Viewing page 3 of 9

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:09:08]
{SPEAKER name="Francis Flavin"}
And this is at a time when many, many Sioux didn't dress this way.

[00:09:12]
They dressed more I guess in the Anglo-American style.

[00:09:15]
And also, she presented herself as a full-blooded Sioux;

[00:09:21]
she very seldom spoke of her father,

[00:09:24]
and in some of her writing she, you know, she does talk about having a non-Indian father,

[00:09:28]
but she really depicts herself as a full blooded Sioux.

[00:09:30]
And I think this kind of suggests this conflicted, this conflicted identity, also.

[00:09:35]
And I think while she was at Carlisle, she actually got to give a speech in front of President McKinley.

[00:09:41]
Pretty amazing.

[00:09:42]
And also at about this time around 1900, 1901,

[00:09:46]
she began to write, not just for herself or for her friends,

[00:09:51]
but she began to write for publication.

[00:09:53]
And she published in The Atlantic Monthly several articles and she was even reviewed in Harper's Bazarre.

[00:09:58]
And I kind of-- I wasn't sure whether or not I should do this,

[00:10:03]
actually read to you from some of her prose,

[00:10:05]
but because she is perhaps most distinguished as a writer,

[00:10:08]
I would feel like I was letting you down if I didn't read at least a little bit.

[00:10:12]
And then we can maybe pick up on some of those themes that I mentioned to you earlier.

[00:10:15]
So anyways, this is from from an essay entitled "Impressions of an Indian Childhood."

[00:10:20]
She's always going back, trying to remember what it was like to be a child on the Yankton Reservation.

[00:10:26]
This chapter is called, or this section is called, "My mother".

[00:10:30]
{SPEAKER name="Francis Flavin"}
[[Reading from book: "Impressions of an Indian Childhood]]

[00:10:30]
"A wigwam of weather stained canvas stood at the base of some irregularly ascending hills.

[00:10:34]
A footpath wound its way gently down the sloping land 'til it reached the broad river bottom,

[00:10:39]
creeping through the long swamp grasses that bent over it on either side.
[00:10:43]
It came out on the edge of the Missouri.

[00:10:45]
Here, morning, noon and evening my mother came to draw water

[00:10:49]
from the muddy stream for our household use.

[00:10:52]
Always, when my mother started for the river,

[00:10:55]
I stopped my play to run along with her.

[00:10:57]
She was only of medium height.

[00:11:00]
Often she was sad and silent, at which times her full, arched lips were compressed into hard and bitter lines,

[00:11:05]
and shadows fell under her black eyes.

[00:11:09]
Then, I clung to her hand and begged to know what made the tears fall.

[00:11:14]
'Hush. My little daughter must never talk about my tears.'

[00:11:17]
In smiling through them she patted my head and said, 'Now, let me see how fast you can run today.'

[00:11:23]
Whereupon I tore away at my highest possible speed with my long black hair blowing in the breeze.

[00:11:28]
I was a wild little girl of 7 - loosely clad in a slip of brown buckskin.

[00:11:33]
Light footed with a pair of soft moccasins on my feet.

[00:11:36]
I was as free as the wind that blew my hair and no less spirited than a bounding deer.

[00:11:41]
These were my mother's pride. My wild freedom and my overflowing spirits.

[00:11:45]
She taught me no fear, say that of intruding myself upon others.

[00:11:49]
Having gone many paces ahead I stopped, panting for breath,

[00:11:52]
and laughing with glee at--as my mother watched my every movement.

[00:11:56]
I was not wholly conscious of myself, but I was more keenly alive with the fire within.

[00:12:00]
It was as if I were the activity and my hands and feet were only experiments for my spirit to work upon.

[00:12:06]
Returning from the river I tugged beside my mother with my hand upon the bucket I believed I was carrying.

[00:12:13]
One time, on such a return, I remember a bit of conversation that we had.

[00:12:18]
My grownup cousin, Sunflower, who was then 17, always went to the river alone for water for her mother.

[00:12:24]
Their wigwams were not far from ours and I saw her daily going to and from the river.

[00:12:29]
I admired my cousin greatly, so I said, 'Mother, when I'm as tall as my cousin Sunflower,

[00:12:34]
I will not have to -- you will not have to come for water. I will do it for you.'

[00:12:38]
With a strange tremor in her voice which I could not understand, she answered,

[00:12:43]
'If the pale face does not take away from us the river that we drink.'

[00:12:47]
'Mother, who is this bad pale face?' I asked.

[00:12:50]
'My little daughter he is a sham - a sickly sham. The bronze Dakota is the only real man.'"

[00:12:56]
I find that very interesting. She has this longing to go back to an idyllic childhood.

[00:13:00]
After she, after she begins to publish,

[00:13:04]
she ends up in Boston at the New England Music Conservatory where she studied music

[00:13:11]
and she really enjoyed her Boston experience.

[00:13:13]
And there she meets-- she meets another, highly educated Indian man whose name was Carlos Montezuma.

[00:13:21]
And Carlos Montezuma was from the southwest. He was Yavapai Indian. And they became engaged.

[00:13:26]
However, this engagement didn't last too long.

[00:13:29]
And one of the reasons that they called it off was that Carlos Montezuma,

[00:13:34]
like I said he was an Indian, but he, he very much wanted for the Indians to assimilate,

[00:13:40]
to become mainstreamed with the rest of America.

[00:13:45]
Whereas Zitkala-Sa felt some trepidation towards that,

[00:13:49]
and she wanted to preserve some element of Indian culture.

[00:13:53]
And this is a theme that she'll address later in her life because she goes back to Yankton Reservation,

[00:13:59]
spends some time there, and she finds a man whose name is Raymond Bonnin.

[00:14:04]
B-0-N-N-I-N. And he-- they get married.

[00:14:09]
He get's a job as a government clerk working on Uintah Indian Reservation in Utah. This is a huge reservation.

[00:14:15]
I mean it's not as big as Navajo, but it's a huge reservation.

[00:14:18]
She then moves out there - working amongst Indian people.

[00:14:23]
She's a teacher. She teaches them music and she also writes. She writes a play, she writes an opera.

[00:14:28]
But, you know, she's not happy there.

[00:14:31]
She feels cut off. She feels disconnected. She longs for some kind of educated and sophisticated companionship

[00:14:38]
that she had had when she was back in Boston and in the East.

[00:14:42]
Now around this time, a very important American Indian Organization gets founded.

[00:14:47]
It's 1911 and it's called, "The Society of American Indians." The S.A.I. - Society of American Indians.

[00:14:53]
And this is a group of Indians from all different tribes. It's a pan-Indian organization.

[00:14:59]
These Indians mostly are very well educated, and they decide to come together to try to use their education

[00:15:06]
to try to advocate for Indian interests. And Zitkala-Sa joined this society.

[00:15:11]
About 220, 230 people in there, when was in there. Maybe about 30 percent of them were women.

[00:15:17]
But Zitkala-Sa really strives and develops herself and before long she's on their advisory board,

[00:15:23]
and then she becomes Secretary of the organization. And when she becomes Secretary,

[00:15:27]
it necessitates a move to Washington, D.C.

[00:15:30]
So she and her husband come to Washington, D.C.

[00:15:33]
and really begin to engage a lot of these issues.

[00:15:36]
And there's, there's a term that's kind of used

[00:15:42]
in a lots of different places when you look at American Indian history,

[00:15:45]
and it's called "The Indian Problem".

[00:15:47]
Do any of you know what "The Indian Problem" is?

[00:15:50]
How do we solve The Indian Problem? Somebody might say, "what does that mean?"

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-04-06 17:21:49 Reopened to insert more frequent time stamps per instructions (every 3-5 secs or phrases or so, rather than having 10-15 secs at a time). Also removed some "uhs" & "ums" per instructions they are not to be transcribed overly much (only if they impact what the person is saying). ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-04-07 10:20:41