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Cari M. Carpenter
On a San Francisco stage in 1879, Northern Paiute author and activist Sarah Winnemucca surprised her audience into laughter, using a physical comedy that allowed her to critique William Rinehart, the duplicitous Indian agent who had cheated her people. As one reporter wrote in “The Piute Princess,”
There was little left of the redoubtable Christian agent when she finished him. She described him as having a right arm longer than his left, and while he was beckoning them to be kind and good and honest with the one hand, the other was busy grabbing behind their backs. She would wrap up her summary of Rinehart’s character with a bit of mischievous sarcasm that brought down the house.
Playing the Indian agent, she lifted one hand to heaven and used the other to rummage in a money sack, causing “considerable merriment” (Anonymous 1879: 1).
In Gerald Vizenor’s words, Winnemucca “ousts the inventions with humor, new stories, and the simulations of survivance” (1994: 5), presenting herself as a post‐Indian warrior who disrupts non‐Native expectations of Indigenous identity.1 Such brilliant rhetoric was required in a time of great trial for most American Indians. The Dawes Act of 1887 was one of the many federal policies that proved disastrous. As a result of this legislation, which designated 160 acres of land to each qualifying American Indian and gave the “excess” to whites, Native American land diminished from over 150 million acres in 1880 to 75 million acres by the turn of the century (Warrior 2005: 75–76). This was also a time of brutal Indian–US army encounters, from the more infamous Great Sioux War, Battle of Little Big Horn, and Wounded Knee Massacre to events like the lesser known Bannock War, in which Sarah Winnemucca was involved. With the official end of treaties in 1871, the US government sought to “incorporate” American Indians through often insidious policies of assimilation. Winnemucca’s biography offers a microcosm of the state of affairs for many American Indians in the nineteenth century: she fought, for example, President Grant’s “Peace Policy,” which replaced civilian Indian agents with Christian missionaries. In her case, this meant that an agent whom she felt had treated Northern Paiutes comparatively well was replaced by the corrupt Rinehart, who became the focus of much of her critique of the reservation system.
Sarah Winnemucca’s activism was preceded by authors like William Apess (Pequot), a Methodist minister who wrote compelling defenses of American Indian rights with the prescient rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr., such as “An Indian’s Looking‐Glass for the White Man,” the final chapter of his The Experience of Five Christian Indians (1833; see Lopenzina 2017; O’Connell 1992). Other Indigenous predecessors were religious figures whose training afforded them fluency in English, such as the Presbyterian cleric Samuel Occum, a Mohegan (see Brooks 2006). As for Native women, early in the nineteenth century Jane Johnston Schoolcraft wrote poetry in both English and Ojibwa as well as stories based on Ojibwa legends (see Parker 2008). Three of the most well‐known Indigenous women writers of the late century – Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (c. 1844–1891), Alice Callahan (Muscogee Creek, 1869–1894), and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, better known by her pen name Zitkala‐Ša or “Red Bird” (Yankton Sioux, 1876–1938) – are illustrative of Indigenous resistance in this troubled era. Their resistance involved complex, often seemingly irreconcilable tactics: the use of anger, sentimentality, and humor.
Sarah Winnemucca (Thocmetony) dealt early on with the repercussions of US colonialism.2 After her birth around 1844, she spent her early years living with the Northern Paiutes – the Numa, as they call themselves – in the stretch of the Great Basin now known as Nevada. As a member of the band known as the Kuyuidika‐a (Eaters of the Cui‐ui, an ancient fish in Pyramid Lake), Sarah was only a young girl when non‐Natives began to enter Northern Paiute territory; diseases and other calamities followed. Martha C. Knack and Omer C. Stewart report that two‐thirds of the Paiute population was killed during this period (1984: 83). Unlike her grandfather, who told a traditional story about whites as the tribe’s “long‐looked for brothers” who had once been separated from them, Sarah Winnemucca increasingly focused on resistance. In April of 1870, she wrote a letter to Indian Commissioner Ely Samuel Parker calling for the humane treatment of the Indians. The letter was printed in a number of publications, including Harper’s Weekly. In the letter she adopted the tone of many of her future missives, detailing agents’ abuse of power and declaring that if the Indians were well treated, they would become “educated” in English and non‐Native ways. But she rejected the whites’ description of the Northern Paiutes; as she writes, “the savage, as he is called to‐day, will be a law‐abiding member of the community fifteen or twenty years hence” (Carpenter and Sorisio 2015, my emphasis). For Winnemucca, then, to become educated in English did not mean endorsing a view of assimilation wherein Native cultures were eradicated or denigrated.
Winnemucca’s resistance continued after the Bannock War of 1879, when she persuaded several bands of Northern Paiutes to move to Camp Harney, Oregon, despite their fears that they would be treated as prisoners of war. The United States did, indeed, later declare the bands at Camp Harney hostile and forced them to remove 350 miles to Yakima, Washington, in early 1879. Winnemucca traveled with her group and witnessed the Northern Paiutes’ intense suffering, which eventually resulted in the death of one in five of the Northern Paiutes who were removed (Zanjani 2001: 221). While in San Francisco a year later, she circulated a petition to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, insisting upon the Northern Paiutes’ innocence and requesting that they be allowed to return to Malheur. When Schurz ultimately failed to allow this return, Winnemucca turned her attention to Fort McDermit, which was declared a reservation for the Northern Paiutes in 1889.
When Winnemucca toured the East in the 1880s, she found a warm welcome among supporters like the writer and reformer Elizabeth Peabody. Winnemucca’s resistance to Indian agent W.V. Rinehart, however, drew his wrath and a flurry of negative commentary. The Council Fire and Arbitrator, citing affidavits filed against her by Rinehart in 1880, represented Winnemucca as an “inmate of a house of ill‐fame in Winnemucca, Nevada,” and a “common camp follower, consorting with common soldiers.” As the paper declared, “It is a great outrage on the respectable people of Boston for General Howard or any other officer of the army to foist such a woman of any race upon them” (quoted in Carpenter and Sorisio 2015: 156). The Council Fire’s editor, Thomas A. Bland, published attacks on Winnemucca, even attempting to stop the publication of her autobiography, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883).
The lectures Winnemucca gave in the Northeast indicate her astute sense of what should be included – and perhaps more importantly, excluded – from her speeches. Elizabeth Peabody, another spirited advocate of Indian reform, affectionately recalls Winnemucca’s first lecture. It was directed exclusively to women:
she unfolded the domestic education given by the grandmothers of the Piute tribe to the youth of both sexes, with respect to their relations with each other both before and after marriage, – a lecture which never failed to excite the moral enthusiasm of every woman that heard it, and seal their confidence in her own purity of character and purpose.
(Peabody 1886: 28)
Winnemucca’s framing of Paiute culture in these terms suggests that she found that such sentimental, moralistic language made her message more attractive to white, middle‐class women in the East. In turn, Winnemucca omits the details of her marriages and her alleged bar fights. A woman who carried a knife, rode bareback, and physically defended herself had to tailor herself carefully in a sentimental narrative. Given the allegations of white men who accused her of violating sentimental norms of domesticity and chastity, it is no wonder that Winnemucca omitted details of her life, whether true or alleged, that could only be used against her. Her inclusion of several letters of recommendation by white men in the appendix of Life Among the Piutes further indicates her attempts to intervene in these representations.
Life Among the Piutes reveals her rhetorical mastery of both sentimentality and anger. Tears have a prominent place in the narrative; references to weeping occur on no fewer than 18 of the first 50 pages. In Winnemucca’s narrative, weeping serves not only to forge this alliance between character and reader but to assert Paiute dignity. It also becomes a form of resistance: early on, Winnemucca’s tears mark her refusal to trust the whites, while Washoe women cry in protest when their innocent husbands are accused of killing two white men: “Such weeping was enough to make the very mountains weep to see them” (Hopkins 1994: 63). Weeping registers that this violence is not simply against the Washoe or Paiute Indians but against the very earth itself.
In addition to sentimentality, Winnemucca mobilized a humor that was in turn biting, self‐deprecating, and regionally specific. In doing so, she challenged nineteenth‐century mores that largely excluded women from comedy and developed a technique that forcefully critiqued colonialism. She employed no single form of humor on stage; indeed, part of her strategy was to tailor it to her audience. Eastern crowds heard sarcastic critiques of Indian agents out west, while western audiences were more likely met with physical comedy and blistering accounts of easterners. Despite the form her humor took, the articles suggest it had a similar effect: it often lowered the listeners’ guard so that she could deliver a powerful critique of the treatment of American Indians.
Some of this laughter, however, may have masked the effectiveness of Winnemucca’s political critique. The Daily Alta California of September 1879, for example, follows one of her sarcastic comments with the bracketed word “laughter,” which suggests that the audience received her critique as a lighthearted joke: “They lived with us peaceably, and we hoped more of our white brothers would come. We were less barbarous then than now. [Laughter]” (quoted in Carpenter and Sorisio 2015: 104). This article begins by noting Winnemucca’s frustration with “friends” who were intent on offering her political advice. She was relieved, the reporter notes, to be speaking on her own the next day. While the bracketed word “laughter” suggests a certain response, it does not convey the precise quality of that response; there are, of course, different kinds of laughter, and we cannot be sure if it was polite, lighthearted, or cognizant of Winnemucca’s intended barb. This suggests the challenge she faced in framing her humor so that it would have political potency; there was always the danger that the critique would be diluted by a facile laughter. Such moments highlight the discrepancy between her position and that of her audience: while they could look at her as a source of temporary entertainment, she was speaking in response to grave issues of genocide, land dispossession, and violence against Native American women. It was through a complex negotiation of sentimentality and anger, evidence suggests, that she mounted this response.
While Sophia Alice Callahan’s short life (she died of pleurisy at age 26) leaves us less material with which to understand her, she too espoused a resistance that drew from both sentimentality and anger. As the author of Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891), the first known novel by a Native American woman, Callahan engaged in activities common to middle‐class white women of the time, participating in the temperance movement and attending a respected “female institute” that prepared her for a teaching career. She was later involved with temperance and religious organizations associated with the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), founded in 1879. She edited Our Brother in Red, a publication of the Methodist school where she taught, she was a member of Muskogee’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and in 1893 she served as a secretary of the Indian Mission Conference.
Callahan’s position as a reformer was somewhat complicated by her Creek ancestry. Her father, Samuel Callahan, was one‐eighth Creek and active in tribal affairs throughout his life. After serving in the Confederate Congress, he was a clerk in the Muskogee House of Kings, one of the two houses of government. He also served as a justice and a clerk of the Muskogee Supreme Court, a member of the Creek tribal council, and an editor of the Indian Journal. He shared his daughter’s writing interests as an editor and a writer of several candidates’ speeches. Samuel Callahan was closely aligned with a number of Creek leaders including Isparhecher, a full‐blood Creek who was elected principal chief in 1895, and for whom he served as a secretary and interpreter. Isparhecher helped establish a traditional Creek government to fight US allotment policies (Green 1990: 102). In 1893, the year before Alice’s death, leaders of the “Five Civilized Tribes” refused to meet with the commission to discuss allotment, and later rejected it outright (Callahan 1997: xxxiv). Callahan was undoubtedly privy to these heated discussions of allotment in the years before her death.
Although scholars such as Louise Michele Newman (1999) have traced white women’s involvement in Indian reform, less attention has been given to American Indian women’s relationship to the movement. If white women reformers couched reform in terms of their anger on behalf of American Indians, what role was left for Indigenous women? In other words, how could American Indian women – already silenced in these accounts – mount their own protests? Given her positions in reform movements as well as the Creek community, Callahan is an intriguing subject for such questions. For such answers, we must turn to Wynema, her only book‐length publication. Unlike Winnemucca, whose print career far surpassed her book, much of Callahan’s literary presence is limited to Wynema. To see Indigenous anger in Wynema is to read it somewhat differently than other critics have done. In one of the most central critiques, Craig Womack argues that the book is “unCreek” in part because it is not angry enough; it ignores resistance efforts such as the Red Stick War of 1813–1814 or the late‐century railroad protests (Womack 1999: 111). While we might agree with limitations of Wynema, I argue that she borrowed from white women’s scripts of anger and on occasion voiced her own.
Callahan wrote Wynema in a period when whites’ paternalist attitude toward American Indians was solidified by the momentous Dawes Act. Members of the WNIA supported allotment as a means of assimilating Indians into Anglo‐American society and protecting them from whites’ greed, while the Creek nation resisted signing any allotment agreements until 1901. In February of 1882 several founders of the WNIA signed a congressional petition that deemed allotment a critical safeguard of American Indians. Such efforts positioned white men (and, at times, white women) as the indignant protectors of the Indians, who were often figured as children. Thus, a familiar sentimental trope emerged: the protective parent and the helpless child. As “protectors,” white women were able to borrow from the masculine authority of white men.
A protectionist attitude is evident in the publisher’s preface to Wynema, which notes that although this is the story of an “Indian born and bred” – and thus distinct from whites’ accounts of the mistreatment of American Indians – its voice is one of Indians’ “inherent weaknesses, of their patient endurance and injustice, oppression and suffering.” In other words, this “real Indian” paints her people as they have been painted by whites: downtrodden individuals who are, because of their helplessness, worthy of the reader’s sympathy. Only one clause in this string of descriptors suggests anything other than Indian frailty. Tucked in between the “despair” and the “magnificent results” brought about by white sympathizers is a note of the Indians’ “last defiance of governmental authority.” In the context of the passage, this claim is as ineffectual as the American Indians are said to be. Earlier in the preface, Callahan’s “protest” is described as “sincere, earnest, and timely,” as if to neutralize any of its negative connotations. It is also described as a “plea,” a word that places the author in a diminutive relationship to the whites who apparently control the Indians’ destiny. And in repeatedly referring to the novel as “this little volume,” the publishers dilute any of its potential edge by describing it as a modest, endearing object – a classic move in sentimental literature, where the object is instilled with value. The publishers thus defend the novel (and by extension, its author) against potential critics, reenacting a defense of the Indians that shores up white personhood (Callahan 1997: ix).
The differentiation between the overtly racist view of Native Americans and a more insidious interpretation of them is evident in the relationship between Gerald, the white male missionary and reformer, and Genevieve Weir, a white Methodist teacher in the Muscogee‐Creek Nation. Gerald educates Genevieve about Creek culture, offering her a more “sympathetic” view of the community. The first description of Gerald emphasizes his sentimental capacity: “possessing a kindly sympathy in face and voice, he easily won the hearts of his dark companions” (2). Like Sarah Winnemucca, Wynema Harjo assumes the position of interpreter, in between the whites and Native Americans in a position that generally fosters Natives’ affiliation with whites. Yet Wynema seems to lack Winnemucca’s self‐consciousness of her complicated position as a potential conduit for conversion, a lack that likely fuels Womack’s and other critics’ frustration with her. And despite Wynema’s fluency in English, she is unable to explain customs like the busk to Genevieve; such explanations are left to Gerald, as if he knows more about Creek culture than Wynema does. So, while the novel might attempt a neat distinction between “us” (the whites) versus “the foreigners” (the Creeks), the sentimental outsider occupies the center of the Indigenous community.
A main feature of this centerpiece, as in Winnemucca’s narrative, is the school, a site linked to the home in fundamental ways. Yet unlike the multilingual Indian school that Winnemucca established, the school Callahan envisions seems to embrace the colonial model. At the request of Wynema’s father, Genevieve is recruited to live with the family. In the final line of the opening chapter Genevieve’s arrival is equated with the civilization that is the goal of conventional sentimentality: “Thus came civilization among the Tepee Indians” (5). Here scripture somehow manages to transcend linguistic differences in sentimental terms. The children don’t understand “sweet, comforting gospel” like the fourteenth chapter of St. John, but the “tone went straight to each girl’s heart and found lodgment there” (6). The teacher–student relationship is likened to a nuclear family, accomplishing both a religious and a cultural conversion: no longer is the extended family of Creek culture in play.
It is with Gerald’s guidance that Genevieve is able to assume the position of the sentimental narrator. When Genevieve expresses her desire that the Indians quit their “barbaric” dance, Gerald replies,
“Do you think, Miss Weir, that if our Indian brother yonder, now full of the enjoyment of the hour, could step into a ball‐room, say in Mobile, with its lights and flowers, its gaudily, and if you will allow it, indecently dressed dancers – do you think he would consider us more civilized than he? Of course that is because he is an uncouth savage.” (21)
Thus the sarcasm that Sarah Winnemucca uses so effectively is here reserved for the white man. In upstaging the Native American author, the white male character seems to teach even Callahan the proper treatment of Creeks. Gerald is, as Genevieve notes, the perfect “Champion” of the Indian, one on whom they depend for protection from such misrepresentation. Yet Genevieve’s response indicates that there is still some work to do: she laughs, granting Native American “superiority” with a lightness that seems more a testimony to her deference toward (and attraction to) Gerald than an earnest belief in Indigenous civility (22).
When Genevieve returns to her southern home, Wynema in tow along with other “Indian relics,” the white heroine displays the outrage that proves crucial to her self‐development and corresponding protection of the American Indians (42). Her anger is sparked not only by her fiancé’s description of her future as his “little girl” and “little wife” but also by his inability to imagine her as a “protector” of Indians (47):
“Your wife, indeed! I have never promised to be such, and please heaven! I never will. My husband must be a man, full‐grown – a man capable of giving an opinion, just and honest, without using insult to do so. Good evening! I have no time to spend in arguing about a people who have not the intellect of a dog,” and with a curl of her lip, and a toss of the head, she swept from the room, righteously angry. (56, my emphasis)
These last two words indicate that Genevieve’s anger is expressible and dignified because it is steeped in her moral defense of Indians; it stems not from self‐interest but her indignation on behalf of others – an anger that Marilyn Frye notes is often considered more acceptable in women than anger for themselves (1983: 91). Like the representatives of the WNIA, Genevieve relies on an image of Indians who are dependent on whites. Genevieve emerges from this scene a more confident woman who sees herself as a kind of prophet who will return to her “‘people, Israel,’” no longer a girl who frets over her role as a missionary (59).
Notably, it is here that Callahan voices one of her most poignant feminist critiques, as if in Genevieve’s anger and self‐development she finds new confidence. Genevieve’s heated condemnation of Maurice’s racist and sexist beliefs belittles his masculinity and, in the process, suggests her own authority: “Oh, if I pretended to be a man, I’d be a man, and not a sniveling coward. If you were a man, I would reason with you, but you do not understand the first principles of logic” (56). Genevieve’s bizarre characterization of Native Americans as poor, ignorant people “who have not the intellect of a dog” indicates that her anger is more about her ability to defend wayward children than her belief in the equality of the Natives themselves. In other words, American Indians become a platform, a catalyst, for her own anger and self‐development. Her fiery speech also suggests that it is Gerald’s righteous anger – his avowed protection of the vulnerable Indians – that makes him more attractive, more “manly,” than her fiancé, Maurice. Indian reform thus proves conducive to the “right” kind of heterosexual white relations. Following Genevieve’s rebellion against the oppressive domesticity of a life with Maurice, she returns to her “own” home, which is located with the Creeks. With her ignorant views of Creek culture replaced by Gerald’s lessons, Genevieve now has more “sophisticated” views on current Anglo‐Indian affairs. Genevieve can now become the protector, a position the Native American woman (and man) is denied.
In marked contrast to Genevieve, Wynema does not display the anger that the novel suggests is essential to a woman’s development as a protector of others. Although she shares Genevieve’s commitment to suffrage, she believes white women’s political ascendancy will enhance Native women’s power: “we are waiting for our more civilized white sisters to gain their liberty, and thus set an example which we shall not be slow to follow” (45). As opposed to Sarah Winnemucca’s narrative, which presents the Northern Paiute political structure as just as or even more egalitarian than that of the United States, Wynema defers to the Anglo example. Like Gerald, it is Genevieve’s brother, Robin, who seems most able to espouse white women’s and Indigenous rights, in part by “‘taking one of the women’” (46), as he finally does by marrying Wynema. And when Genevieve expresses her outrage at her fiancé, Wynema shares none of it – indeed she fears she is its cause.
It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that no space exists in Callahan’s novel for an Indigenous anger. The elderly Chikena, who has come to live among the Creeks, emerges in the final pages to offer a blistering account of whites’ massacre of her Lakota community. This is an account complete with a powerful image of assaulted domesticity: babies dying in their mothers’ arms. It is while relating Chikena’s story that the narrator voices her most cogent critiques of the whites. Significantly, Chikena appears only after the sentimental novel has been disrupted rather radically by newspaper articles on the dire conditions of the Sisseton and Wahpeton Reservations and a bitter account of Wounded Knee. As opposed to the indiscriminate label of “Indians” that frequents much of the novel, here particular Indian nations are named. While readers usually point to this disruption as an aesthetic fault of the novel, we might instead consider it an opportunity for Callahan to break out of the conventional sentimental narrative and the Indian reform discourse, introducing a more productive Indigenous anger. As if to emphasize this shift, the first paragraph of chapter 21 is in the present tense as opposed to the past tense of much of the previous text. The sections on Wounded Knee and Chikena’s protest feel disconnected from the rest of the book because they fundamentally are: here are the only occasions when a sustained Indigenous anger emerges. Both require a separation not only from the rest of the narrative but from Callahan’s own racial and gender position – they center on Lakotas and a figure who does not fit neatly into the categories of femininity or masculinity. In this sense, as with Sarah Winnemucca, Wynema offers another example of newspapers enriching our understanding of nineteenth‐century Native American writers.
Although Womack faults Wynema in part for its lack of strategic irony, in describing the murder of Miscona Callahan expresses a sarcasm and irony that pervades Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes. Consider, for instance, the biting declaration in Wynema, “[It was] only an Indian squaw, so it did not matter” (90). This statement is particularly powerful because it is not qualified in any way; Callahan does not end, for example, with “it did not matter to the government.” Leaving the statement open, she makes no distinction between the oppressive government and the unsympathetic whites and the white reformers. This elderly Lakota woman is at once to be pitied – “her face dripping with tears” – and admired as the group’s fierce defender: “I staid to protect them. But, oh, the bitter, bitter night! The cold wind swept by me and tortured me with its keen, freezing breath; but I drew my blanket more closely about me and defiantly watched my dead” (91). Chikena lays claim to the vanquished bodies of her people: she acts, in other words, in defense of the collective. She is maternal, wrapping infants in blankets, and protective – a quality that just a few pages earlier defines the masculinity of Wildfire, a Sioux warrior. Chikena, that is, does not sit easily within the rigid masculine and feminine roles that characterize much of the novel. It is because of her transgression of these categories – and the novel’s rejection of conventional sentimentality at this point – that she (and, through her, Callahan) is able to critique the whites.
Indeed, Chikena’s commentary is located in a chapter that articulates the Indians’ anger about the whites’ behavior. Given the previously benign tone, the sentence, “But, instead of this, the Indians were slaughtered like cattle, shot down like dogs” is striking (89). In the final paragraph of the chapter, quotation marks reappear, this time to expose stereotypes of American Indians: Buffalo Bill’s “‘showing’” of the Indians (96) and the newspaper’s report of the death of “only a few ‘Indian bucks’” (92). The distinction between good and bad whites momentarily dissolves, and a forceful American Indian voice is lifted in opposition. As in Life Among the Piutes, these moments are effective not despite but because of their unconventional sentimental form; they combine the intimacy of the genre with a stinging critique of its audience. For once, the white reader is not allowed the exalted position of the valiant protector; she is exposed as separate from, and indeed a threat to, the nation that Chikena at least momentarily affirms. Chikena’s angry tears serve as deeds of possession, boundary markers between Lakota and US nations. Yet these tears also have the potential to cross boundaries: in Karen Sánchez‐Eppler’s words, “as the eyes of readers take in the printed word and blur it with tears” (1993: 26). Grief and anger converge, frustrating attempts to keep them apart. The two are so powerful together because they represent both a sharing of feeling (and property) and an assertion of distinct ownership. To get angry, and in turn, to get sentimental, is to assert one’s rightful ownership of one’s self and nation.
The contributions of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (aka Zitkala‐Ša) offer another useful link between Indigenous anger and sentimentality in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in the mid‐1870s to a Yankton Sioux mother and a white father who soon left the family, Bonnin spent her early days feeling the full onslaught of colonialism. Bonnin’s mother moved with her tribe to the border of present‐day South Dakota, as the Yanktons elected “not to participate in Sioux conflicts with whites” (Lewandowski 2016: 7). Those conflicts became particularly pronounced after 1874, when Custer surveyed the traditional Sioux homeland of the Black Hills, confirming the existence of gold in that region. Following the Great Sioux War and the Battle of Little Big Horn, the Sioux were compelled to cede the Black Hills. Atrocities like Wounded Knee followed. As a child, Bonnin was sent to White’s Manual Labor Institute in Indiana, one of the many boarding schools established to assimilate Native children into white culture. She later went on to Earlham College, where she participated in a speaking contest and won first place despite the opposing school’s cruel display of a banner with the word “squaw” prominently displayed. She eventually became a teacher at the Carlisle Indian School, the infamous boarding school for Native Americans founded in 1879 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. She devoted the remainder of her life to Indigenous activism in a variety of forms.
Much of Bonnin’s early writing focused on her early experiences in school. Her most well‐known work, American Indian Stories (1921), was a collection of autobiographical narratives, short stories, and essays, some of which had been published in prominent eastern periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine. In one of the most compelling of those narratives, “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” originally published in 1900, she tells of her painful indoctrination into a boarding school that profoundly changed her life. The school she describes is more similar to Callahan’s vision than Winnemucca’s; rather than being a multilingual space, it is a manifestation of colonialism in which Native students are absolutely forbidden – and thus estranged from – their Indigenous language. In one scene, Bonnin forges this critique in domestic terms. Reprimanded for some trivial “misconduct,” the young narrator is forced to mash turnips for the evening dinner. The turnips instantly become the target of her anger. “I hated turnips, and their odor which came from the brown jar was offensive to me.” In a vivid description of the relationship between her body and the turnip jar, she describes taking the wooden tool, climbing up on the stool, and grasping the handle firmly with both hands:
I bent in hot rage over the turnips. I worked my vengeance upon them […] I saw that the turnips were in a pulp, and that further beating could not improve them; but the order was, “Mash these turnips,” and mash them I would! I renewed my energy, and as I sent the masher into the bottom of the jar, I felt a satisfying sensation that the weight of my body had gone into it.
Standing “fearless and angry,” she recalls, “I whooped in my heart for having once asserted the rebellion within me” (Zitkala‐Ša 2016: 60, 61). Thus her unjustified punishment becomes the vehicle for her revenge. Not insignificantly, it is in the kitchen – the ultimate domestic space – that this revenge is carried out. Quite unlike the docile, obedient girl who is supposed to quietly mash the turnips, she takes this order to the extreme, challenging the gender and racial stereotypes to which she is expected to conform. She has devoted her whole body to the task, but for a very different end. From a conventional domestic stage, she uses irony to enact her anger.
Such anger emerges in other moments of American Indian Stories. For example, in “A Warrior’s Daughter” we see the brave Tusee, a Dakota daughter whose lover is kidnapped by another tribe: “A burning rage darts forth from her eyes and brands him for a victim of revenge” (Zitkala‐Ša 2016: 148). The final lines leave us with a new take on gender roles as she alone saves her lover from the enemy:
“Come!” she whispers, and turns to go; but the young man, numb and helpless, staggers nigh to falling.
The sight of his weakness makes her strong. A mighty power thrills her body. Stooping beneath his outstretched arms grasping at the air for support, Tusee lifts him upon her broad shoulders. With half‐running, triumphant steps she carries him away into the open night.
(Zitkala‐Ša 2016: 152–153)
As with Callahan’s Chikena, here Tusee exists in a space between masculinity and femininity, offering a new vision of a Native woman’s strength. In addition to the autobiographical descriptions of her painful experiences being poked, prodded, denied her language, and shorn of her hair, she includes stories of other Indigenous figures – perhaps most poignantly, in “The Soft‐Hearted Sioux” – who are alienated from their cultures and left to wonder where they will go at the moment of death (Zitkala‐Ša 2016: 125).
Bonnin’s writing ultimately took a turn from autobiography, fiction, and poetry to politics. In her essay “Why I Am a Pagan” (1902), she reacted to a critique of “The Soft‐Hearted Sioux.” Describing a meal she had shared with a converted Indian, who had been hurried away by the ringing of the church bell, she added: “The little incident recalled to mind the copy of a missionary paper brought to my notice a few days ago, in which a ‘Christian pugilist’ commented upon a recent article of mine, grossly perverting the spirit of my pen” (quoted in Lewandowski 2016: 63). The essay thus becomes a commentary on a fictional story, indicating the degree of anger – and sentiment – that motivated it. Perhaps finding more cachet with political writing, in later years she turned her attention to invectives like “The Red Man’s America” (1917), a critique of the failure of the US government to ban peyote; the pamphlet Americanize the First American (1921), which calls for Indigenous citizenship; and Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians (1924), a scathing account of the exploitation of Indian Country. The subtitle of the latter is itself a statement of the rage with which it was written: “An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes – Legalized Robbery.” Bonnin goes on to write of “a situation almost unbelievable in a civilized country.” As in her earlier texts, she draws from sentimentality in detailing a horrific state of affairs:
That Indian children have been allowed to die for lack of nourishment because of the heartlessness and indifference of their professional guardians, who had ample funds in their possession for the care of the wards. That young Indian girls (mere children in size and mentality) have been robbed of their virtue and their property through kidnapping and a liberal use of liquor.
(Bonnin, Fabens, and Sniffen 1924: 5, 8)
This work is credited with leading to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which had the noble goal of reversing years of assimilation in favor of a return to traditionalism and tribal self‐government.
In her essay “What It Means to be an Indian Today” (1929), Bonnin concludes: “To be an Indian today means to be an inarticulate subject under the plenary power of Congress, presumed by the United States Supreme Court to be governed by Christian motives in its dealings with this ignorant and dependent race. It means to be hungry, sick, and dying while still used for a national political football” (Zitkala‐Ša 1929: 46–47). Combining a sentimental image of Native persecution with a sarcastic edge, Bonnin’s description recalls Callahan’s biting account of the public’s reaction to the slaughter of American Indians, and Winnemucca’s clever critique of words like “civilization” and “savagery.” Similarly, Bonnin’s poem “The Indian’s Awakening” (1916) creates a stark image of the boarding school that contrasts Colonel Pratt’s ominous call for the Indian to “save his life only by losing it by quitting all race distinctions and climbing into the great big all containing band wagon of real American citizenship through industrial usefulness” (quoted in Parker 1915: 97). In Bonnin’s hands, Pratt’s school is unsuccessful in two terms. It deprives students of their cultural heritage and fails even according to his standards: the work is not complete. “The Indian’s Awakening” is stocked with the imagery of failure. “My light has grown dim, and black the abyss / That yawns at my feet. No bordering shore; / No bottom e’er found by hopes sunk before,” the speaker declares, adding a few lines later: “I’ve lost my long hair; my eagle plumes too. / From you my own people, I’ve gone astray. / A wanderer now, with no where to stay.” The individuality that Pratt would herald as a sign of progress is here a mark of decline: “I stand isolated, life gone amiss” (Zitkala‐Ša 2003: 165, ll. 9–11, 17–19, and 16). This failure has two facets: it is both an individual isolation that sentimentality decries and the divide from the community that scholars have shown is so undesirable in Native American literature. Bonnin’s line recalls Winnemucca’s effort in Life Among the Piutes to restore her position within her tribal community; as she realizes, to “stand isolated” is to lack authority.
Bonnin forged a life irrevocably altered by colonialism, in which she, like the narrator of “The Soft‐Hearted Sioux,” felt divided from her home and family after her colonialist schooling. Yet she still managed to devote herself to Indigenous rights. Such work was particularly evident in her position as the editor of the American Indian Magazine from 1918 to 1919 and later as the founder, with her husband Raymond Bonnin (Yankton Sioux), of the National Council of American Indians.
It was as editor of the American Indian Magazine that Bonnin wrote the essay “America’s Indian Problem,” offering a forceful combination of anger and sentimentality. Here Bonnin describes the Indigenous people as gracious hosts who are ultimately taken advantage of by the “barbarians.” It is notable that, like Callahan, Bonnin views women as key to successful reform: “Now the time is at hand when the American Indian shall have his day in court through the help of women of America” (Zitkala‐Ša 2016: 186). The fact that she includes pronouns like “they” when referring to Native Americans suggests a certain alignment with white women, though she later speaks of Native Americans as “we.” Such transient pronouns suggest not a confused sense of her identity and loyalties, as some critics have suggested, but rather the difficulty of Indigenous leaders in that time to establish an authoritative position in which they would be taken seriously by the whites who constituted most of their audience. Bonnin speaks frankly about this difficulty in the following passage, from an American Indian Magazine editorial in June 1919:
my mother said to me, “You must learn the white man’s language so that when you grow up you can talk for us and the Indian and the white man will have a better understanding.” I said, “I will.” It has not always been easy […] Of course there are always things to discourage. We seem to have no money, no friends, and we have no voice in Congress.
(Zitkala‐Ša 2003: 215)
Bonnin’s struggle, it seems, was to construct a powerful speaking position in which she could garner rights for a people that had been stripped of them. While its successes were and remain debated, Bonnin’s strong words – whether in literary or political prose – set a high standard for the American Indian writers and activists who would follow. Beginning with Sarah Winnemucca, these Indigenous writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found that it was in writing against expectation – in most cases, combining vitriol with tenderness – that they could muster the most support. It makes sense that anger would be vital to nineteenth‐century literature by American Indian women, who were staking claims in rather loose earth. In each of these texts, we witness women’s attempts to reclaim anger so that it is not madness (and thus beyond their sane, “civilized” control) but a statement of entitlement consistent with and critical to self‐ and nationhood.
References
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 12 (THE LITERATURE OF ANTEBELLUM REFORM).
Notes