alterations to

the double story, Zitkala-Ša adapted an oral Dakota story into the English textual medium in her

own voice and with her own creative touch. The following analysis of another adaptation of the

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same narrative will further illuminate some of the choices that faced early twentieth-century

Indigenous writers when engaging in such adaptations of, and innovations in, their cultural

practices.

4.3.3 “A Youth’s Double Abuses His Sister”

Published in 1923, Arthur C. Parker’s Seneca Myths and Folk Tales begins with several

chapters of introductory generalizations about commonalities between different Seneca stories.

Among a list of “basic premises of Seneca folk-lore” (3), Parker states, “Good spirits are constantly

making war upon evil spirits” (3), and “There is such a thing as...magical power...[which] makes

its possessor the master over the natural order of things” (3). This introduction, while it may at

times appear to be an oversimplification of Seneca stories and beliefs, is likely a part of Parker’s

strategy for translating these culturally specific stories for an English-speaking, non-Indigenous

audience. While Zitkala-Ša’s retelling of the double story changes some elements and adds more

background detail that was absent from the Dakota version to the story itself, Parker instead

provides this context earlier and in a more academic tone. Parker spent much of his career

publishing historical and archaeological texts—such as Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food

Plants (Bruchac 38)—and that experience shows in this approach to framing oral stories, which

often seems to be in accordance with the more ethnological side of his work.52 Parker also lists

52 A non-Indigenous colleague of his, William N. Fenton, directly describes Parker as an ethnologist in the introduction to the 1989 edition of Seneca Myths and Folk Tales (xi).

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common “themes and materials” (23) across many Seneca stories, including a brief summary of

the double story among them: “A youth lives in a secluded cabin with his sister. The youth’s double

comes to the lodge when the hero is absent, endeavoring to seduce the sister. Double is repulsed.

Sister will not believe brother has not insulted her. Brother finally makes a sudden return from a

hunting trip and apprehends the double, killing him” (25). The inclusion of this description in this

list of common themes indicates that Parker was aware of multiple versions of the same story—

likely including the one published five years earlier by Curtin and Hewitt. The use of the word

“seduce” also makes the sexual nature of the double’s assault on the sister much more explicit than

in Zitkala-Ša’s version, even before the full story itself adds more details. After several more lists

of common elements of stories, as well as a description of “The Atmosphere In Which The

Legends Were Told” (37), Parker further organizes the stories he retells into categories, beginning

with “When The World Was New” (57). The double story fits into the section titled “Horror Tales

of Cannibals and Sorcerers” (239), right after “The Cannibal and His Nephew” (284). This

placement frames the story as a frightening one before it even begins, further emphasizing the

violent nature of the events to come. Parker continues to present a more sensational version of the

tale in several ways—and in the process, especially when read next to Zitkala-Ša’s work, he seems

to play up intimate Indigenous conflict and play down Indigenous women’s agency, at least until

the concluding sentences of his version of the story.

The opening sentence of Parker’s version of the story reads, “There was a lodge in the

forest where very few people ever came, and there dwelt a young man and his sister” (290). Like

Zitkala-Ša’s Dakota version, no further background information about the siblings or their

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relationship is provided before the brother leaves his sister alone to go hunting. They are given no

names, and whether they were born as siblings or forged a kinship bond later in life is not clarified.

Also similar to the Dakota version, it is clear that in this story the sister cannot initially tell the

double and her brother apart, as when he makes his first appearance she is confused and states, “I

thought you just went away to hunt” (290). The narration of this scene leaves the nature of the

double somewhat ambiguous as well, casting some doubt as to his identity with the phrase “his

sister saw, so she thought, her brother” (290, emphasis added), but including no clarification about

his true nature until later on. The double’s subsequent attack on the sister is described as having a

much more clearly sexual nature than in either of Zitkala-Ša’s versions; Parker writes, “he sat

down on the bed with the sister and embraced her and acted as a lover” (290) and “he endeavored

to fondle her in a familiar way” (290). The double eventually leaves after repeated rejections from

the sister, but it is clear that from the sister’s perspective in this version of the story, her brother

has made sexual advances on her and may have intended to sexually assault her if she did not resist

so forcefully. Unlike in Zitkala-Ša's English version, no direct confirmation of the existence of the

double softens the disturbing nature of these events.

The next part of the story differs from both of Zitkala-Ša's versions as well. In “Squirrel

Man and His Double,” the sister initially believed that the double and the brother were the same

person, and so kept her sadness and shame to herself at first and did not speak to her brother about

it. In “The Witch Woman,” on the other hand, the sister knew that the double was not her real

brother, and so immediately told her brother about what happened. Parker’s version of the story

seems like a combination of elements from both, as while the sister does still believe that the

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double and her brother are the same person, she also immediately communicates with her brother

about the violence done to her. When he returns from his hunt and asks her why she seems upset,

she rebukes him with the words, “you ought to know you have abused me” (290). When he

professes ignorance, she clarifies, “you embraced me in an improper way yesterday” (290). Unlike

the sister in Zitkala-Ša’s Dakota version, she does not appear ashamed to relate the details of the

attempted sexual assault. When the brother explains that the perpetrator of this act must have been

“[his] friend who resembles [him] in every respect” (290), the sister does not believe him, replying,

“You have given a poor excuse...I hope your actions will not continue” (290). This scene paints a

very different picture of the characters and their relationship than that in either of the other

iterations of the tale. In some respects, it appears to present a much more confident and independent

woman, unafraid to defend herself and speak out against abuse from men. However, when the

sister in “Squirrel Man and His Double” initially suffered in silence, it was partially because of

confusion and uncertainty about whether her brother would really do something to hurt her. While

she at first debates whether it may be true that “[her] brother did a very terrible thing” (Dreams

79), she later insists, “My older brother doesn’t do disrespectful things to me” (79), and eventually

settles on the plan of parting the eagle feather in his hair as a way to discover the truth of who her

attacker really is. In Parker’s story, on the other hand, the sister is immediately ready to accept the

possibility that her brother might try to abuse her—and furthermore, while she scolds him for his

actions, she does not appear to consider leaving and finding somewhere safer to live, as Zitkala-

Ša’s Hides-in-Willows did after conflict with her birth family in “The Witch Woman.” So even

though her confrontation of the brother may initially make her personality seem less submissive

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than that of her counterparts in the other version of the story, it also seems that this version of the

sister is resigned to the idea that all men are going to treat her badly, to the point of being

unsurprised by abuse from her own brother.

Parker’s version of the story also involves the sister in more explicitly physical violence:

when she defends herself upon the double’s return, “she [tears] his cheeks with her nails” (291).

This wound that she inflicts plays the same role as the feather from the Dakota version, as the real

brother returns with the same mark, claiming that his “face was torn by thorns as [he] hunted deer”

(291). He goes on to explain, “If you scratched my friend that is the reason I am scratched.

Whatever happens to either one of us happens to the other” (291). This is another moment where

Parker’s telling of the story is more explicit about some aspects of it than either of Zitkala-Ša’s.

Both other versions of the story do seem to imply that the connection between the two men extends

to them sharing parallel experiences on some level; in “Squirrel Man and His Double,” both of

their eagle feathers are split at the same time (Dreams 79-80), and in “The Witch Woman,” the

double has mysteriously gained an earring to match the brother’s on his second appearance (73).

However, Parker’s version of the story is the only one out of the three to directly explain that what

happens to one man will also happen to the other, setting up for another scene of greater violence

in the two men’s confrontation.

The sister does not believe her brother’s excuses about his “friend,” and remains skeptical

about the double’s existence. When he attacks her again, the sister tears the double’s shirt and

throws grease at him; the brother returns having suffered the same fate once more (291). Finally,

the brother resolves to find and kill his double for “his evil designs upon” (292) the sister. Rather

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than lying in wait for the double like in the other versions, the brother goes out into the forest to

find his double, and drags him back to the lodge to show him to his sister. He tells the man, “You

have betrayed me and abused my sister...Now is the time for you to die” (292). Unlike in Zitkala-

Ša’s versions of the story, the brother does not need his sister’s help to defeat the double; instead,

he kills him in front of her with his bow and arrow (292). This is one of the most significant

differences between Parker’s version and those retold by Zitkala-Ša, both of which had the sister

deal the killing blow. Both “Squirrel Man and His Double” and “The Witch Woman” give the

sister a more important role in the final confrontation, allowing her to directly get revenge on the

man who assaulted her. Yet while this version is more violent in its descriptions of the earlier

fights between the double and the sister, the sister is downgraded to a mere witness to the final

murder of her abuser. However, the final line returns to the sister’s perspective, providing a final

confirmation that what happens to the double will also happen to the brother: “The sister saw her

assailant fall to the floor, and then looked up as she heard her brother give a war cry and fall as

dead with blood streaming from a wound in his chest over his heart” (292). This element is not

present in either of Zitkala-Ša’s versions of the story, both of which involve the brother surviving

the fight largely unscathed. Parker’s version sets itself apart with its heightened levels of violence

and tragedy, as well as with its clearer depiction of the brother and his double as supernatural

“shadows” of each other who are bound to the same fate.

The brother’s death alongside the double is the conclusion of the story that Parker calls “A

Youth’s Double Abuses His Sister”; however, just as both of Zitkala-Ša’s stories continued past

the double’s death with further adventures, Parker’s resumes on the next page under the heading

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“Murdered Double Speaks Through Fire (Second Part of A Youth’s Double)” (293). Parker’s

separation of the story into two halves underlines how much detail he affords the representation of

complex and sometimes violent relationships; there is a direct comparison with Curtin and

Hewitt’s version of the story, which condenses the threat of seduction into a brief precursor to this

second episode.53 In this sequel, the brother is shortly brought back to life by his “inherent magic”

(293)—a power which the double evidently does not share. The general outline of the story is

similar to Zitkala-Ša's versions, with the brother and sister attempting to trick the double's mother

into believing her son is still alive. This version of the second part of the tale gains its title,

“Murdered Double Speaks Through Fire,” from an event that occurs when the double’s mother

arrives at the protagonists’ home: a voice from the fire in which they cremated the double repeats,

“My friend has killed me, my friend has killed me” (293). This scene differs from similar events

in both of Zitkala-Ša's versions by having the mother visit the brother and sister rather than the

other way around, and also by having the dead double speak to his mother directly. However, just

like in the title of Zitkala-Ša's English retelling, Parker's story refers to the double's mother as a

“witch woman” (293). This specificity in diction, especially when Zitkala-Ša’s story is translated

from Dakota and much of Parker’s book is likely translated from Seneca or another Iroquoian

53 Curtin and Hewitt’s version of the story does begin with a brother killing a friend of his who had made advances on his sister (172), but provides very little detail about these advances and does not specify whether the two men looked alike. This information is only presented briefly before the dead man’s mother arrives and the speaking through fire narrative continues more similarly to Parker’s version. It seems possible that the Seneca version of this narrative was typically told as separate, though connected, stories, and Curtin and Hewitt were either unfamiliar with or chose to omit the longer version of the first part, while Parker adapted both.

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language, could suggest that Parker had some familiarity with Zitkala-Ša’s version of the tale,

which influenced his wording of his own retelling.

Parker’s version goes on to emphasize the themes of incest in the story once more when an

owl tells the witch woman, “The stranger has taken to wife his younger sister” (294). The element

of the brother presenting his sister as his wife to the witch woman was present in Zitkala-Ša's

versions of the story as well, but remained a relatively minor detail which was simply one part of

their plot to disguise themselves and trick her. Parker's story emphasizes that detail to a much

greater extent, and rather than more simply explaining that the brother is not the witch’s son, and

the sister is not really his wife, the owl’s dialogue focuses on the strangeness of a marriage between

siblings. The narrative also specifies that in order to remain convincing as a couple, the brother

and sister sleep in the same bed, “arranged in an affectionate attitude” (294). The witch spies on

them in their sleep and is satisfied that they are a real married couple, which aids them in making

their escape (294). These details of the episode appear unique to Parker’s version of the story, as

they are not stated in the Curtin and Hewitt retelling either. Unlike “The Witch Woman,” which

downplays the incestual elements of “Squirrel Man and His Double,” Parker’s version of the story

brings the implications of incest to the forefront. Even after the death of the double, whose

attempted assault on the sister was already more explicit than in other versions, “Murdered Double

Speaks Through Fire” focuses on the brother and sister convincingly presenting themselves as a

married couple. Where parts of Zitkala-Ša’s English version appeared designed to make the story

less disturbing, Parker’s version is likely more disturbing for many readers instead, as befits its

placement among the other “Horror Tales” in this section of Parker’s book.

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Similar to the other versions of the tale, the witch begins to suspect them again and a chase

scene ensues; also unique to this version is the appearance of the brother’s real mother at the end,

who saves him and the sister by pouring oil on the witch’s head (296-97). This provides a parallel

to the earlier scene in which the sister poured oil on the double, with the same weapon being used

again by the older generation; as I read it, the female power that earlier seemed absent from

Parker’s version lies here, in this collective, intergenerational female action. Additionally, the last

words in the narrative are given to the mother, who says, “Your younger sister...came here and

found me. We are all now safe and are reunited, so now all is well and I am thankful” (297). This

conclusion seems to emphasize the importance of family; however, at the same time, it suggests

that the brother and sister really do have the same biological mother, unlike the kinship ties formed

later in life in “The Witch Woman.” This detail further highlights the borderline incestual content

of the story, which is one of its major differences from the softened retelling by Zitkala-Ša. This

complex conclusion clearly illustrates that across various versions of the double story, both writers

identified some of the same themes—including, but not limited to, the importance of Indigenous

families and communities, the risk of violence from those who would claim false membership to

those families and communities, and how Indigenous women can defend themselves from those

violent imposters. Both took different approaches to depicting familial relationships, violence

against women, and female agency in their quest to adapt such a layered and meaningful narrative

to a different form of media for a different audience.

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4.4 Conclusion

In tracing in detail Zitkala-Ša’s and Arthur C. Parker’s approaches to similar stories, this

chapter seeks to build a deeper understanding of the complex work that Indigenous writers of their

era undertook in adapting oral narratives to text, as well as to demonstrate that such adaptations—

far from mere transcriptions and translations—were the result of creative processes through which

Indigenous writers could engage in and celebrate their cultural practices in a new medium.

Throughout the process of this analysis, I have endeavoured to avoid overstepping my bounds as

a non-Indigenous researcher. To go too far in ascribing intentionality to the adaptation choices that

Zitkala-Ša and Parker made, many of which were likely influenced by factors beyond my

understanding, would be inappropriate for someone in my position. Yet when I return to the

introduction to Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends, in which she stated, “The old legends of America

belong quite as much to the blue-eyed little patriot as to the black-haired aborigine” (vi), I feel that

on some level, she invited a settler readership in, encouraging us to build our own understandings

of the stories she chose to share. That she attempted to cultivate such a relationship with her readers

gives me some confidence in expressing what, in my reading, is ultimately significant about the

comparison I have traced in detail across these various narratives.

As I’ve laid out in this chapter, Zitkala-Ša and Arthur C. Parker belonged to similar

Indigenous networks, while holding somewhat different political visions and goals. While I do not

mean to imply a simple one-to-one correlation between those political visions and the details of

the two authors’ stories, there does seem to be some evidence that suggests that this larger context

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informed the different ways in which they offered their separate adaptations of the tale of the

double to a non-Indigenous public. Parker positioned himself very differently from Zitkala-Ša in

his work across multiple genres, taking an approach which was sometimes similar to that of non-

Indigenous ethnologists. And that position seems to come across in the heightening—almost

sensationalizing—of intimate Indigenous violence in his double story, which can be understood as

exposing his culture to negative responses based in colonial attitudes. One cost of this approach is

the downplaying of Indigenous women’s power throughout the story, although even at that, his

version ultimately acknowledges—or perhaps even celebrates—the strength of intergenerational

female power at the very end. On the other hand, Zitkala-Ša appears to work in much subtler ways

in her English adaptation, producing a text which can be read as perhaps more protective of some

of the dangers, tensions, and conflicts facing her Nation from both within and without; she may

have been trying to shield her fellow Dakotas from settler voyeurism. At the same time, her

softening of the violent elements of the narrative can also on some levels be understood as

protecting a potentially sensitive audience from elements that would be too disturbing, negotiating

a more nurturing relationship with her English-language readers than Parker does. Unlike his

version of the story, hers more clearly emphasizes an Indigenous woman’s strength in the face of

violence throughout.

In reading in detail the rhetorical strategies through which Parker and Zitkala-Ša each

reconfigure Indigenous stories into English-language narratives, I feel that I can glimpse

something of their processes of cross-cultural communication in action. I also feel that I can draw

a connection between Zitkala-Ša and the Indigenous women artists of today who continue to resist

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the violence of colonialism through their work, such as those who experiment with new creative

and collaborative ways to adapt oral narratives to other mediums. Zitkala-Ša was one of many

artistic predecessors who set the stage for this continuation of the cultural practice of oral

storytelling. As she herself writes in the introduction to Old Indian Legends, “the same story [is]

told over again by a new story-teller” (v), the different versions sometimes varying in the details

or “restoring some lost link” (vi) that one storyteller might have changed or left out over time.

Placing varied adaptations of similar stories side by side, and situating them within their cultural

and historical context, allows readers such as myself to build their own interpretations of a

narrative through multiple different retellings, similar to what the audiences of older oral versions

of these tales would have done. Through continuing to engage with these stories, the works of

Zitkala-Ša, Arthur C. Parker, their contemporaries, and their predecessors across generations are

kept alive.

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CONCLUSION

At the beginning of this dissertation, I turned to the recent work of Métis scholar Warren

Cariou for a principle with which to frame my research: that of “critical humility,” emphasizing

“openness to learning” (6) over “construction of critical authority” (6). In studying the works of

Zitkala-Ša from the position of a settler scholar, I have therefore paid close attention and kept an

open mind to the lessons that she and other Indigenous artists can teach me, attempting to shed

some of the prejudices associated with settler-focused approaches to literary criticism. Remaining

aware that there are aspects of Zitkala-Ša’s writing—and of her relationships with her Indigenous

readers and colleagues—that necessarily lie beyond my understanding, I have focused on her

approaches to cross-cultural collaboration and communication, striving to build a deeper

comprehension of the connections her work can build with non-Indigenous readers such as myself.

In order to build this comprehension, I have also considered the historical and cultural contexts of

her work as much as possible, avoiding readings which risk becoming extractive. And

understanding the interconnectedness of her work and that of many other Indigenous writers,

performers, and activists who came before her and worked alongside her has also assisted me in

recognizing her legacy in contemporary Indigenous art, a continued sense of presence that White

Earth Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor terms “survivance.”

Before undertaking more in-depth analysis of the works of Zitkala-Ša herself, my first

chapter focused on her survivance through the work of twenty-first-century Indigenous women

researchers and performers The Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble. I structured my research in

this manner so that what I learned from the Turtle Gals and their collaborators—particularly

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Michelle St. John (Wampanoag), Jani Lauzon (Métis), and Yvette Nolan (Algonquin), who were

kind enough to grant me with eye-opening interviews—could shape the rest of my work. Through

close reading archival documents and recordings relating to the development of their 2004-2007

production The Only Good Indian..., I was able to build a deeper understanding of the great risks

that all Indigenous women performers face in going public, as well as the difficulties of negotiating

the expectations of settler audiences—struggles which are as ever-present today as they were in

Zitkala-Ša’s time. My analysis of the play led me to interpret its conclusion as the characters re-

orienting themselves toward each other rather than toward the audience, emphasizing solidarity in

the face of colonial violence, as well as making connections with other Indigenous women across

generations. The importance of such inter-generational relationships remains significant

throughout the rest of my research.

Next, I turned to Zitkala-Ša’s work with non-Indigenous composer William F. Hanson on

The Sun Dance Opera, seeking to understand some of the complexities of this cross-cultural

collaboration. Through learning about the historical context of the production, including

oppressive laws against the Sun Dance and the often appropriative “Indianist” opera trend, I was

able to appreciate the ways in which Zitkala-Ša asserted her creative agency. While she was limited

in some ways by the colonial attitudes of her collaborator and the expectations of non-Indigenous

audience members, many of whom saw her as an anomaly and Indigenous “traditions” as

belonging to the past, she nonetheless found opportunities to subtly express some of her Nation’s

non-heteronormative views of gender, and to allow Ute performers to engage on some level in

cultural practices that had been outlawed. Through learning about The Sun Dance Opera—as well

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as Zitkala-Ša’s Creek/Cherokee contemporary Tsianina Redfeather’s work on Shanewis—I was

also able to see continuity with the innovative Indigenous operas of the twenty-first century as

another indication of Zitkala-Ša’s survivance into the present day.

Having examined one site of collaboration in Zitkala-Ša’s career, I moved on to analyze

two other works in which she collaborated in different genres: the explicitly activist “Oklahoma’s

Poor Rich Indians” and Petition of the NCAI. Reading all of these works side by side provided me

with some insight into the different forms of collaboration that are appropriate to different

relationships, as I compared the limitations placed on Zitkala-Ša’s creativity by The Sun Dance

Opera, to the individual respect paid to her contributions in the Oklahoma pamphlet, and to the

powerful Indigenous collective voice created by the NCAI. My research on this chapter also re-

affirmed the importance of avoiding extractive reading practices, as I not only recognized the harm

in a contemporary work stripping Zitkala-Ša’s words of some of their context, but also gained a

deeper appreciation of how essential it is to understand the networks of collaborators who created

these works, as well as the networks of predecessors who set the stage for them. Considering the

significance of all these relationships once more aided me in developing a sense of how

interconnected Zitkala-Ša’s work is with that of other Indigenous writers and activists who came

before and after her.

Finally, I applied all the lessons I had learned thus far to a close reading of three different

versions of one narrative: one which Gary Cavender (Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux) translated

from Zitkala-Ša’s handwritten notes in Dakota, one which Zitkala-Ša herself “shaped and retold”

(Dreams 71) in English, and one which Zitkala-Ša’s contemporary and one-time friend, Seneca

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writer and historian Arthur C. Parker, separately adapted into English from a different but similar

source. Through this comparative analysis, I built further understanding of the challenges that

Zitkala-Ša and her contemporaries faced in adapting Indigenous oral narratives to written ones in

English for different audiences, and of the multitude of complex factors that may have led to

Zitkala-Ša and Arthur C. Parker choosing to present these similar narratives in different ways. In

Zitkala-Ša’s adaptation, I read a celebration of an Indigenous woman’s strength in the face of

violence, just as I had seen in Michelle St. John’s performance in The Only Good Indian... in

chapter one. And I also developed an appreciation for the cultural contexts from which these

narratives derive, and of the multiple ways of keeping them and their storytellers alive through

engaging with their narrative complexities.

Throughout all four chapters, I was continually faced with more links between Zitkala-Ša’s

work and the work of Indigenous artists and activists today. Studying the relationships that she

formed with her collaborators and audiences has allowed me to understand her survivance into the

present, and the significance of the legacy that she built. While this marks the conclusion of my

research, my journey as a student of the works of Zitkala-Ša and other Indigenous writers across

multiple eras and generations is far from complete. I hope to find productive ways to share my

knowledge with those who can also benefit from it, and to continue to learn from Zitkala-Ša and

others while guided by the concepts of survivance and critical humility.

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205

APPENDICES

1. 1898 photograph of Zitkala-Ša with her violin

Gertrude Kasebier Photograph Collection, Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.