Laura Moran
LITR 4332 2002 project

Speaking for the First Americans: Three Women's Words

       Although there are several Native American authors who I plan on reading now that I have unearthed them while looking for the perfect topic for this project, I decided to concentrate on three. These authors, all women, make an interesting transition from oral storytelling to contemporary writing: Zitkala-Sa, Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich. While each woman has her own distinct writing style, a common thread that I find they share is that each uses adversity to make them stronger, both as writers and in their personal lives. Paradoxically, while each has a past founded in oppression, they have used this as a way of becoming independent and as a result have emerged as powerful writers.

Zitkala-Sa

     Zitkala-Sa was born in 1876 and was one of the first Indian writers to make the transition from written to oral form and attempt to bridge the gap that existed between what was new and what was tradition. She was learning the white man's way and when she would go home to her mother found that what she longed for was no longer there. She no longer fit in since she was assimilating to the ways of the white man. She was torn between two worlds. According to Dexter Fisher, author of the foreward to American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Sa's mother and the traditional Sioux on the reservation where she had grown up were highly suspect of her because, in their minds, she had abandoned, even betrayed the Indian way of life by getting an education in the white man's world. To those at the Carlisle Indian School where she had taught from 1898-99, on the other hand, she was an anathema because she insisted on remaining "Indian," writing embarrassing

articles such as "Why I am Pagan" that flew in the face of the assimilationist thrust of their education (viii).

     After reading about Indian boarding schools in preparation for a poetry presentation, I was eager to hear how that experience was for a young Indian girl and had a chance to find out when American Indian Stories was assigned. After re-reading the foreward when I finished the stories, I was moved by how Zitkala-Sa used what were a series of disheartening experiences to educate others and not let the past be forgotten. Once she had become part of the white man's world, there was no turning back. In order to help her people she had to conform to a world that was unfamiliar. By learning a new language and making the words work for her, she is able to continue to educate long after she has left this world.

     I was fascinated by what I found out about Indian boarding schools: that they were much more than a place of learning, but were in essence a way to wipe out the Indian thought process and make them think more like the white man. Referred to as assimilation by education, the schools were also a form of genocide; not only teaching the children the white man's way, but alienating them from their tribal family as well.  Once inside this system, there was no turning back, since the only way to empower themselves was to continue their education in order to give them a fighting chance in the ever-changing world around them. Only when I read the foreward of Zitkala-Sa's American Indian Stories, did I realize how much power an author can have in helping people understand a culture and its people, even if they had no previous knowledge or even the desire to obtain the knowledge of such. In particular, by keeping her rage just

under the surface, Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Sa's given name at birth) gained a wider audience during her school years, all the while honing her writing skills. Referring once again to author Dexter Fisher, Gertrude Simmons distinguishes herself as an orator and poet, publishing essays and highly formal poems in her school's newspaper and winning several debating honors. Fisher also writes that it is during this period that her literary talents begin to take shape. As she becomes more and more fluent in English, language becomes the tool for articulating the tension she is to experience throughout her life between her heritage with its imperative of tradition and the inevitable pressure of acculturation. In her early essays, despite their stiff formality, the pattern of ambivalence is already there, as she alternates between a controlled rage over the mistreatment of Indians and a desire to convince America of the Indian's humanity. Her impulse is toward the cutting edge of truth as she defends the Indian's right to feel revenge in on of her essays:

 What if he fought? His forests were felled; his game frightened away; his streams of finny shoals usurped. He loved his family and would defend them. He loved the fair land of which he was rightful owner. He loved the inheritance of his fathers, their traditions, their groves; he held them a priceless legacy to be sacredly kept. He loved his native land. Do you wonder still that in his breast he should brood revenge, when ruthlessly driven from the temples where he worshipped? Do you wonder still that he sulked in forest gloom to avenge the desolation of his home? Is patriotism a virtue only in Saxon hearts: is there no charity to cover his crouching form as he stealthily opposed his relentless foe? (xi-xii)

Just when a reader of this essay might be getting a little restless and uncomfortable with the subject matter at hand, Simmons lets one off the hook by showing us the wisdom of learning the "White Man's ways." In the same essay she writes:

We come from mountain fastnesses, from cheerless plains, from far-off low-        wooded streams, seeking the "White Man's ways." Seeking your skill in industry and in art, seeking labor and honest independence, seeking the treasures of knowledge and wisdom, seeking to comprehend the spirit of your laws and the genius of your noble institutions, seeking by a new birthright to unite with yours our claim to a common country, seeking the Sovereign's crown that we may stand side by side with you in ascribing royal honor to our nation's flag. America, I love thee. "Thy people shall be  my people and thy God my God."(xii)

 By showing her audience how she admires their ways and is striving to learn from them, she cleverly keeps them from questioning her motives in the prior excerpt, all the while enlightening them with her observations and letting them inadvertently glimpse her point of view (and that of her people). When she changes her name to Zitkala-Sa it shows her ties to her traditional life, while her continuous education is her asserting her independence as a more modern woman. Her life is one of ambilvalence; using modern ways trying to help the traditional people that she grew up with, all the while having them not trust her.

     Her writing style in American Indian Stories is straightforward. She did not use an editor, interpreter or an ethnographer and the raw style is powerful. Told mostly from a small girl's point of view, readers have the sense of being told simple stories, although her writing also gives one terrific insight into what is going on and her descriptions of things in nature are truly beautiful. She uses past experiences and expressions to describe some of the turbulent feelings she is experiencing in this passage from the chapter "An Indian Teacher", in American Indian Stories:

For the white man's papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks. On account of my mother's simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also. I made no friends among the race of people I loathed. Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God. I was shorn of my branches, which had waved in sympathy and love for home and friends. The natural coat of bark which had protected my oversensitive nature was scraped off to the very quick (97).

       Zitkala-Sa never achieved the wholeness of the merging of her two worlds that she longed for, but she did educate white audiences to the ways, and more importantly the feelings, of the American Indian. And even if she did not solve the problems of oppression and discrimination, she at least forced the people who heard or read her to take a second look and to think about what she took the time to write about.

Leslie Marmon Silko

     Leslie Silko was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1948. She is of Laguna, Mexican and white ancestry. Despite her awareness of the position of mixed-bloods in Laguna society, she considers herself Laguna. The Lagunas are a Keresan Pueblo people. Laguna Pueblo is a cosmopolitan place where some Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, Zia, Santa Ana, Jemez, Cochiti, Domingo and Acoma live with the Laguna. Despite this mélange, the Laguna have a keen idea of their discrete identity, and Silko's sensitivity to being of mixed ancestry is painfully apparent in her depiction of Tayo in Ceremony.(106)

Silko's great-grandfather was a white surveyor and trader named Robert Gunn Marmon, who came to Laguna in 1872, four years after his brother Walter had moved there. The brothers settled in the pueblo, and both eventually served as governor, an important man in community affairs, although not as important as the chief religious leaders. Being a Marmon Laguna, a mixed-blood from a ruling family, meant being different from, and not fully accepted by, either the full bloods or the whites, a dilemma similar to the one Zitkala-Sa faced by being too educated for her people, but not fully accepted by the whites either. Also, as with Zitkala-Sa, this was a source of pain to Silko, but also a source of creativity. As she puts it:

My family are the Marmons at Old Laguna on the Laguna Pueblo reservation where I grew up. We are mixed bloods - Laguna, Mexican, white - but the way we live is like Marmons, and if you are from Laguna Pueblo you will understand what I mean. All those languages, all those ways of living are combined, and we live somewhere on the fringes of all three. But I don't apologize for this any more - not to whites, not to full bloods - our origin is unlike any other. My poetry, my storytelling rise out of this source (qtd. in Rosen, p.230).

Silko graduated from the University of New Mexico with a B.A.in English in 1969. She stayed on and taught creative writing and a course in the oral tradition for the English department. She has written short stories and a collection of poems, but the story I am using as an example of her style is her story, Ceremony. Although referred to as some as a novel, Ceremony is more precisely a telling, interspersing Laguna myths throughout the tale. The protagonist is Tayo, a mixed-blood Laguna who has returned from fighting the white-man's war (World War II) and is having severe mental problems as a result. Silko's writing is so descriptive that one actually feels as tired and confused as Tayo must feel. She shows us bits and pieces of his past and laces them in with stories and what might be chants or tales of traditional ceremonies. She then immerses us in the culture even though it is unclear what is going on during all this flashing back and forth between time and style. I found that this confusing pace made the scene in which Tayo finally begins to see the past merge with the present more meaningful, since I, the reader, felt something (confusion?) lift from me. The passage that I am referring to is this:

He stood on the steps and looked at the morning stars in the west. He breathed deeply, and each breath had a distinct smell of snow from the north, of ponderosa pine on the rimrock above; finally he smelled horses from the direction of the corral, and he smiled. Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time…

Coming closer to the river, faintly at first, faint as the pale yellow light emerging across the southeast horizon, the sounds gathered intensity from the swelling colors of dawn. And at that the moment the sun came over the edge of the horizon, they suddenly appeared on the riverbank, the Ka't'sina approaching the river crossing. He stood up. He knew the people had a song for the sunrise…

He repeated the words as he remembered them, not sure if they were the right ones, but feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together - the last stars, the mountaintops, the clouds, and the winds - celebrating this coming. (Pp.181-82)

According to a literary criticism by Elaine Jahner, this is the point where Tayo has found his center of the world.  His experience of event is precisely realized in language replete with the most exact sensuous detail. There are distinct smells, sounds and colors, all qualities of definite and real places. Each detail shapes the way Tayo experiences this particular intersection of life and story. While alone, he does not experience the moment as isolation. He senses the presence of the Ka't'sina and knows he is in touch with very fundamental life forces. In this place, at this time, he gives them full recognition. His own act of attention is complete. From earlier developments in the story, we know that the place where he is able to sing the sunrise song is a specific place, marked by the stars themselves. It is also an emergence place for him because he moves into a new level of experiencing his role in an all-encompassing story.36)

Silko's writing style takes us one step further than Zitkala-Sa's. While Zitkala-Sa gives us an Indian-level view of life before and during assimilation, Silko takes us from assimilation to taking a half-step back into traditional ways. Her protagonist relies on the traditional ways of the Indian to help him through a tough time brought on by attempting to do the right thing and fight the white-man's war. Another point that I found interesting is that when Tayo finally stops caring about living, it becomes much easier for him. When he stops dwelling on his problems, things seem to fall into place. I can't help but to wonder is this part of the Indian way of the past?  Actually this sort of attitude is true of any situation. Quit thinking about it and the problem goes away!  The final author I studied will bring us up to an even more contemporary style of writing, involving Native Americans, but not making their culture the main point of the story.

Louise Erdrich

     Louise Erdrich was born in 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She received an M.A. degree from the John Hopkins University in 1979. Erdrich's fiction and poetry, draws on her Chippewa heritage to examine complex familial and sexual relationships among full and mixed blood Native Americans as they struggle with questions of identity in white European American culture. She is a novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist and a critic. While doing an interview about why she chooses to write, she had this to say:

 I think that if you believe in any sort of race memory, I am getting a triple whammy from my background - in regard to place and home and space. First of all, the connection that is Chippewa is a connection to a place and to a background, and to the comfort of knowing, somehow, that you are connected here before and before the first settler. Add to that the (I think) overblown German Romanticism about place inherited from my father's family. Add into that that the German part of my family is most probably converted Jews and the Jewish search for place and you have this 'awful' mix. A person can only end up writing - in order to resolve it. You can even throw in the French part of the background - the wanderers, the voyagers, which my people also come from. There is just no way to get away from all this, and the only way to resolve it, without     going totally crazy looking for a home, is to write about it.(172)

Before doing my poetry presentation on Erdrich's "Indian Boarding Schools: The Runaways", I read her novel, The Beet Queen, just because every time I'd look for some information on her the characters from that book were mentioned and I was intrigued - they sounded humorous and eccentric. The book's story opens with a brother and sister running away to their aunt's house, using a boxcar as a means of transportation. This same mode of transportation is used in her "Indian Boarding School" poem. So while the novel is contemporary, she immerses us in some of the earlier Native American ways.     The book takes place in the 1930's in an off-reservation town. Again, both cultures are there, yet very much assimilated so that we feel that even the Native Americans are mostly white in culture, except for the "real" Indians who live on the outskirts of town and are looked at as being "different" by the more assimilated Indians.  Throughout the years that this books follows, members of this unforgettable family clash, draw apart and meet again. I really enjoyed reading this. It read quite easily and at the same time taught me much about the way the Indians merged into Catholicism and the different levels of assimilation and acceptance that are found in one family and one community. Each chapter of the book is told by a different character, giving us insights that we would not have, had it been just one point-of-view.

     There are literally many wide-open spaces in this book. At the beginning of the story the mother, Adelaide, flies off with a pilot who is doing tricks at an air show, never once looking back. She just leaves her children to deal with all the problems that have happened up until now. This sounds tragic, but is funny the way Erdrich tells the story. When asked about the wide-open spaces found throughout her writing, Erdrich agrees that it has a lot to do with where she grew up. "I set myself back in that pure, empty landscape whenever I am working on something… [because] there's nothing like it…It's the place where everything comes from." (173)

      She mentions that the women in her books are lighting out for home. She also mentions that going home for most people is like trying to recapture their childhood. This makes me think back to Zitkala-Sa, who wanted her education and also to return to her childhood happiness, but could never mix the two worlds. As in the African American fight for freedom, literacy is always the constant in becoming free, even when freedom costs one their culture. With a more mainstream and perhaps larger audience than some Native American authors, Erdrich may be able to interest people in the culture, although now it may be considered “trendy" and not so much about rights of a people. While Zitkala-Sa carries us into the white man's way and Silko has us stepping back into tradition for reassurance, Erdrich has the Native American characters pretty much assimilated into white man ways, only to be divided up by themselves into different levels of just how "white" or "Indian" they label each other.

     Zitkala-Sa lived from 1876-1938. Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 and Louise Erdrich in 1954. It is interesting to see the changes taking place not only in writing styles, but in how society's view changes. Zitkala-Sa seemed to be viewed almost as an experiment in how an Indian can become an "acceptable" member of society, but never without the "Indian" label. Silko, while appealing to a larger audience, is still mostly read for literary purposes of studying the Native American style of writing. Erdrich's writing could stand on its own merit and be read truly for entertainment and if we learn something about Native American culture while we're at it, then that's a bonus. These are only three voices of Native American authors, and women at that. There is so much more out there to look at and learn from. Literature is a great form of truth. It is neither black or white, nor right or wrong. There are no vast differences when it comes to writers, only wonderful varieties.

Works cited

Jahner, Elaine. "An Act of Attention: Event Structure in Ceremony." Pp.35-44. Native-American Writers. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1998.

Pearlman, Mickey and Katherine U. Henderson. A Voice of One's Own: Conversations with America's Writing Women. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Pp.171-79.

Rosen, Kenneth. Voices of the Rainbow. New York: Viking Press, 1975.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

Velie, Alan R. Four American Indian Literary Masters. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.

Zitkala-Sa. American Indian Stories. Washington D.C.: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921. Foreword by Dexter Fisher. 1979. Pp. v-xx.