Work · Indigenous Philosophies
Why I Am a Pagan
A short essay in the Atlantic Monthly that sets the Dakota experience of the Great Spirit in nature and kinship against a converted preacher’s threats of hellfire and declares for the former; later reprinted as “The Great Spirit”.
Introduction
The essay appeared in December 1902 in the Atlantic Monthly, two years after Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays had made her known. It is short and personal: walking near her home, she feels the presence of the Great Spirit in the landscape, in the birds and in the kinship of all living beings; then a Dakota convert visits her and threatens her with the fires of hell. Against his Christianity of fear she sets a religion of kinship and peace and declares that if this is paganism, she is a pagan. Coming from a former teacher at Carlisle, the flagship of the assimilation schools, the essay was a provocation for its supporters. A revised version appeared in “American Indian Stories” (1921) under the title “The Great Spirit”. Today it is read as an early statement of Indigenous religious self-determination.
Connections
Taken up in
- American Indian Stories1921 · Zitkala-Ša
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