American Indian Stories and Old Indian Legends

by Zitkála-Šá

Read: February 2024

This book was a collection of stories by Zitkála-Šá a Yankton Dakota woman born in 1876, which means that she was just about my age when my paternal grandpa was immigrating to the Americas, which doesn't really mean anything but I feel like it should. The first section of the book autobiographical/semi-autobiographical and the second section a series of folktales.

I think I got a lot out of this book. Zitkála-Šá very pointedly contrasts her childhood (birth-8 years old) living in a Dakota community and her childhood living in a Quaker missionary residential school and the rest of her life sort of oscillating between the two. She remembers her short time in a wigwam with her mother with a lot of warmth and careful consideration. Amongst the Dakota she was treated with a dignity and respect that she never found among the white missionaries and other colonists. One of my favorite scenes early in the book includes her in her wigwam alone when a man comes to visit her mother. She wasn't there so he chose to wait and baby Zitkála-Šá took the opportunity to exhibit how hospitable she was by offering him bread and coffee. But since she was too young to make a fire (and thus, brew coffee) she basically just serves the man cold coffee grounds. When her mother comes home and sees his empty cup she asks where the coffee had come from.

"My graddaughter made coffee of a heap of dead ashes, and served me the moment I came." They both laughed, and mother said, "Wait a little longer, and I shall build a fire." She meant to make real coffee. But neither she nor the warrior, whom the law of our customer had not compelled to partake of my insipid hospitality, said anything to embarass me. They treated my best judgement, poor as it was, with the utmost respect.

This scene is incredibly touching. An adult patiently allowing a child the space and time to practice such necessary skills like hospitality is the kind of thing to remind you how beautiful communities can be. It reminded me of this little girl about the same age I used to babysit. She was the oldest of three and would always serve me the grossest tea. Fruit tea steeped until it tasted like silver. Horrible. She was always so excited to offer, and even more delighted to hand the mug to me though. It was too cute, and so diligent! I hope she's doing well, she's probably about 20 years old now.

But it's also worth noting that while she remembers her time with the Dakotas as predominantly kind and nurturing (and her time under the Quaker missionaries as terrifying and painful) she still points out here that it wasn't a Dakota custom for this man, this warrior, to drink her cold coffee-tinted water to be polite, but that he chose to do so as an individual. I think this is mostly important as an anthropological piece. It's less important that this one unnamed man made this kind choice, but rather that she was underlining a Dakota custom. Setting it to text, archiving something that may have otherwise so easily been stolen away in the cultural and physical genocide she was facing. After all, this section was written after she had already learned English at the end of a rod.

Her time at the missionaries' school was terrifying, abusive, and alienating. One of the first things that happened was a woman picked her up and tossed her in the air. (emphasis is mine)

I was both frightened and insulted by the trifling. I stared into her eyes, wishing her to let me stand on my own feet, but she jumped me up and down with increasing enthusiasm. My mother had never made a plaything of her wee daughter.

While here she doesn't make explicit if this is typical of general Dakota child-rearing or specific to her mother, Zitkála-Šá is still emphasizing the indignities afforded her by white missionaries and their culture.

Another thing I found important, and actually a little surprising, was one of her early responses to the Quaker's mode of dress:

I looked hard at the Indian girls, who seemed not to care that they were even more immodestly dressed than I, in their tight-fitting clothes.

Here cultural values match up (ie- clothing should be modest) but how those values are expressed is where the tension comes in. She actually saw Quakers and called their clothes immodest. She called it specifically "tight-fitting" which must be a reference to the bodices and not the skirts but still:

The rest of the book is a series of