Category: Fiction

Worth A Read Absolutely
Length 320
Quick Review Zitkála-Šá uses her experience as Sioux woman to write nonfiction stories, short stories, and poems to fight for change and equality long before the fight received any recognition.

November is National Native American Heritage Month, and I never knew that until this year when I looked up to see if they had a month… Suffice to say, we could do better educating the people of this country about the indigenous people who lived here long before we barged in and stole their land. I don’t know very much about native culture or history, so I definitely need to do better. After reading Zitkála-Šá’s American Indian Stories, I need to make more of an effort to read and appreciate Native American literature and writing. 

There’s a shitty irony in the fact American Indian Stories is written in English, the language of the colonizer. Zitkála-Šá writes about her life and tells stories inspired by her people, but in order to get published or reach a wide audience, she had to write in English. A language she was not raised speaking and struggled to learn in a harsh and cruel environment. 

American Indian Stories paints a beautiful and heartbreaking picture of a land and a close knit community ingrained with caring for the needs of others, respect each other, and being a part of nature. It’s more than a book about being a native child and woman; it’s about her journey into activism. From being a young child chasing her own shadow on the plains to a child angrily hiding from a haircut or ruining turnips for dinner in the city, she pushed back and followed her own path. 

The writing is beautiful. Even when the stories are being told from a child’s perspective, they are poignant, “I sank deep into the corner of my seat, for I resented being watched.” or “”… for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.” The contrast between home on the plains and living in a boarding house in the city is stark. In the modern world full of sound, lights, technology, and people, I didn’t think about the sensory attack it was for her to move into a bustling city. Her inability to move or feel the breeze from the plains would have been stifling in its own right. The language and style Zitkála-Šá utilizes throughout American Indian Stories changes to punctuate the emotions she or her characters were going through. Life on the plains was illustrated with long and flowing syntax to the point of being lackadaisical. Her experiences in the boarding house and among white people changed the style into short sentences with precise punctuation, which only reveals a small part of the tension, anxiety, anger, and sadness she must have been feeling at the time.

Zitkála-Šá depicts strong people and characters in her book. The most interesting and abundant characters are strong women. She was an incredibly strong woman herself. She was a writer, musician, activist, politician, and more, so it should be no surprise, her characters are independent women. In “A Warrior’s Daughter,” she shows a woman can be brutal warriors, saviors, and gentle all at the same time. They don’t have to choose between being strong and vulnerable or a warrior and a wife; women are capable of great things simultaneously.

As a native Midwesterner from a neighboring state to Zitkála-Šá’s home state of South Dakota, her descriptions of nature resonate with my history. The land she ran across as a child is the same land I did. There are stark differences, of course. As a child standing on a hill looking at the rolling fields and feeling a sense of belonging and freedom, we were the same for a moment. These shared histories and emotional memories are what connect us as humans across differences and time. She was born 115 year before I was into a very different life and way of life, but her home is my home. Reading her childhood memories of South Dakota in American Indian Stories felt like reading my own childhood memories of Iowa. 

Through so much of this book, I kept thinking What the fuck, white people??? As a linguist – and probably as an intersectional human being – I can’t fathom thinking corporal punishment will make children suddenly speak a foreign language. The whole boarding house situation was appalling. There was no understanding of children or their needs, let alone the needs of children from different backgrounds, cultures, and languages. It broke my heart. I knew what happened and went on, but it’s another thing to read someone’s experiences.  

American Indian Stories is a beautiful book. It’s small. It has an incredible emotional depth full of meaning and insight into our past as Americans and what has been done. It is heartbreaking and relatable because her experiences are human. Zitkála-Šá calls out the wrongs she and her people faced a century ago, but those wrongs continue to be done. 

Memorable Quotes
“The most gruesome conflict, make no mistake, was within the self, in the individual heart that was, at one time, culturally defined by connection to others.” Forward by Layli Long Soldier
“They treated my best judgement, poor as it was, with the utmost respect.”

bisous und обьятий,
RaeAnna

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Title: American Indian Stories
Author: Zitkála-Šá
Publisher: Modern Library (Penguin Random House)
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781984854216