American Indian Stories

While American Indian Stories includes many examples detailing American Indian traditions, culture, and lifestyles, its primary goal is to describe the effects of assimilation on American Indian tribes in general and the Sioux tribe in particular at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the book’s autobiographical sections and fiction stories, Zitkála-Šá details how attempts to require American Indians to adopt White, Euro-American, and Christianized culture were more or less forced. Furthermore, her book details how these practices, which were sponsored by missionaries, the US government, and other groups, split apart families, disrupted cultural traditions, and lead to injustice.

Early in the book, Zitkála-Šá’s mother warns her not believe the “white man’s lies” because their “words are sweet but […] their deeds are bitter” (22). Despite the warning, Zitkála-Šá chooses to attend a mission school. Her mother repeats warnings like this throughout the book, such as when Zitkála-Šá returns home from the mission school and when she returns again after securing a teaching job. Her decision to describe these experiences in her book, rhetorically speaking, gives her authority to criticize the practice of assimilation. She writes from a perspective of having seen the practices of assimilation firsthand, and she can thus critique its dangers and injustices accurately and honestly.

She describes having her hair cut, a practice enforced by the mission school, under the assumption that assimilated American Indian children would adopt the appearance of White, Euro-American, Christianized children. For Zitkála-Šá, the mandate to cut her hair was emotionally damaging because in her culture, “short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards” (30). Zitkála-Šá also describes her attempts to understand some of the cultural ideas that were thrust upon her during the mission school’s attempts to assimilate her. For instance, she describes her bewilderment in encountering the Christian idea of the devil.

Zitkála-Šá does describe how once she began to assimilate, she was “restless and unhappy,” and no longer felt at home among the Sioux and on the reservation (39). Her attempt to assimilate caused her to lose a connection to her roots, and yet she continued to face discrimination, such as when fellow students showed a crudely drawn image of a “squaw” at an oratory competition, and when the headmaster of the school she worked at belittled her by calling her a “little Indian girl” (45, 48).

Even after she leaves behind the world of assimilation after quitting her teaching job and returning to the Sioux tribe, Zitkála-Šá faces discrimination and the pressures of assimilation. In her essay “The Great Spirit,” she describes how a cousin from her tribe feels “disappointed” at her for not adopting Christianity (60). This excerpt shows how deeply disruptive the practice of assimilation could be for the Sioux tribe, such that the pressure to assimilate came not only from missionaries and other outsiders but also from within the tribe itself. As a result, the community and traditions that would have otherwise been passed down uninterrupted among the Sioux were threatened.

Zitkála-Šá is fully aware of the US government’s role in promoting and compounding the practice of assimilation. In the “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” she describes government land rights policies that did not extend those rights to American Indians in a cohesive and honest way, but instead increased inequality and marginalization. Chief High Flier notes in the story that “[a] slowly starving race was growing mad, and the pitifully weak sold their lands for a pot of porridge” (101). Zitkála-Šá highlights similar examples elsewhere in American Indian Stories, such as “A Dream of Her Grandfather,” and most prominently in the final essay, “America’s Indian Problem.” Zitkála-Šá lays out an argument for granting American Indians full citizenship, which she sees as a specific way to halt the detrimental practices of assimilation. Zitkála-Šá also urges the adoption of such plans as a path to correcting the injustices, inequality, and cultural disruptions caused by forced assimilation.