Natalie Leonard

1 May 2004

To Be or Not To Be Indian

            “If peace ever dwelt with men, it was in former times, in the recesses from war, amongst what are now termed barbarians” (Namias 184).  These are the words of a white woman captured by the Seneca Indians at age twelve.  Despite opportunities to return to her family she would choose to make her home among her captors.  She notes, “their [the American Indian Woman’s] task is probably not harder than that of white women…and their cares certainly are not half as numerous, nor as great” (Namias 182).  How difficult then must the crossroads of assimilation be for the American Indian Woman. Indian culture revered women as the “creative life force of the universe” (Literature resource center).  What motivated Indian women to enter into the white man’s world?  According to historian Clara Sue Kidwell in her overview of iconic Indian women, their participation in the dominant culture was determined by their own culture and those actions would ultimately bring destructive changes to the Indian culture they sought to save (Kidwell 98).  Kidwell argues that Native American women did not seek entry into a new white world but hoped to preserve their own yet they, “could not escape the consequences of the cultural contact that was happening,” (Kidwell 101).  This is the paradox of life for the American Indian woman.  Her heritage taught her to be a mediator and keeper of the land and its people.  This lead her into a voluntary participation with the dominant culture.  She voluntarily moves into the white world through aspects of mediation, education and marriage for the sake of survival for herself and her people and she finds herself being assimilated and leaving behind her Indian culture.  She is then trapped between the two worlds unable to completely assimilate and unable to turn back time.  The pain of this position is seen in the writings of Zitkala-sa, Linda Hogan, and Joy Harjo.  These women attempt to voice the struggle of clinging to some thread of their heritage while attempting to gain voice in the white man’s world.  They voice the agony of seeking an identity and voice between the worlds of the American Indian and the white man.  These Indian women writers in their lives and in their writings find themselves the wife of a white man, the daughter of a white man, and employed by a white man, while still desperately clinging to that part which is still wild and free.  As Kidwell observes, “however much she [the American Indian Woman] might have moved in white society, she still saw her relationships in very Indian terms” (101).  An analytical overview of their writings is crucial to understanding the past, present, and future of the American Indian woman and her role in the process of assimilation.

            Zitkala-sa, a Native American Sioux Dakota, was born of a white man and full blood Dakota woman.  Her father left the family before she was born.  We find no explanation as to the relationship between her parents.  Why would her mother bear a white man’s child.  Was she betraying her own people?  Was she “driven by passion…or forced to submit to men of a dominant society” (Kidwell 98)?  These questions go unanswered.  But, what is obvious from Zitkala-sa’s writings is that her mother raised her in the ways of the Sioux Dakota.  Zitkala-sa writes, “I was a little girl of seven loosely clad in buckskin, and light-footed with a pair of soft moccasins…I was as free as the wind that blew my hair” (Zitkala-sa 8).  At an early age she describes the ways her mother trained her saying, “close beside my mother I sat on a rug, with a scrap of buckskin…This was the beginning of my practical observation lessons” (19).  Zitkala-sa’s mother never seemed to recognize that her daughter was not full Indian nor did Zitkala-sa.  When as a little girl she questioned her mother, “who is this bad paleface,” her mother replied, “My little daughter, he is a sham,- a sickly sham!  The bronzed Dakota is the only real man” (9).  How the mother must have been fooled by the paleface.  History has shown us that the earliest American Indians had no aversions to white men and on numerous occasions came to ignorant frontiersmen’s rescue.  The Indian culture of openness, community, and interdependence encouraged American Indian Women to take on the roles as “cultural mediators” (Kidwell 97).  This then encouraged Indian women to intermarry with white men, and go to missionary schools.  They attempted to bridge the gap and save their people.  Yet, this role was detrimental because it destroyed the culture it sought to save and left the Indian woman feeling betrayed. 

When the missionaries come to talk to Zitkala-sa’s mother about her daughter attending school she does not want her daughter to go.  Yet, there is a feeling that the education will somehow makeup for the wrongs done to the Indians by the white man.  Zitkala-sa begs to go into school.  Why is Zitkala-sa so eager to enter the white man’s world?  At this point it is childish curiosity.  Her mother is aware of both the danger and necessity saying, “she will need an education when she is grown, for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and many more palefaces” (44).  It seems that Zitkala-sa’s mother encouraged the assimilation although she resented it.  Zitkala-sa laments about how lost she felt after having been away only a few years at the missionary school, “nature seemed to have no place for me.  I was neither…a wild Indian nor a tame one” (Zitkala-sa 69).  Even more distressing was the fact that her mother, “had never gone inside of a schoolhouse, and so she was not capable of comforting her daughter who could read and write” (69).  Zitkala-sa now chose to follow the white man’s path voluntarily because she no longer felt she felt in as an Indian.  In later years her mother would disapprove of Zitkala-sa continuing her education but Zitkala-sa could no longer fit in the Indian way of life.  She was now burdened with distinct sense of homelessness as she writes, “homeless and heavy hearted, I began anew my life among strangers…and the magic design which promised me the white man’s respect” (76).  This is the climax in Zitkala-sa’s transition from the Indian culture to the Dominant culture.  No longer did her mother and her family ties have precedence.  She moves from seeking acceptance in her own culture to a need for acceptance and respect from the dominant culture.  After her education she would be employed by that dominant culture in different positions of teaching and mediation.  Yet for her lifetime, Zitkala-sa, was torn and hurt by her role as a mediator that could not claim membership into either the minority culture or the dominant culture. 

This need for white acceptance and respect was documented in a study by Devon Mihesuah in, “Too Dark to Be Angels: The Class System among the Cherokees at the Female Seminary.”  His article explores how American Indian girls saw themselves, their relationships to each other and their relationships to the dominant culture.  According to Mihesuah, “it was the general consensus among the mixed blood students that the full blood girls were a little backward, and that the full bloods were well aware of their inferior status” (Mihesua, 32).  Mihesuah records the following about the seminary superintendent in 1889,

Female seminary superintendent and male seminary graduate Spencer Seago Stephens, for example, proclaimed in 1889 that “it is the white blood that has made us what we are…If missionaries wish to lift up Indian tribes… let them encourage intermarriage with whites (Mihesuah 39).

These girls sought to gain acceptance and respect by being as white as they possibly could.  Receiving more white education and hoping for the opportunity to be a white man’s wife.  These women eagerly sought entry into the dominant culture.

By evaluating the literature of the Indian woman we get a glimpse into her heart and the anguish she suffered by attempting to remain a whole person while making choices of assimilation or resistance.  The question is once again raised, what were her reasons for the choices she made and the roles she played?  It seems that even the Indian women themselves could not answer these questions.  Were they seeking personal survival or a peaceful coexistence?

            Joy Harjo, an American Indian writer who has been heavily influenced by her Muskogee Creek Heritage, in her poem “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,” writes about the struggle of the American Indian woman hanging between all the roles that she has played in her lifetime.  She hangs, “on the Indian side of town.  Her belly soft from her children’s births, her worn Levis swing down,” and, “she is several pieces between the two husbands she has had” (Harjo 30).  She has been a mother and a wife within a social context that could not define those roles for her because it consisted of a collision of two worlds that were incompatible.  Should she be an Indian mother and train her children as Zitkala-sa’s mother did?  Or is she just another mother in an American apartment?  Although we are not told whether the husbands were Indian or white we are still given the image of a tearing between the two that this woman has felt.  According to one literary source, “To read the poetry of Joy Harjo is to hear the voice of the earth, to see the landscape of time and timelessness and most important to get a glimpse of people who struggle to understand, to know themselves, and to survive” (Gale 4-20-04).  Harjo uses both the images from nature (her Indian culture) in contrast with the images of the Chicago Tenement building (white culture)  It communicates how opposite these two worlds are.  It is suicide to try and make the two worlds co-exist.  This is evident in the line that reads, “Her hands pressed white against the concrete molding” (Harjo 29).  The line explains the possible death she will encounter as she is pressed into the white mould.  This is the inevitable as she hangs on for survival.  She must find a way to reconcile her heritage with her reality in order to survive.  This desperation is felt in Zitkala-sa’s writings as well.  She struggles to survive in the dominant culture without completely loosing herself

            The third author Linda Hogan was born to a Chickasaw father and a white mother.  In her autobiographical essay, “The Two Lives,” she writes of the struggles of her ancestors both Indian and non-Indian during the settling of the Nebraska Territory.  It is again a return to the theme of two distinct worlds that seem to stretch each of these women beyond their limits.  Hogan draws on this theme for her poem “Heritage.”  The speaker in the poem has learned something from all of her ancestors and the result is that she has, “learned the secrets of never having a home” (Hogan 286).  This dangling between two worlds has left her with the same sense of homelessness as expressed by Zitkala-sa.  The speaker comes from an Indian father who was told, “not to remember,” the old Indian chants and to feel ashamed to be Indian.  But she also comes from a grandmother who was brown who instilled in her a feeling that, “whiteness a shame” (285).  The speaker is left feeling that neither world was acceptable and that in the end she really had no home and her identity ambiguous.  Hogan uses stark contrasts to show the trap between the two worlds.  First she contrasts whiteness and brownness by contrasting her mother’s white breasts and her father’s brown eyes.  She does this again with her grandmother’s brown skin and brown snuff against her white shirt.  She contrasts east and west writing, “our tribe has always followed a stick that pointed west that pointed east” (286).  The speaker in this line questions which way do I go?  In these contrasts Hogan portrays a feeling of being pulled between two worlds as she learns something different from each of her ancestors.  Who is right and who is wrong?  Who is the authority on such matters?  Should she listen to a father who does not believe in remembering the old ways or a grandmother who believes that tobacco, “has more medicine than stones and knives against your enemies” (285)?  She seems to conclude that there is no home.  No settling on one culture or another but only a sense of individualism that defies identity as either white or brown.  Her own role has become the keeper of secrets from both worlds that never have a place to rest.  The title then brings everything together claiming the secrets and homelessness as her heritage.  She becomes the ultimate mediator between all the members in her family.

            What is the identity of the American Indian Woman?  Is she American or Indian?  Can there be a coexistence of these two things or are they too different?  How can a woman, any woman, exist in two worlds and understand who she is?  Where would her loyalties lie?  Eunice Goodson, in a personal interview, tells stories of her grandmother, Letitia, a full blood Cherokee Indian married to a white man.  Her grandmother would never speak of her Cherokee heritage. That she was Cherokee was known but not acknowledged outwardly.  It was not until she was an elderly woman that her family became aware of the anxieties that plagued her.  Letitia would be heard muttering or screaming in panic that the Indians were coming. She would repeat this over and over much to the distress of her family.  Somewhere in this woman’s life, a shift occurred and she no longer considered herself an Indian.  Rather, she believed the Indians were the barbarians that the dominant culture had portrayed them to be.  She was no longer Cherokee but the white man’s wife a fully assimilated part of the dominant culture.

            The struggle for the American Indian woman lies in the many roles she must play in life.  These roles demand that she understand what culture she will operate within – who will she marry?  How will she raise her children?  These are struggles that hang between the two worlds of the white man and the Indian woman.  These authors give voice to that struggle.  The conclusion is that there are no answers.  The American Indian woman must find herself between those two worlds as an individual.  She must come to terms with the fact that she hangs between two worlds as Joy Harjo writes,

                        The Woman hangs from the 13^th floor window crying for

                        The lost beauty of her own life.  She sees the

                        Sun falling west over the gray plain of Chicago.

                        She thinks she remembers listening to her own life

                        Break loose, as she falls from the 13^th floor

                        Window on the east side of Chicago, or as she

                        Climbs back up to claim herself again (Harjo 31).

The American Indian Woman must decide, will she fall or climb to be or not to be Indian.   

Works Cited

The Gale Group.  “Joy Harjo.” Contemporary Authors Online.  The Gale Group, 2001.  April 2004 http://p30643.uhcl.edu:2050/servlet/GLD.

Goodson, Eunice.  Personal Interview. 8 October 2003.

Harjo, Joy.  “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window.”  Unsettling America. Ed. Maria Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.  New York: Penguin, 1994. 29-30.

Hogan, Linda. “Heritage.”  Unsettling America. Ed. Maria Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.  New York: Penguin, 1994. 284-286.

Kidwell, Clara Sue.  “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators.”  Ethnohistory 39 (1992): 97-107.

Literature Resource Center.  “Linda Hogan.”  Author Resource Pages.  April 2004 http://p30643.uhcl.edu:2050/servlet/LitRC.

Mihesua, Devon A.  “Too Dark to be Angels: The Class System Among the Cherokees at the Female Seminary.”  American Indian Culture and Research Journal 15.1 (1991): 29-52.

Namias, June.  White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Zitkala-sa.  American Indian Stories.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.