Work · Indigenous Philosophies
American Indian Stories
Collects her autobiographical essays of 1900 on childhood, boarding school and teaching at Carlisle, together with stories and the essay on paganism: a testimony to the loss imposed by assimilation, written for a white readership.
Introduction
The volume appeared in 1921 in Washington, when Zitkala-Ša was working as a political activist. Its first part gathers the three autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900: “Impressions of an Indian Childhood”, “The School Days of an Indian Girl” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians”, which describe her life on the Yankton Reservation, the boarding school in Indiana and her time as a teacher at Carlisle. They are followed by stories, among them “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” and “The Trial Path”, the essay on the Great Spirit and the text “America’s Indian Problem”, a call for citizenship and justice. Read together, the pieces form an early critique of assimilation written by a Native woman, addressed to the white readers whose institutions they describe.
Connections
Builds on
- Why I Am a Pagan1902 · Zitkala-Ša
More works by Zitkala-Ša
- 1902Why I Am a Pagan
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