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' REFORMING’ THE NATIVE: FRONTIER ACTIVISM AND WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By Maureen A. Burgess, B A, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2000

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Leigh Gilmore, Adviser Approved by Professor Debra Moddeimog

Professor H. Lewis Ulman . . ,

Professor Chadwick Allen D^tbqger English Graduate Program UMl Number 9971518

UMT

UMl Microform9971518 Copyright 2000 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

Bell & Howell Information and teaming Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT

This project addresses America’s quest for “order” during the Progressive era through an examination of how women’s political culture engaged popular attitudes about race and gender, savagery and civilization, and culture and citizenship as part of a nationalist agenda. Taking the nostalgic imagery of a “lost frontier” as a starting point, I consider how women, particularly white and Native American women engaged in progressive reform, staked out a different symbolic territory for the nation and its frontiers as part of a national discussion about who and what constituted

America. Along with indigenous narratives about the colonial invasion, 1 read autobiographies written by women who traveled West and became involved with U.S.

Indian policy during this era of national incorporation. Their texts, I argue, seek to reinvent the meaning of America through portraits of the West that move beyond the masculinist and, at times, Anglocentric symbolism of much frontier nostalgia. Such texts often maintained racist and ethnocentric assumptions about culture and civilization; at the same time, they reflect white America’s continued longing for the

‘Indian” at the turn of the century, part of a national project of remembering that depended upon the assimilation of Indians and, implicitly, the “forgetting” of

America’s actual treatment of native peoples. The primary authors studied are Elaine ii Goodale Eastman, Zhkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), Mary ElHcott Arnold, Mabel Reed, and Mary Austin.

m To Jamie

nr ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my adviser, Leigh Gilmore, for her insightful commentary and enthusiastic support throughout this project, and for her patience in reading and editing many drafts.

I thank Debra Moddeimog for introducing me to the study of multicultural theory and for her support through my many years of graduate study, including this project.

I am grateful to H. Lewis Ulman for thoughtful, intellectual discussions that cast new insight on my work. Chadwick Allen likewise provided invaluable commentary on the work-in-progress.

I also wish to thank the English Department at Ohio State University for a dissertation fellowship, and the Elizabeth D. Gee Fund for Research on Women for a Dissertation Completion Award.

Finally, I thank my parents, Martin and Winifred Burgess, and my sister,

Joanna Burgess, for their love, understanding, and support during the most difficult stages of the degree's completion. And to Jamie Lampidis, I am gratefW always.

Without his loving support and vision, this project would not have been possible. VITA

June 7, 1968 ...... Bom—Poughkeepsie^ New York

1990...... B.A.—Fairfield University

1993...... M.A. English—The Ohio State University

1991-1997...... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University

1997-1999 Lecturer, The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

Research Publication

I. H. Ulman and M. Burgess, “Mapping the Emergent Structures of Hypertext,” Contexts, Intertexts, and Hypertexts. Eds. Scott DeWitt and Kip Strasma. New York: Hampton Press, 1999.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Biglish

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page Abstract ...... ü

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

Vita...... vi

Chapters:

I. Introduction ...... I

2. Single Women Heading West: The Autobiography of Elaine Goodale Eastman, Sister to the Sioux ...... 24

3. Young Girls Heading East: Zitkala-Sa ...... 73

4. “The Unmapped Way^: Lost and Found Frontiers on the Klamath River 121

5. Conclusion: Imagining America in Mary Austin’s Earth Horizon ...... 170

Bibliography ...... 198

vu CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his influential paper, “The Significance of the

Frontier in American History,” at a meeting of the American Historical Association held at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in July 1893. His central argument was that American westward expansion was the defining experience in the formation of a national character. He subsumes the complicated history of American expansion and colonialism within the fi’ontier story, arguing that the frontier is central to the reproduction of the ideal American citizen; "American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of

American life, this ecpansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character."^ Turner’s paper was, in part, inspired by the Superintendent of the Census’s declaration that the frontier was “closed,” but his effort was part of a larger project to offer a “distinctly New World explanation for the evolution of democracy.”^ This project gave voice to a growing mythologf depicting the American West as the heart of

American individualism and freedom, wherein the frontier becomes a metonym for the nation as well as an expression of its limits. The rise of mass culture during this period was critical to the popularization of this mythology, and it is no coincidence that the academic memorialization of the frontier occurred at a World’s Fair, with Buffalo Bill

Cody just down the street playing his cowboy and Indian games. World’s Fairs were enormously successful, with over 100 million visitors in the «(position heyday between

1876-1915, and Chicago’s contained exhibits drawn from the era’s academic views on race, ethnography, history, and science. Despite their celebration of progress and collective national identity, a semiotics of borders still prevailed at these expositions, defining America through its exclusions and anxieties as well as by its authorized representatives. Part of the staging of America as an international power, the 1893

Columbian Exposition relied on progressive conceptions of civilization, culture, and social Darwinism to represent the nation’s ongoing experience of interpenetrating national borders, identities, and cultures that define its (internal/external) frontiers.

To maintain a homogenized front for the “face” of America, the fair excluded

Afiican-Americans from positions of power and controlled the representations of

Indians, blacks, and other peoples, while restraining more radical voices for political cfiange.^ While white women were given their own exhibition building, many progressive feminists resisted it as a perpetuation of the nineteenth-century philosophy of

“separate spheres.” Controversial from the start, the Women’s Building speaks to the place o f (white) women in this newly hnagined national space. It also provides a telling condensation of the racial and class divisions among women during the Progressive era.^

For, in the name of speaking for all Women, the building was predicated on the exclusion of some women. It was caught in the shift from late-Victorian views on domesticity and morality as the domain of middle-class white women to progressive formulations of women as workers and political activists with an important role to play in the public sphere.^ The building itself came to function as a part of an architectural and symbolic frontier between the “civilized” and “primitive” territories of the &ir, occupying the space between the honky-tonk and ethnological displays, and the White City of Anglo-

American and European culture.

This project addresses America’s quest for social “order” at the turn of the century, an order rooted in a collective national identity and signified in the design of

Chicago’s fair, through an examination of how women’s political culture engaged popular attitudes about race and gender, savagery and civilization, and culture and citizenship as part of a nationalist agenda.*^ I open with an urban venue for education and amusement to link popular productions of America’s past, present, and future with the fervent public debate about “Americanization” during the Progressive era, which roughly spanned the 1880s to the 1920s.’ Fears about rising immigration, along with conflicts over the civil rights of Afiican-Americans and Indians, fed white Americans’ terror of

“race suicide” and led to racist immigration laws and the rise of restrictionist groups like the American Party in California and the Immigration Restriction League.* Jim Crow laws institutionalized the racist exclusion of African-Americans from power across

America, while violence against blacks increased. Meanwhile, legislators and reformers acted to assimilate native peoples into America by eradicating collective land holdings, traditional cultures, and languages through the General Allotment Act and other laws. boarding and day schools, and home mission work/ Within this context, and out of both scholarly (Turner) and popular (Buffalo Bill) sources, a culture of nostalgia grew up around a ‘lost” frontier, bringing front and center the popular association of the West as wilderness with the very meaning of America. This spectacular staging of America that took place in the new jewel of the prairie, Chicago, provides a snapshot of popular

American views on gender, race, and national belonging. This snapshot then stands as a background for the rest of this study, which takes the nostalgic imagery of the lost

frontier as a starting point for a consideration of how women, particularly white and

Native American women engaged in progressive reform, staked out a different symbolic

territory for the nation and its frontiers as part of a national discussion about who and

what constituted America.

The 1893 fairgrounds were built out of swamplands on Chicago’s lake shore, and

split into two main sections, the White City, a collection of neoclassical buildings filled

with educational displays ranging from machinery to art, and the Midway Plaisance, a

honky-tonk strip of amusements and sideshows. The buildings in the White City’s

central Court of Honor were all painted white, and coal burning was prohibited on the

fairgrounds to prevent dust from dimming the effect of whiteness; the Vfidway, by

contrast, had no strict building specifications. There visitors could ride the first Ferris

Wheel for fifty cents, watch belly dancing and camel rides on “The Streets of Cairo,” eat

a hamburger or visit the Chinese teahouse or Blarney Castle. Entrepreneurs who rented

space could set up shop in a tent, cottage, or building of them own design. Still, beneath

the festivity lurked anxiety. The middle-class in late Victorian America remained uneasy about leisure and fiivolous amusements, and the fair’s planners did not want the

Midway’s adventures to diminish the stateliness of the Court of Honor. To make the

Nfidway “fh” with the White City’s refined atmosphere, they placed a series of

"‘ethnological villages” on or near the entertainment strip under the official auspices of

Frederic Putnam, Peabody museum curator and head of the fair’s Anthropolo^

Department.

This concern about representation and education, however, did not lead planners to include a spectrum of American voices which could speak to the historical, cultural, and national purposes of the exposition. Indeed, the villages on the Midway were not designed or controlled by the people displayed (in clear defiance of requests by Sioux

leaders) and were strictly oriented toward ahistorical and stereotypical depictions of “the native.”" Seventeen villages were built, many of which were associated with empires,

European and American, including the Dahomey, Chinese, Javanese, Inuit, and Sioux peoples. Every day, the village performers paraded up and down the Midway before

returning to their respective locations to take up their daily tasks of public living as performance. Simultaneously, the Fair resisted attempts by Afiican-Americans to serve

on the fair’s National Commission or its Board of Lady Managers, as well as to have their own exhibit focused on the achievements of Afiican-Americans since the Civil

War.*^

On the threshold of these two worlds stood the Woman’s Building, part o f the

White City and managed by the Board of Lady Managers. This structure was the first building a visitor encountered when walkmg from the Nfidway Plaisance into the White City. In her sentimental novel. Sweet Clover: A Romance o f the White City, Clara

Louisa Burnham writes about the passage from the Midway Plaisance into the White

City. “You come out o’ that mile-long babel... you pass under a bridge—and all of a

sudden you are in a great beautiful silence. The angels on the Woman’s Building smile

down and bless you, and you know that in what seemed like one step, you’ve passed out

o’ the darkness and into light.”" Hugh Bancroft described the symbolic function of this

placement in more ominous terms: “The entrance to the Plaisance was directly beyond

the [Woman’s Budding]. Serious-purposed womanhood, as personified by the structure,

stood before the Plaisance, blocking the way like a guardian angel, with back turned

haughtily to all the Midway’s follies, and skirts well shaken of its dust.”*"* The Woman’s

Building stood as a gatekeeper, a guardian angel protecting the pristine stateliness of an

ideal “white” America from the Babel of the Midway’s competing subjectivities. Built to

celebrate the achievements of a “liberated” woman and her contributions to the progress of a nation, the Woman’s Budding remained in the control of more conservative and

privdeged white women. Led by the civic-minded socialite Bertha Palmer, the building and its Board of Lady Managers attempted to celebrate the “emancipation of woman” as part of the triumph of Anglo-American society symbolized by the White City; displaying the material accomplishments of women artisans, writers, inventors, homemakers, and refisrmers, the budding subtly sidestepped more controversial public debates in which progressive women reformers were engaged, including female suf&age, eradication of urban poverty, and anti-lynching campaigns. Writing about the ambivalent relation o f female progressive reformers to contemporary discourses of femininity, Eileen Boris states, “the progressives attempted to mitigate the impact of capitalist industrialization by consciously or unconsciously stabilizing the social order, in which reconstructing the family was a central component.”^* Their fight to “save the home from the factory,” for example, relied on an invocation of sentimental notions of motherhood and feminine values, such as altruism, piety, and domesticity. The Woman’s Building encapsulated the debate between moderate reformers and radical women activists, as it showcased progressive social goals of providing public health care, housing, and education wfiile retaining

Victorian beliefs about a feminized domestic sphere through the progressive model of

“municipal housekeeping.” Moreover, in its active exclusion of black women, the building also mirrored the divisions between white and Afiican-American women reformers during the Progressive era, as white women tended to ignore or to support the period’s extensive institutionalization of racism in the United States which was the primary focus of black activists such as Ida B. Wells. “ Thus, the Woman’s Building sought to present women’s artistry on its own terms, yet simultaneously retained the familiar distinctions between public and private, male and female, white and black, civilized and primitive, that regulated American understandings of participation in the nation. It is a fitting irony then that tfiis building was the buffer between the AÆdway

Plaisance and the White City.

The dichotomy between the White City and the Mdway embodies the Chicago

Exposition’s reliance on a defiled Other as part of America’s coming-of-age story; it also sets the stage for my study of the constitution and meaning of national “borders” In progressive women’s narratives of the American West. The ideal of progress and civilization embodied by the White City depended upon the depiction of the uncivilized and the primitive; while seemingly cast out from the heavenly Court of Honor, the

Midway represented a contact zone between cultures, a camivalesque encounter that resonated with popular imaginings of the American frontier like Buffalo Bill’s “Wild

West” shows. The diversity sideshow on the Midway replaced the clear division articulated by Turner’s frontier thesis, as the “meeting point between savagery and civilization” gave way to an urban avenue teeming with the symbols of a world overrun by difference; at the same time, the Midway offered the possibility of containment, through the discourse of scientific classification and social Darwinism that made the

Other both an object of study and a relic of a soon-to-be past. Indeed, the Midway and the frontier offer two competing conceptualizations of America. Both are predicated upon a division between whites and people of color, and attempt to regulate the encounter with difference through a national symbolic that defines America as white,

Christian, and middle-class; the frontier remains tied to a nationalist narrative of Manifest

Destiny and expansion, while the Midway arises out of the industrial, mechanical world of the American City.

While so much of the fiur looked toward a utopian future, the Exposition also precipitated a glance back at the nation’s past, revealing much about the anxious production of collective national identity during this period. Appropriately, then. Turner delivered his frontier thesis at Chicago in 1893. Not surprisingly, his celebration of the agrarian frontier is tinged with urgency—what will “we” do now that the frontier is disappearing? How will the nert generation of Americans be “made”? PCs concern was echoed by many others during the period, especially Theodore Roosevelt in his series.

The Wirmmg o f the West, and his popular promotion of the “strenuous life” for model male citizens. Roosevelt saw the increasingly urban way of life as the danger to

American men, claiming that the frontier had provided the necessary conditions to shape a dominant class of virile men in charge of financial and national empires.'^ For

Roosevelt, the fading American frontier led to the necessity of empire, justifying

American imperialism as essential work for dedicated male citizens. Turner, on the other hand, focused on the agrarian frontier, the Jefrersonian idyll of an endless supply of land, as essential to the formation of a vibrant American democracy.

Turner’s thesis captured the imagination of a generation of American historians because it organized the differences (racial, ethnic, classist, and cultural) that trouble national homogeneity, symbolized by the frontier, into an emblem of national unity. In particular. Turner’s attempt to historicize and naturalize the elusive ideological construct of the ideal American rests upon a paradox: the frontier is always already America and not-America, not simply its limit but its self-abnegation. For Turner, the essence of the frontier is fleeting, a moment wherein, at each successive frontier incarnation, custom is shattered and opportunities to define oneself outside of the past, beyond society, are everywhere. In that instance, America is both there and not there, as American citizen- pioneers bring the nation with them and attempt to leave its restrictions and confined spaces behind. “There is not a tabula raxt.... in spite of envfronment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.”^ The escape from the past is the return to it as, again and again, Americans rediscover the roots of national origins—the free individual. As Michel

De Certeau explains, “historical discourse makes a social identity explicit, not so much in the way it is given’ or held as stable, as in the ways it is differentiated from a former period or another society.”^* Through the emblem of the frontier. Turner differentiates a social identity for the progressive American. In its designation as past. Turner’s frontier marks a rupture for contemporary Americans from the violence and disruption of westward expansion. At the same time, he builds the definitive American man upon the outposts of U.S. settlement, articulating the subjectivity of the contemporary citizen within an idealized frontier narrative.^ The enduring popularity of Western mythology attests to the power of Turner’s construct as part of a national symbolic representing

American identity and citizenship.^

Many critics have critiqued Turner’s frontier thesis, showing both the complex breadth of its symbolic structure as well as its limitations as a vehicle for interpreting the diverse populations, histories, and cultures of what has come to be known as the

American West.^^ I retain the term as it was part of the popular lexicon about the West during the era this study covers, and appears frequently as a marker o f experience m the texts I discuss. Like the urban cacophony of the Vfidway, the frontier emblematized the place where America became unfamiliar. An uncharted territory, the ever-popular

10 iconography of the frontier provided Americans (especially white American men) a vista that opened onto a more primal and quintessential experience of national identity.

However, while historians like Turner and Roosevelt waxed nostalgic, and Buf&lo Bill cashed in on his “WOd West" shows, other representations of the “frontier” were proffered during this period, ones which retained the theory of the West’s progressive incorporation into America but which differed from the more widely circulated viewpoints of Turner, Roosevelt, and “Wild West” culture. This project looks at autobiographies written by women who traveled West and became involved with U.S.

Indian policy during this era of national incorporation; their texts, I argue, seek to reinvent the meaning of America through portraits of the West that move beyond the masculinist and, at times, Anglocentric symbolism of much frontier nostalgia. Like the

Woman’s Building, the white women reformers who wrote about their relation to

Indians ofren maintained racist and ethnocentric assumptions about culture and civilization; at the same time, their texts reflect white America’s continued longing for the “Indian” at the turn of the century, part of a national project of “remembering" that depended upon the assimilation of Indians and, implicitly, the “forgetting” of America’s actual treatment of native peoples.^

Earlier in the nineteenth-century, American depictions of the “Indian” supported a seemmgly contradictory view of Indians as both fundamentally native to America and alien to h, as white writers sought to define a national identity that was distinctly tied to the North American landscape rather than to Britain and the Revolution. Romantic portraits of the native, such as James Femmore Cooper’s Chingachgook, Lydia Marie

11 Child’s Hobomok, and stage plays about Pocahontas, created a mythic indigenous

American identity that whites could claim while they “removed” real Indians out of

Georgia to the far West. Thus, as Susan Scheckel argues in a study of American nationalism and hidian imagery, such literature reveals how “Indians constituted the boundaries at which the meaning of the nation [was] defined.”^® However, by the century’s end, Indians were regarded by the dominant culture as curios from a rambunctious past, emblems of America’s wild youth before it settled down to the grown-up business of building empires and making money.^ Those Anglo-Americans still concerned with Indians between the 1880s and 1930s can be loosely divided into three groups; the ‘Triends of the Indian,” white Christian reformers who supported assimilation, allotment in severalty, and the end of the reservation system; professional and amateur ethnologists and other Western enthusiasts who sought to document and preserve elements of Indian cultures and identities; and popular mythmakers such as

Buffalo Bill Cody and Zane Grey, writer of Westerns. The Woman’s Building and the fair’s Ethnology Department represent the first two groups, while the popular Wild West amusements and attractions like Sitting Bull’s camp on the Midway indicate the

American appetite for the mythical landscape o f white American conquest. These contrasting images of the American West and its populations reflect the competing ideologies about the ethics of conquest, the necessity of empire, and the terrors of racial and s&cual difference lurking with formulations of a national American identity.

Progressive reform developed as a compl&c set of responses to these changes

American society was undergoing and the resulting conflicts, a loose movement that

12 historian Nancy Dye has described as a “sometimes contradictory amalgam of social

criticism^ popular protest, political restructuring, economic regulation, and social welfare

legislation.”^ As several historians have described, women (especially white and black

middle-class clubwomen) played an important role in these reform activities, and images

of a “new woman” began to circulate in magazines, novels, and advertising, reflecting

this next stage in women’s struggle for independence.^ The new woman was educated

and outspoken, earned her own living, and, in later incarnations, was sexually liberated.

While this figure was never an objective reality, she reflected important changes in

American women’s political activity as well as changes in middle-class homelife. And in

American fiction, Cecilia Tichi argues, the new woman made a significant appearance,

“invigorating the national literature with new fictional designs in character, form, and

theme.” Indeed, Tichi concludes, “at a period when the men’s Bildungsroman was urban and industrial, and based upon such scientific laws’ as Darwinism, the ethos of the

new woman engendered a fiction of what must be called women’s regionality. It sought to establish alternative bases of consciousness and to show how consciousness itself could be deployed for women’s empowerment.”^” The new woman intersected with progressive reform through women’s political agitation for better working conditions, restrictions on child labor, clean water and milk, the creation of playgrounds and parks, improved housing, and schools.

This project is not a survey of these activities, however, but a more specialized study of the relationship between progressive formulations of citizenship, gender, and race, and women’s narratives about then fi'ontier journeys and experiences with

VS American Indian cultures. While women’s roles in progressive reform and the concurrent shift in women’s fiction have been a subject of recent study, their interactions with Native Americans have garnered less attention. Nonetheless, progressive reformers, teachers, and writers headed West as part of a multi-faceted national project to incorporate Indians into America. In so doing, these writers often did not simply seek to “convert” Indians to white middle-class American culture, but ended up enacting a cultural exchange with native peoples, complicating their own experiences of America and their identities as women, activists, and artists. Such exchanges, as their autobiographies reveal, expose how progressive visions of a reformed America were predicated upon assumptions about the nation and its borders (defined in geographic, cultural, racial, and religious terms) which are rooted in a firontier ideology shaped by

America’s expansion West.^^

While many conservatives sought to restrict access to America, some progressive men and women imagined the American body politic as a permeable entity for those outsiders willing to be “re-formed” as citizens, envisioning the nation as an adoptive family which immigrants and Indians could emulate and reproduce. In her study of the literary “making” of American identities, Priscilla Wald argues that naturalization debates firequently centered around a crisis fiicing the “American” (traditional white middle-class) family, and that progressive Americanization programs in education and settlement work sought to address the crisis by teaching newcomers, especially children, to exchange old world ways (including their traditional family) for American role models.^^

Naturalization legislation in 1906 even encouraged immigrants to change their names,

14 making it possible “for an immigrant to exchange the name of an Old World father (or, in some cultures, the hyphenated name of parents) for a name that signaled a new identity.Sim ilarly, Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford Lytle describe how citizenship became a ceremonial event during the early years of Indian land allotment, signaling a kind of conversion from Indian to American through the acquisition of private property.^* Reformers took this ceremomal function further when they embarked on a project to rename the American Indian as a result of difficulties created by Allotment’s division of tribal lands, a project undertaken by Hamlin Garland and Dr. Charles Eastman which ultimately undermined native cultural traditions in the name of American patrimony.^®

Citizenship was the centerpiece of the Indian reform movement led, since the late

1870s, by East-coast based groups of white, middle-class Christians such as the Boston

Indian Citizenship Committee, the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), and the Indian Rights Association (IRA). Their agendas included support for missionaries, teachers, and home-building projects as well as the division of tribal land and the end of the reservation ^stem. The philosophy underpinning their theory of Indian reform was based in American conceptions of personhood, as clearly seen in the reformers’ support for the General Allotment BiU, commonly known as the Dawes Act. The Dawes Act was signed into law by President Cleveland on February 8, 1887 and was not reversed until 1934 under the Indian Reorganization Act. It authorized the president to survey the reservations and allot land to individual Indians, linking private property with citizenship by making citizens of those who accepted an aHotment.”^^ The WNIA

15 supported allotment and argued that Christian women had an hnportant role to play in the making of these new American citizens, defining their work as follows; "to teach

Indians to make and properly keep comfortable homes; to teach them domestic work and arts; to prepare food and make clothing; to care for the sick and for children; to respect work and to become self-supporting; to influence and to help them to learn the English language; and above all, to teach them the truths of the gospel, and to seek their conversion to practical Christianity. Such reform groups urged the deconstruction of the native national body on the collective and individual level, equating social propriety with the responsible conduct of the property owner. However, their proposed solutions were increasingly inappropriate to the demographics, economic structure, and political system of the United States after the Civil War, as they proflered an anachronistic model o f citizenship based on a romantic ideal of the American pastoral.

For progressives trying to “rescue” native peoples, citizenship operated as a symbol and a practice. Alan Trachtenberg accurately concludes, “the Dawes Act, in short, implied a theory and pedagogical vision of America itself.”^® It sought to “teach”

Indians what it meant to be an American through the wonders of private property, forming, and citizenship. It admitted the apparent (and disturbing to many reformers) endurance of tribal structures and indigenous religions, but oflered an alternative— become “one of us.” The choice was not a balanced one, for the government promotion o f allotment ecplicit^ linked individual survival to the acceptance of the economic and moral code of American life: private property as the basis of the male-dominated nuclear family.'"^ The discourse o f Indian reform linked representation (as citizenship) with an

16 agrarian-based patriarchy at a time when every aspect of this model was under attack.

Women reformers, like the ones considered in this study, were called upon to stabilize the contradictory narratives of nation and citizenship in their jobs as teachers, missionaries, and home mission women on the reservations; initially, many turned to the discourse of female moral authority to lend coherence to their “civilizing” project. While such authority was limited, it nonetheless reoriented citizenship toward a representative

“femaleness,” destabilizing the metonymic relation between the male body and the

American citizen which supported (and continue to support) patriarchal systems of power in the United States.

The WNIA dropped the word “Women’s” from its title in 1901, reflecting what

Peggy Pascoe has termed a “crisis” in Victorian female moral authority.'** However, many progressive women working on reservations or elsewhere in the American West had already begun, in conscious and unconscious ways, to redefine their mission in terms that mitigated or directly challenged sentimental discourses o f domesticity and female piety. In Chapter Two, I consider an autobiography by Elaine Goodale Eastman, a

WNIA member who worked as a teacher on the Great Sioux Reservation and wrote many articles supporting the ‘Triends of the Indian” agenda. Of all the authors I study,

Eastman is the most closely allied with nineteenth-century models of gender and race; however, her ecperiences with Sioux culture, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and her marriage to Dr. Charles Eastman (Oh^esa—Sioux) generate a crucial ambivalence in her narrative about the meaning of whiteness, womanhood, and America in the context of

U.S. Indhm policies, fo. my thfrd chapter, Gertrude Bonnin or 2Stkala-Sa (Sioux) offers

17 an alternative to Eastman's narrative, as she eng%es the terms of progressive Indian reform but inverts them, placing her Sioux mother at the moral center of her autobiography rather than the virtuous white woman of home-mission ideology. My fourth chapter critiques a later stage in Indian reform policies, the field matron program, through a reading of frontier imagery and independent womanhood in a memoir by Mary

EOicott Arnold and Mabel Reed. I conclude with Mary Austin's autobiography. Earth

H orizon, exploring the links Austin makes between progressive activism, a distinctly feminine artistic vision, and a new “America” bom out of the ongoing encounter between

Indian, Spanish, and Anglo cultures in the Southwest. While Austin’s life-story differs considerably fi"om the previous narratives, her attempt to forge a progressive vision of

America out of Western landscapes and native populations best exemplifies an experimental exploration of new womanhood within a regionalist context, such as Tichi describes. A progressive feminist who was active in Indian rights, Austin believed her artistry grew out of a cultural and spiritual exchange with American Indians. However problematic her position is, her memoir provides a fitting conclusion to these autobiographical accounts of progressive reform. Western fi'ontiers, and cross-cultural encounters shaped by competing conceptualizations of gender, race, and nation at the turn of the century.

18 NOTES

' Frederick Jackson Turner. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The Frontier in American History (1920; Tucson: U of Arizona Press, 1994) 2-3

" Ann Fabian. “History for the Masses,” Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's fVestem Past Eds. William Cronon, George Miles. Jay Gitlin (NY: Norton, 1992) 224.

^ In this dissertation, 1 will use the term American “Indian” along with Native American since the former continues to be in use among native and non-native people, and speaks to the indigenous populations’ 500 years of colonial experience. Where appropriate. I use the specific name of the people discussed, such as Sioux or Karuk. as every “Indian” is part of a distinct nation and culture.

'* For an important treatise on the exclusion of Afirican-Americans fi-om the lair, see Ida B. Wells. Ed., The Reason Why the Colored American is Mot in the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Ida B. Wells. 1893). Reprinted in Selected Works o fIda B. Wells-Bamett. Ed. Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford. 1991) 46-137. Frederick Douglass, in a speech as the Haitian representative at the Fair, called the White CiQf a “whited sepulchre.” which concealed the American betr^al of Afoican-Americans. leaving them to suffer poverty, segregation, political degradation, and violence such as lynchings See Richard Slotkin. Gunfigftter Mation: The Myth o f the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norton. OK: Ü o f Oklahoma P, 1992) 65.

^ For seminal discussions of eighteenth and nineteenth conceptions of white women and models of domesticity, see Barbara Welter and Nancy Cott For the shift from the Victorian emphasis on female moral authority to Progressive conceptions of the “New Woman.” see Carol Smith-Rosenberg.

^ Rydeil states, “the directors of the expositions offered millions of fairgoers an opportunity to reaffirm their collective national identity in an updated synthesis of progress and white supremacy that suftused the blueprints of future perfections offered by the fairs” (1984,4).

^ When referring to the time period, I will capitalize Progressive; in referring to attitudes or specific movements/reformers. I use the lower-case to signal the wide-range of viewpoints gathered historically under the progressive label.

’ The American Party was formed in California in the 1890s in the face of extensive labor activism, and it promoted sweeping immigrant restriction and tougher citizenship requirements. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882.

’ The clearest manifestation of tfiis attempt to “incorporate” native peoples into America by destroying the “fixfian” in them (to paraphrase Carlisle school founder, Richard Pratt), was the General Allotment Act of 1887 (Dawes Act), which sought to divide tribal land hokfings into parcels o f private property for indtvichial Indians, and opened up vast tracts of fodian land to white settlemenL

19 Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions ofEmpire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984) 62. Also, see Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition and American Culture (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979) 80-82, for a discussion of the Midway’s evolution horn a ‘^dignified and decorous” ethnological display to "one of the most successful and famous... amusement areas of any of the great world’s fairs.” For more general discussions o f midtHe-cIass culture and American society see Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times o f a Lost Generation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1966) and Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Tranrformations in Everyday Life, /S 7 6 -/9 /J (New York: HarperCoUins, 1985).

"During the fair’s planning, several Native Americans wrote the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affîürs, "We, American citizens of Indian blood, most earnestly and respectfully petition you to grant us through the forthcoming World’s Fair and anniversary o f the chscovery of America, some recognition as a race, some acknowledgement that we are still a part, however inferior, of America and the Great American Republic.” (Quoted in Robert RydeU, "A Cultural Frankenstein? The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition o f 1893” in Neil Harris, et al. Grand Illusions: Chicago's World's Fair o f 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society. 1993) 160.

'* See Jeanne Weimann. The Fair Women (Chicago: Acacfemy. 1981): 103-124. for a discussion of thwarted attempts by A&ican-American women in Chicago to have representation of the Board of Lacty Managers; For a discussion of A&ican-Americans’ response to their exclusion from fair planning and racist representations of blacks at the Exposition, see Etydell (1993.144-150).

Clara Louise Root Burnham, Sweet Clover: A Romance o f the White City (NY : Houghton Mifflin, 1894)201.

'■* Hugh Bancroft The Story o f the World’s Fair, Vol. 1,503.

Eileen Boris, "Reconstmcting the ’Family’: Women, Progressive Reform, and the Problem of Social Control.” Noralee Frankel and Nancy Dye. eds.. Gender, Class. Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington: University of Kentucky. 1991) 75.

During this era. Jim Crow laws became pervasive, the convict lease system perpetuated a form of slavery, the lynching of black men was openly tolerated and viciously pursued, and racial segregation of public facilities increased, as did disenfranchisement of black voters. For insightfrrl discttssions of the political agentb of African-American Progressive clubwomen as well as the racism of white clubwomen, see Pattla Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact o fBlack Women on Race and Sex in America (New York; Bantarrr, 1984) and Bettina Aptheker, Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (Amherst: U. o f Massachusetts P. 1982).

" For a contemporary promotional discussion of the Woman’s Building’s (kvelopment and corrtents, see Maud Howe Elliot, Ed, Art and Handicraft in the Woman's building o f the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893 (New York: Goitpil and Co., 1893). For more recent scholarship. Weirrtarm’s The Fair Women is the most extensive historical and critical review of the Woman’s Bttilding.

IS See Slotkin 51.

In his 1899 speech to the Hamdtoa Club in Chicago, ‘The Stremrous Life.” Roosevelt declared the virtues of empire-building "The ttittid man, the la ^ man the man who c&stmsts his country, the overctvilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of freling the mighty lift that thrills 'stmn men with empires in their

20 brains'—all these, of course, shrink 6om seeing the nation undertake its new duties.” Theotbre Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (New York: The Review of Reviews Co., 1900) 9.

“ Turner 38.

Michel de Certeau, The Writing o fHistory, Trans. Tom Conlw (NY : Columbia UP, 1991) 45.

~ The characteristics Turner ascribes to the true American are: ‘That coarseness and. strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to Gnd expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with hreedom” (37).

“ For discussions of the continued resonance of the Western n^thology with the American public, see Cronon, et aL Under an Open Sky, especially Ann Fabian’s essay. For a detailed stucfy of fontier imagery across North and South Americas, see Richard Slatta. Comparing Cowboys and Frontiers (Norman: U of Oklahoma, 1997). 1 take the term “national symbolic” Bom Lauren Beriant. The Anatomy o fMotional Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1991)5. It defines the “political space of the nation,” a cluster of “juridical, territorial, genetic, linguistic, and experiential” spaces.

“ For revisions of Turner’s thesis and alternative models for reading the iconography and literature of the American West, see Howard Lamar, Dee Brown, Richard White, Richard Slotkin, Robert Berkhofer, Patricia Limerick, Annette Kolodrqr. Anqr Kaplan, and Arnold Krupat. Vfy use of the term “fiontier” has been informed by my readings of these texts, as well as work by Mary Louise Pratt on the “contact zone” and Gloria Anzaldua on the “borderlands.” 1 understand it as m ating both physical and ideological territories where cultures meet, mingle, and conflict, often but not always violently. It also gestures toward the experience of dislocation when one ventures to the margins of the familiar—be it nation, home, or culture. While the “Bontier” thus bears much historical and critical baggage. 1 use it along with “contact zone” and “borderlands” as it reflects a popular. Eurocentric perspective about the West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“ language here echoes Ernest Renan’s ess^. “What is a Nation?” which argues that the creation of the modem nation depends on willful acts of remembering and forgetting. Reprinted in Homi Bhabha. ed.. Mation andMarration (NY: Routledge, 1990) 8-22.

“ Susan Scheckel, The Insistence o f the Indian: Race and Mationalism in the Mineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP. 1998) 9. 1 agree with (Zheryl Walker's argument that Native Americans were not simply passive victims in this process of national identity formation, but that Indian writers and speakers were also engaged in nineteenth-century ddates about what it means to be an American. Walker, IniUan Mation: Motive American Literature and Mineteenth Century Mationalisms (Durham: Duke UP, 1997).

“ For discussions of nineteenth-century castings of Indians as childlike and white Americans as grown-ups, see Michael Rogin, Fathers and Chileùen: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation o f the American Int&an (MY: Knopf; 1975). I am extenthng this reading to include a motif of white America’s own “youth,” echoing the Progressive era’s celdnation of a mythic Bontier where men are made.

“ Nanqr Dye, Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era, Etfe. Nancy Dye and Noralee Frankel @Ædngton: U o f Kentud^ Press, 1991) 1.

21 ^ For examples of the wicfe-ranging histories of progressive women, see Giddings, Frankel and Dye, Erika Kuhlman, Petticoats and White Feathers: Gender, Conformity, Race, and the Progressive Peace Movement,, and the Debate aver War. 1895-1919 (Westport. CT: Greenwood Press, 1997); Trisha Franzen, Spinsters and Lesbians: Independent Womanhood in the United States (NY: New York UP, 1996); Lynn Gorden. Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Ibven: Yale UP, 1990).

“ Cecelia Tichi, “Women Writers and the New Woman,” Columbia Literary History o fthe United States, E d Emory Elliott (New Y orif Columbia UP, 1988); 590. For other discttssions o f the New Woman in American literature of the Progressive era, see Carolyn Forrey, “The New Woman Revisited,” Women's Sttu&es (2,1974): 37-56; and Patricia Raub, “A New Woman or an Old-Fashioned Girl?: The Portr^ral of the Heroine in Popular Women’s Novels of the Twenties.” American Stuc&es (35.1, 1994): 109-130.

For discussion of “whiteness” and racialized conceptions of American citizenship in the Progressive era, see Tracy Fessenden, “The Soul of America: Whiteness and the Disappearing Bodies in the Progressive Era,” Perspectives on Embaument: The Intersections o f Nature and Culture, eds. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (NY: Routledge, 1999) 23-40.

^ Priscilla Wald. Constituting ,4mericans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke UP. 1995) 248.

“ Wald 248.

“ One such ceremony asked a man to shoot “his last arrow” and then take hold of the handles of a plow, \rine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (Austin: Texas UP. 1983) 221.

“ Daniel Littlefield. Jr. and Lonnie Underhill. “Renaming the American Indian: 1890-1913.” .American Studies {12: Fall 1971): 33-45.

“ Francis Paul Prucha, S.J., describe the basic principles of allotment, although there were many qualifications depending on the quali^ of land and other concerns: "The amounts to be allotted reflected the strong tradition of a quarter-section homestead for the yeoman farmer. One-quarter of a section ( 160 acres) was to be allotted to each head of family, one-eighth of a section (80 acres) to each single person over eighteen years of age and to each orphan child under eighteen, and one-sixteenth of a section (40 acres) to other single persons under eighteeiL” The allotment would be issued as a patent to the indtvichial Indian, which meant that the U.S. would hold the land in trust for twen^-five years before turning the land over in fee simple to the indtvichial or his/her heirs. After lands were allottecL the Secretary of the Interior could begin negotiations with the tribe for the purchase of so-called “surplus” lands. Land in Severalty was seen as a protective measure against immediate alienation of Indian lands. It also limited the ability of patent holders to lease their land rather than farm it themselves. Prucha. The Great Father: The United States Government and the .American Indians, Vol. H (Lincxln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1984) 667. See Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis (257-264), for a more detailed cfiscussion o f contemporary concerns voiced about the polices abiliQr to lead to assimilation o f native peoples and early abuses of the system.

“ Amelia Stone Quinton, “The Indian,” Literature o f Philanthropy, e d Frances GcxxWe, (New York; Harper and Brothers, 1893) 122.

22 “ See Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, The Frontiers o f American Women’s Writing. She states, “Not only did their [reformersi ideology emphasize paternalistic family values and dbmestici^ at a time when women increasing^ sought work and professions outside of the home, but reformers also tried to impart the values of capitalism to Indian people in a manner that ignored contemporary economic and social development^ (245). For a more complicated portrait of the ctebates surrounding evolutionary models of Americanization among various reformers, see Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis 152-161.

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation o fAmerica: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (NY: Hill and Wang, 1982)33.

^ For another view on the historical link between private proper^ and citizenship that influenced American Indian policy in the antebellum period, see Lucy Nhtddtx. Removals: Nineteenth Century American Literature and the Politics o f Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford UP. 1991): 22-25

Peggy Pascoe, Relations o f Rescue: The Search fo r Female Moral authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (NY: Oxford UP, 1990) 177.

23 CHAPTER!

SINGLE WOMEN HEADING WEST: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ELAINE GOODALE EASTMAN, SISTER TO THE SIOUX

In his 1916 autobiography From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Charles

Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) describes how he moved from a traditional life among the Santee Sioux to American Indian schools and then to Dartmouth College to study medicine. ^ Upon graduation, he headed to the Pine Ridge agency to work as a doctor among the Sioux, where he became engaged to Elaine Goodale, a white schoolteacher, only days before the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890).^ Years after the end o f their marriage, Elaine Goodale (1863-1953) also wrote an autobiography in which she traces how she came to live and teach on the Sioux reservation; her text narrates a life of relative independence on the American frontier, one which ends with her marriage and retreat from public life as an activist. Although she resigned her government position and began a 6mily in 1891, Goodale continued to publish her own texts and edit those of her husband. In addition to her work as a journalist, poet, and children’s author,

Elaine collaborated with Charles on at least two books, and edited all of his work prior to publication tmtü their separation in 1921. ^

24 In recent years, Charles’s writing has garnered critical attrition in terms of his narration of a bicultural identity, his support for assimilationist policies, and his later retreat from U.S. society to the northern woodlands of his childhood. However, despite her work alongside Charles Eastman during his involvement in progressive reform on the reservations, Elaine Goodale’s newspaper articles, poetry, and fiction are nearly forgotten, and her memoir. Sister to the Sioux, was not published until 1978, twenty- five years after her death.*^ In part, this disparity in critical interest reflects the essential differences in the identities of these two writers: race and gender. After years of neglect, Charles’s autobiographical texts have become part of a growing canon of

Native American literature, while Elaine’s autobiography remains harder to classify. A frequently sentimental and romantic portrait of a white woman among the Sioux, Sister to the Sioux is variously a travelogue, a political statement, and a personal narrative about the frontier, written long after Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous declaration.

What holds the disparate pieces of her story together is the trope of white womanhood as a sign of social reform in the West. While her husband figured himself as moving from “the deep woods to civilization” (reifying popular American conceptions of a primitive West and a civilized East), Elaine’s narrative moves in a different direction, as she tells a story about the “civilization” white women could bring to a frontier popularly fi'amed by the misguided violence of white men as well as by the anti-colonial resistance of indigenous peoples. Signifrcantly, her equation of white womanhood with civilization provides the means o f Elaine’s autobiographical self-creation, yet becomes the trap that ultimately leaves her narrative “haunted by a secret sense of frustration”

(173). In this contradiction, her text comes to reflect a shift in women’s political culture 25 at the turn of the century from female moral authority to more secular, progressive

formulations of social uplift. This chapter examines how Elaine Eastman’s story of her journey West captures the promise and the peril experienced by white women reformers

on the margins of the nation, as she finally seems caught (or “far from modem,” to use

her words) between traditional roles for white middle-class women and the independent

voice Eastman found by traveling to a "frontier” of her own making.

Elaine Goodale headed West during a crucial period in the history of U.S.-

Indian relations, the era in which allotment of tribal lands into individually owned

parcels was heralded as the answer to the so-called “Indian Question.” It was also a

watershed moment for the nation in the formation of a modem American identity. The

Gilded Age was at its height, and technological inventions and capital conglomeration

rapidly were remaking the face of the nation.* Immigration was reaching a historic high

point, and the press, politicians, and scholars were concerned with the question of who

is and what defines m American. Fears of “race suicide” punctuated public debates

about national identity among white Americans, while many women, African-

Americans, and immigrants struggled for political and social equality and civic reforms.

Everywhere public monuments and exhibitions dedicated to an iconography of national

unity through history and symbolism appeared, with perhaps the best examples being

the World’s Fafrs in Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), and St. Louis (1904).

Meanwhile, Theodore Roosevelt was publishing his celebratory histories of America’s

westward expansion while a young historian, Frederick Jackson Tumer, was tracking

the trends of agrarian settlement and consolidation of American capital in the West.

The demand by white settlers and corporations for American Indian land and resources 26 in the West continued unabated, and the implementation of allotment through the

Dawes Act in 1887 could only hasten the declaration by the U.S. Census department in

1890 that the frontier officially was closed.

Against this backdrop, Elaine Eastman lived and worked among the Sioux from

1886-1890, marrying Charles Eastman in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee massacre and retiring from govenunent employment. Their lives spanned the Dawes era to the

Collier administration’s attempts in the 1930s to undo the effects of allotment. Her story is one of many that speaks to the lived experience of a national identity, showing how Eastman saw herself as both representing America, yet mollifying its imperial project because of her role as a mediator between the colonizer and the Sioux. Frantz

Fanon defines national culture as a process of education, where “to educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens.”^ This, in a sense, is Eastman’s job, and she clearly sees herself as symbolizing America to the

Indians while also claiming to speak for the Sioux as a journalist and autobiographer.

Her autobiography posits life on the frontier as part of a national story about how women and Indians become Americans, reformulating the familiar tale of westward expansion through images o f the family and the home rather than through the popular icons of cowboys and Indians, pioneers and explorers. She justifies her frontier role as reflecting the moral authority of white women, while she also incorporates a progressive vision of women’s reform work into her story. According to her narrative, she taught Lidians how to be good “American^ through the emblematic function of her white womanhood as well as through her classroom lessons. The frontier becomes a 27 cultural rift within the nation, rather than a borderline between two nations, and white women appear in her autobiography in the service of a national pedagogy aimed at re­ forming the Native into a Citizen.

Eastman’s position as a white woman within the body politic, the “people” of

America, is ambiguous—how are white women both the objects and subjects of national discourse? In his study of national identity, Homi Bhabha writes, “the people are neither the beginning nor the end of the national narrative; they represent the cutting edge between the totalizing powers of the social’ as homogeneous, consensual community, and the forces that signify the more specific address to contentious, unequal interests and identities within the population.”^ Eastman’s autobiography, like her reform work, gains its authority through the name of the People—she speaks as an

American. At the same time, Eastman is addressed differently as a woman in the nation than are white men. The Gilded Age saw the construction of the Statue of Liberty

(1886), for example, which linked white womanhood with the moral and spiritual center of the nation, at a time when no woman in America could actually vote. “Woman” signified, but women had no direct voice in the political system. Thus, when a woman speaks in the name of the People, does her culturally constructed difference ever challenge the principle of homogeneity at its heart? Eastman’s memoir shows how white womanhood enacts the doubled narrative central to national fantasy: as her body signifies the boundaries of the nation, her memoir reveals how those borders are constructed rather than natural, how they are narrated rather than “real.”^ Ambivalence lies at the heart of any national narration, according to Bhabha, an ambivalence which manifests in Eastman’s text through the instability of this identification of America with 28 idealized white womanhood, an identification which she employs as a strategy of autobiography. In this way, Eastman's story, from her ecperiences teaching Sioux children on the frontier to her troubled marriage with Charles Eastman and unsatisfied ambitions, lays bare the elusive power of white womanhood as icon, pedagogy, and moral authority in the political landscape that shaped the imposition of allotment and citizenship upon the Sioux.

In autobiography, according to Leigh Gilmore, “identification entails reproducing the complex ideology of identity,’ variously inflected in the categories of personhood,’ citizenship,’ [and] ' women’.”^ Reader and writer meet across the complicated terrain of the social in order to identify with the autobiographical “I.” On the reservation, Eastman sees the Sioux as a collective body capable of a material and cultural transformation into American citizens with the help of dedicated white women.

She imagines a unified national identity, arising from the remnants of the allotted reservation, and forged out o f this nurturing relationship. Narrating a pedagogy of national belonging, Eastman especially focuses on a cultural exchange between white women and native women as central to the project of making Indians into Americans.

While Eastman tends toward cultural relativism in her reading of different gender roles, she also naturalizes her relation to Sioux women through an essentialist belief in a shared womanhood. Thus her narrative depends on her claim that “there is a distinctively wom anly quality about these Indian wives and mothers which wins your regard upon a nearer acquaintance. I think they are as devoted, as self-forgetfiil and willing to labor for the good of their households as any of our s&c anywhere in the world.”“ However, Eastman’s emphasis on “womanly” qualities, and her definition of 29 what they are, here speaks to her ambivalence about the limitations such a construction

of womanhood places on her own life. Her frustrated ambition to be a serious

professional writer becomes another central concern of her memoir, as she seeks to

unify her desires with socially acceptable models for women.

In fact, Eastman’s autobiography serves as a testimony to who she was before

marriage and family transformed her career—a single, independent woman working and

writing on the frontier. She identifies with Sioux women as outside America, inscribing

a female frontier where a white woman can access power and freedom through a

colonial discourse of progressive reform. Eastman identifies with Sioux women as

members of “our sex,” invoking a trope of Woman that elides her ambitions as well as the cultural and historical specificity of both Sioux and Anglo culture. It is significant

then that she enacts this exchange in order to position herself both inside and outside the

traditional patriarchal order. The narrative claim she stakes through this reversal

reveals the contradictory process of identification at work in her performance of female

national belonging.

The social subject, writes Teresa De Lauretis, is constituted “across languages and cultural representations; a subject en-gendered in the experiencing of race and class, as well as sexual, relations; a subject, therefore, not unified but rather multiple, and not

so much divided as contradicted.”" Eastman’s narrative rests upon a theory of cross­ identification as central to the incorporation of diverse bodies, cultures, and identities into America. However, although Eastman sees her work as forging a new path in

American tmderstanding of cultural difierence, her narrative always maintains a strict hold on the power of the white gaze to define, classify, and di%nose. While she 30 champions aspects of Sioux culture and treaty rights, she also dismisses the Sioux as a conquered people whose only chance for survival is assimilation. In this manner, she retains her authority as the colonial subject; she observes and categorizes the elements of Sioux culture which mark their “humanity’^ and “civility”—their sameness to whites, in other words—accounting for native peoples’ suitability for incorporation into

America. The “samenes^’ she observes mitigates the threat of their difference, rendering the native in her text as somehow less than the Other. Indeed, Fanon has argued that even Otherness is claimed by the colonizer as part of a refusal of the colonized’s subjecthood, a short-circuiting of the dialectic between self and other, subject and object, that produces subjectivity. He writes, ‘Tf I close the circuit, if I prevent the accomplishment of movement in two directions, I keep the other within himself Ultimately, I deprive him even of this being-for-itself.”*^ At times, Eastman’s narrative attempts to signify a productive dialogue between her American identity and that of the Sioux people she meets, especially in their day-to-day encounters over questions of child-rearing, courtship and marriage, home-making, mourning, and land.

However, her belief in the overwhelming presence of America, and the illegitimacy of internal tribal bodies claiming sovereign rule over land and people, ultimately fixes the

Sioux in her text as objects to be acted upon in the reproduction of the nation on the frontier.

Still, Eastman’s autobiography must come to terms with her identification with the Sioux, particularly as that identification destabilizes her position as a colonial model Identification works in her memoir at cross-purposes: Eastman attempts to identify with Sioux women on their own terms, to some degree, while also believing 31 that their identification with her will effect their assimilation. Eastman wears moccasins and goes without a hat, speaks Dakota and attends some traditional ceremonies; yet, Eastman’s attempts to fit in as a practical plains woman cannot escape the colonial imperative her text supports, as her adoption of cross-cultural dress allows her to take a transgressive pleasure in disavowing certain signs of her whiteness, without seriously disrupting the imperialist agenda her presence on the reservation signifies.*^ In this context, to follow Diana Fuss, “identification... is itself an imperial process, a form of violent appropriation in which the Other is deposed and assimilated into the lordly domain o f the Self.”*'* Eastman’s description of Sioux women and girls seeks to classify them as assimilable through a representation of their shared sexual sameness; her belief in an essential feminine character forges the gap, for Eastman, between her white body and theirs, asserting her cultural and racial superiority ('they must become like me’), while providing her with a sense of belonging to the female community on the reservation. The colonizer’s identification with the colonized thus becomes essential to the program of assimilation that Eastman supports.

The frontier that allows Eastman to narrate the nation also reveals how her subjectivity, like that of the collective “people” for whom she speaks (both Sioux and

American), is contradictory and heterogeneous. She heads West to find herselfr and the frontier becomes a trope in her text for a female journey of discovery. However, her narrative also implicitly presents the frontier as an intersubjective space where recognizable social identities are displaced, challenged, and ignored as often as they are rmfied. Gilmore argues that a tecbnolo^ of autobiography is interruption, “a discursive effect of gender politics and self-representation [which] evidences the 32 possibilities of and limitations on women’s self-representation.’’^^ Eastman’s narrative tries to present an integrated vision of womanhood on the frontier. My reading of

Eastman’s memoir fr)cuses on her text’s mtemtptions rather than on the chronological series of anecdotes that structures her story on the surface. These interruptions come from inside and outside the text, from her thwarted career ambitions and failed marriage, to her racism and justifications for U.S. imperialism; interruptions come also from the larger history of white women’s involvement with American colonization of native peoples and the stories the colonized tell about the white women who came to teach them how to be Americans.'^

Autobiographical writing mediates cultural fantasy and individual engagements with that fantasy. American autobiographies which reconstruct a given frontier must engage with the prevailing national fantasies of expansion, incorporation, and homogenization. The autobiographer therefore inscribes frontier as a condition of her construction of an autobiographical self at the limits of the nation. Paul John Eakin asserts that autobiography is a record of how an individual negotiates the “models of identity” available to her in a given cultural/historical moment. For Eakin, the “self of an autobiographical text is a construct of a construct” since “the self is already constructed in interaction with the others of its culture befr)re it begins self-consciously in maturity (and specifically in autobiography—where it exists) to think in terms of models o f identity.”^^ Eastman’s memoir, relying on competing notions of the “People”

(Americans, Women, the Sioux) makes apparent the uneasy relation between self and citizenship. This autobiographical strategy raises a number of questions: What gaps does a white woman experience between her body and the “representative man” of 33 citizenship? How can she speak for the People? How can she speak for Indians?

Autobiography reproduces here the unstable relationship between self and citizenship (a national configuration of personhood) as part of the meaning of the frontier in an era when many Americans sought to represent the nation as a unified and homogenous body of citizens. Eastman’s memoir, weaving together Victorian and progressive discourses of social reform, inscribes a frontier subjectivity that relies on a

“culture/nonculture” opposition wherein white women appear as mediators between the order of America and the chaos of the unassimilated Other,** The People becomes a measure of exclusion as well as inclusion, and white women and the affectionate nuclear family unit represent an idealized progressive A m erica in which private property, socialization, and hard work make the citizen.

Ftndtng the Progressive Frontier

Elaine Goodale began her career as a reservation teacher at the White River settlement of Medicine Bull on the Great Sioux Reserve in the autumn of 1886. She regularly published accounts of her work among the Dakota for newspapers, such as

The [ndependent and The Christian Uniotiy and for activist organizations such as the

Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA) and the Indian Rights Association

(IRA). Her memoir, written during the 1930s, draws from these writings and her diary, and she often quotes them directly. Part of an archive of female participation in the

U.S. colonization of tribal peoples, Eastman’s scrapbook of articles reflects a related personal desire, one which Eastman subordinates throughout her memoir but cannot erase— to be a respected literary writer. Such a desire is everywhere curtailed in her experience by the gender restrictions Victorian culture placed on women of all races. 34 Similarly, the contect in which she wrote and published on Indian affairs—mainly the publications of Christian “Social Gospel” organizations—reflects the limited field of enunciation that can authorize her published writing. She writes as a female reformer, in a long line of nineteenth-century women engaged in influencing public social policy. However, the same role which enables her to speak also places restrictions on her identity, and her awareness of these limitations comes to the fore in Eastman’s retrospective pieces of the 1930s.

In 1937, Eastman claimed that her articles fi’om Indian territory were written

“with serious educational purpose—in other words, to turn out propaganda rather than literature,” a distinction that bolsters the anxiety throughout her memoir that she is not a real writer but a pragmatic amateur.^ In her longer autobiography, Eastman also declares;

I never stopped writing, but my writing was wholly secondary to my work for Indians and tributary to it. It was done at odd moments, or late at night, in longhand and little, if at all, revised.... I can’t remember a time when I wouldn’t 'rather write than eat,’ and while literary ambition was for many years entirely subordinated to the cause’ (and later to my family), the notion still stayed unreasonably in the back of my head that some day I might write a book that would live.(66-67)

Eastman thus establishes a tension between her calling to be an Indian teacher and her desire to be a serious writer, and her collection of articles serves as a reminder that she commanded an audience through her written word as well as in her classroom. Her readership in these newspapers, on the other hand, reflects the kind of story she was authorized to tell. Eastman’s subordination of her writing to Indian reform work demonstrates a concern with historical narrative, an awareness that certain stories count more than others. Long before 1930, she would witness her own eclipse as a reformer 35 and writer by the public figure of her husband, Charles. Her memoir can be read as an act of recovery for the story of her own work among the Sioux, and an attempt, through autobiography, to inscribe her place in the history of her husband’s people and the story of America’s frontiers on her own terms rather than in relation to “the doctor.”

Eastman found an important audience for her work in the WNIA, an organization of white women dedicated to the assimilation of Native Americans to

Christian middle-class mores. Like other home mission groups, the WNIA often emphasized in their publications and their projects the essential sameness shared by women of all races. At the same time, although members and field workers frequently valued elements of their charges’ home cultures and communities, these organizations consistently asserted the primacy of white American culture in a late-Victorian teleology of cultural evolution.^' Eastman was a WNIA member and wrote for their newspaper. The Indian’s Friend. This work allowed her to follow a path as a single working woman relatively unconstrained by late-Victorian culture. However,

Eastman’s narrative is not a story of triumph, despite her accomplishments working among the Sioux. The organized women’s culture of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not seem to “fit” for Eastman, as she was far from evangelical in her religion, and unable or unwilling to adopt a truly feminist progressive position.

Instead, she appears caught between two worlds—the frontier of her youth’s imagining, and the constraints of marriage and motherhood. As a result, Eastman constructs an autobiographical subject that is predicated on loss—loss of a distinct identity as a woman and author to the categories of wife, mother, editor.^ In her autobiography, the frontier signifies a place where Eastman can express a distinct and independent identity, 36 as well as a trope for the cultural differences she must negotiate. Significantly, then,

Eastman^s narrative focuses almost entirely on her years as an unattached girl-poet and as a single woman dedicated to her career as a teacher and reformer, rather than on her marriage and home-life after 1891.

Eastman begins her memoir with a story of childhood precociousness and isolation. Bom in 1863, Eastman was raised by a gentleman farmer, Henry Goodale, and his “city-bred” wife, Dora, on 700 acres in the Berkshires. Educated at home,

Eastman and her younger sister began writing poetry at a young age and hand-printed a monthly magazine to share with the family. Their work first appeared in print in 1877 as “Poems by Two Little American Girls,” followed by Apple-Blossoms: Verses o f Two

C hildren (1879), and her reputation as a child poet remained with Eastman throughout her adult life. She writes favorably of her family’s quiet rural life, portraying a romantic New England pastoral on the verge of contamination by industrialization and urbanization. Writing her memoir in the 1930s, Eastman declares, “Lacking schoolmates and companions of our own age and with few outside treats, ours was a tranquil and joyous existence, greatly preferable in some ways to the crowded lives of most modem youngsters” (4). While she notes that her mother never fully adjusted to the lack of society and material comfort of the family farm life, she concludes, “it is easier to be prosperous than to be civilized, and Henry Goodale was preeminently the last” (7). Eastman detaches “civilization” from economic privilege, while simultaneously upholding her father’s status as a “gentleman farmer.” While she states that she “adored” her mother, Eastman aligns herself with her father’s refined poverty rather than with her mother’s dissatisfaction in order to cast her childhood as a kind of 37 idyllic retreat from the social. The popular R a tio n o f childhood with innocence and purity is mapped onto a rural, “primitive” landscape, a relation which prefigures

Eastman’s approach to Indian education and reform later in her narrative. Similarly, her childhood freedom is attached to the fading figure of her father, while her mother stands in sharp relief as one who never fully adapts to genteel country poverty. Indeed, although Eastman clearly identifies with her mother’s aspirations and disappointments as foreshadowing her own, she also distances herself from that connection through her claim that her mother was emotionally unbalanced.^ In these childhood stories,

Eastman lays the groundwork for the symbolic economy she will use to make sense of her time among the Sioux. Land is linked with the paternal, but it is a gentle, almost effeminate, paternalism that fails to make farming pay and thus stands outside, or pre- edsts, the harsh capitalist world that will take both her father’s farm and much of the

Sioux’s land by the end of her story. This reclamation of the father, despite her own rejection of traditional gender roles inscribed by patriarchy, also sets the stage for her marriage to another outsider to the powerful male world of Eastern business and government.

Her portrait of her home as an idealized retreat provides the setting for a crucial act of mimesis, in which Eastman attempts to cast her youth as a period of freedom when she and her sister can wander outside the constraints and expectations of

Victorian society. Her identification with her father-as-outsider, at the expense of her mother who later becomes “a nervous invalid,” provides the legitimacy Eastman seeks throughout her narrative fr)r stepping ofiT the customary path for women of her background. Writing about dif^ent strategies the female autobiographer might use, 38 Sidonie Smith sees mimesis as allowing the writer to mime “the textual politics of

' man’ through the law of the same, the white male One. Speaking from this location in discourse proffers authority, legitimacy, readability."^* This identification with the father is a form of disavowal of the mother that allows Eastman to distance herself from the material and historical reality that defines her mother’s limitations; she wants to escape the law of the Father that defines her difference by identifying with the Father.

Rather than rely solely on a model o f female moral authority such as Peggy Pascoe describes in her history of home mission women in the West, Eastman attempts to mold her identity as a teacher and writer out of an interstitial position between the Mother and the Father.^ Woman signifies the font of culture and civility in Eastman’s writing, but the Father signifies her access to an American individualism which Eastman wants to claim for her story of the West. Through this bifurcation, Eastman makes her quiet country childhood the psychological origins for her decision to leave the familiar environs of New England in 1883 to teach indigenous students at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. ^ By linking her dissatisfaction with Victorian society to her search for the

Other, she lends coherency to her narrative as akin to the familiar (albeit male)

American story of the pioneer. At the same time, through her identification with the civilizing mission of the Indian school, Eastman adheres to the “textual politics’’ of

Progressive-era colonization in which humanity and civilization were equated, in the

Law, with U.S. social institutions—the femily, the school, the church.

When Eastman is twenty, her family gives up farming and sells Sky Farm. Her father takes a job in the city, but does not have the funds to send her to college. With few viable options, Eastman’s mother accepts for her the job at the Hampton Institute (a 39 boarding school for black and Indian children) as “the altruistic motive appealed to both

of us, and a post in a missionary school was no doubt less wounding to her pride than

the alternative suggestion o f tutoring small children in a private family” (17). From the

beginning, she is caught between bourgeois pretensions and the narrow options for

respectable work open to women of her class.^ Marriage is not an option because, as

Eastman declares, “I had no small talk, no particular desire to please, and resented the

advance of an occasional admirer' with disproportionate indignation” ( 14). Her family

allows her to postpone marriage, but still constrains her within the limits of middle-class

respectability; teaching is one of the few avenues other than marriage open to her. Here

her self-association with the outsider-as-Father is undermined by the social reality that

inscribes her sex. She is not a woman of independent means, and has far fewer options

for a profitable career than a man. Caught between the need to earn her living, and her

mother’s adherence to middle-class standards of propriety and status, Eastman begins

her gradual journey West. She heads away from “civilization” in order to be the bearer

of culture to a group of people about whom she knows nothing, and finds her

independent voice in describing the frontier through the eyes of a burgeoning New

Woman.

The difficult circumstances that lead to her departure from home contribute to the romance of encountering the Other that becomes central to her narrative. In point of fact, she leaves home under the spell of a major figure in U.S. Indian reform, the founder of the Hampton fristitute. General Samuel Armstrong, whom she first meets on

“a glowing midsummer day in my fifteenth year—[when] a gallant figure on horseback abruptly draws rein at the door of Sky Farm” (16). In her American romance, the 40 gallant man on horseback offers her a chance to travel and work on her own, rather than following the traditional plot of love and marriage. Armstrong, with his “dramatic personality,” his “shining countenance and rapid speech, overflowing with enthusiasm for humanity and bubbling with wit,” becomes another father figure in the series of exchanges Eastman undergoes as she tries to find her own way. She sidesteps the marriage economy, but enters a system in which “the appearance of a slip of a girl in the role of taskmaster” functions as the sign of a new pioneer project: the translation of

“potential warriors” into American citizens. She does not have to marry to reproduce the nation; she can remain a dutiful daughter, gaining the General’s approval through her dedication to the “novel experiment” of transforming “the red man” into a citizen, almost white but not quite. Thus, Eastman’s fantasy about the far West and the homeplace of her indigenous students creates the possibility o f another America, one where she is a woman of independent means charged with creating new citizens but in a radically different context than the old colonial model of republican motherhood.^ The frontier becomes another Sky Farm, somehow outside and beyond the mundane so cia l of Boston and New York, a place where Eastman, under the watchful eye of the Father, can define her womanhood differently through her engagement with the Other.

White reformers, especially Armstrong, become heroic figures in her text, dedicated to a nationalist ideology of productive Christian citizenship as the moral underpinnings of their work among Indians. The “prevailing gospel” at Hampton,

Eastman writes, was “exalted self-help and manual efficiency,” as “Armstrong developed the idea of labor as a creative and stabilizing force” (18). Eastman soon became a writer for the Hampton newspaper. The Southern Worhnan, defending Indian 41 education against those who would cry that government funds might as well be used to

“send coyotes and rattlesnakes to school as vicious Apaches and stolid Sioux!” (21).

Eastman describes how she replied to one such denunciation “with a story of heavily marked features that lighten and quicken from day to day,’ of'rows of dusky faces fairly alive with every variety of expression,’ of odd, bright questions and answers that make knowledge which before seemed hackneyed, even to one’s self, a fresh mental acquisition” (21). Here Eastman reveals her imbrication in Victorian racial biologism at the same time that she promotes a progressive cultural relativism. The “heavy features” of her students grow “lighter” day by day, a racial metaphor that links learning English,

Christianity, and geography with “lighter” skin. She seeks to replace the gaze of doubting senators and “solemn graybeards” with her own, which casts the faces of her

Indian students in the language of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment—the move from primitive darkness to civilization. At the same time, she declares that her experiences at Hampton have left her unable to “think of the people of any race or nation as permanently inferior or essentially different. In this matter, the conclusions of science were long anticipated by the profound moral intuitions of humanitarians like

Pratt and Armstrong” (20). Her point is important, as Eastman’s text reflects a shift in white women’s political culture from clearly defined religious affiliations, adherence to the domestic sphere, and sentimentality, toward a nondenominational liberalism, bureaucratization of social work, and realist writing.^ Nonetheless, her reflection that no race or nation is “permanently inferior” makes clear her belief in the primacy of white Western culture on the frontier. In that belief^ she was frir from alone among the

“Friends o f the Indian.”^** 42 Eastman’s general support of American manifest destiny is indeed tempered by her concern for the interests of the Sioux. But her enlightenment model participates in the American nation’s claim to modernity (and culture) at the «cpense of native peoples, and thus its claim to superiority depends on the presence of the indigenous Other.

Partha Chatteqee argues that there is a relation of power inherent in any theory of cultural autonomy, including pluralism or relativism. Nationalism becomes a subset of this larger problem of power, he writes, particularly as it seeks to represent national culture as a homogenous ideal. He concludes, “nationalism.. . seeks to represent itself in the image of the Enlightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualize itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself.”^* Eastman invokes this dimension of the American expansionism in her description o f how she came to leave the Hampton Institute for the Dakotas. She writes that during her second year at the institute, she began to “bum” with a desire to see “Indian Country,” noting that, “the last great buffalo hunt was only a year or two in the past; the Custer massacre, the sensation of less than a decade earlier. Sitting Bull, starved into submission, had but just abandoned his Canadian sanctuary to settle down with sullen reluctance upon the

Standing Rock agency” (23). Writing fifty years later, Eastman is trying in this passage to recapture the sense of a firontier that is still “real,” albeit fading, a period when Custer and Sitting Bull were still real men rather than the mythic figures of movies and dime novels. But her timeline also reveals the appropriation that the white gaze makes of the colonial encounter between Native Americans and white settlers; the history of the West becomes the story of a fading indigenous culture and Indian wars. Eastman seeks to 43 unify disparate happenings and a complex history through the perspective of the white

Easterner hoping to find the real frontier. However, this frontier is also clearly a masculine one in Eastman’s view, as buffalo hunts, Custer, and Sitting Bull become signs of a heroic West that has been split asunder by the violent meeting between white and indigenous men. Her calling to head West requires Eastman to uncover an alternate female symbolic for the frontier, which she finds in the language of social reform. In

Eastman’s story, white women heal the rift of men’s making, particularly through a model of cross-cultural afiUiation among women.

Eastman traveled to the Dakotas in 1885 with Florence Bascom, a geologist, and

Herbert Welsh, who was seeking to gain Sioux acceptance of allotment and white settlement of their territories. In her account of this trip, Eastman clearly begins to articulate her reformer identity, one which negotiates the divide between Sioux and white societies. For example, she contrasts her visit to a group of Christian Sioux, all of whom “were neatly clad in citizens’ dress and well drilled in the services of the church” with a “typical camp of'blanket Sioux’ near the mouth of the White River” (25). The latter she describes as “a straggling collection of one-room log huts,” a ‘Torlom little community” in which stood “the symbols o f two opposed and irreconcilable cultures”

(25). One is a dilapidated government schoolhouse and a vacant shack that had been a mission residence; the other is a well maintained and neatly decorated Ghost Lodge, honoring the dead.^^ Eastman sees the latter as a primitive attachment encouraged by the simultaneous absence and presence of America in this community, the abandoned schoolhouse and mission shack. Believing the Sioux villagers have maintained the

Ghost Lodge at the expense of the government buildings because of a lack of guidance, 44 Eastman recognizes a special calling 'to the heart of the ardent young girl." She asks,

"who would open the inhospitable doors of the waiting schoolhouse and ring the silent bell?” (26). Here Eastman imagines that the Sioux need more than a white American to step into that doorway; they need a woman. Her calling is twofold: to head West and rescue a foreign people from themselves, and to inculcate a progressive model of domesticity.”

In stepping off the route usually taken by middle-class white women from girlhood to matrimony, Eastman justifies her pursuit through an early progressivist formulation of women’s reform work as public expressions of female familial roles— mother, daughter, sister. In doing so, the project of bringing "civilization” to the

Indians becomes in her memoir a story about how women participate in and are regulated by the political space of the nation. ” Ellen Dubois argues that there were two distinct generations of women progressives, and that the earlier group (bom in the

1850s and 1860s) “made morally loaded distinctions between women’s work and men’s, between selfless efforts and selfish, between labors of love and paid labor.

Such distinctions appear throughout Eastman’s writing on women and Indian reform, as well as in her memoir, particularly in her emphasis on the value of white women on the reservation and in the classroom. In reimagining the American home on the Indian reservation, Eastman’s tect demonstrates how progressivism helped redefine the

American colonial project by justifying a systematic usurpation of native family and economic structures. By retaining the essentialist assumption that women are most fit to nurture and socialize children, Eastman also participates in a senthnentalization of colonialism that posits fodians as children and white women as mothers. Lee Edelman 45 has argued that the image of the child is historically constructed and “has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and been enshrined as the figure for whom that order must be held in perpetual trust.”*® In Eastman’s memoir, like the texts of many other WNIA writers, Indians (especially native children) become another category of the nation’s “children,” in need of protection and guidance for the sake of the nation. They no longer threaten America, but are wards held in the nation’s “trust.”

The reformers’ rhetoric celebrating domesticity, work, and private property thus became a pedagogy for bringing the Indian to independent “adulthood” signified by individual land ownership and citizenship.*^

The construction of citizenship in Eastman’s text relies on a set of norms designed to institutionalize one model of the American family on Indian reservations; private property, gendered roles of work and child-rearing, monogamous marriage, heterosmcuality, and Christianity. Despite her anguish over the deaths of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, Eastman never relinquishes her faith in the

Christian reformers’ project for breaking up the reservations and educating the Sioux in white American culture. Late in her memoir, she claims that “the Sioux had been thoroughly conquered’ in the eighteen-seventies,” developing an argument for assimilation as the only means for the Sioux to survive (145). She maintains this belief through her investment in the power of home-making, which she clearly delineates &om the overt violence of the U.S. army. The home Eastman creates at White River with

Laura Tileston thus serves as a focal point in the early chapters of Sister to the Sioux.

She notes that she met plenty of resistance to her living in a Sioux camp, a project she undmtakes with Tileston in 1886. “Among the prophets of disaster,” Eastman writes, 46 “some held that no two women could keep house together and work in double harness without tears and temper. The omens proved mistaken” (44). Instead, the two women are soon established at the center of a Sioux community near the Lower Brule agency where they immediately begin to teach their Dakota neighbors the norms of American house etiquette. Eastman notes, “We began by teaching them to knock before entering and to refrain from a preliminary peep in at the window” (37). The claim to privacy marks the national female body in Eastman’s text as much as her commentary on her housekeeper’s hard work to “see my ladies in white” frocks and starched petticoats (46).

She emphasizes that other than “a housekeeper of years and discretion, imported from

Chamberlain in response to the appeals of our respective mothers, there was no white person nearer than eight miles”(37). The young white women’s need of a housekeeper and chaperone in the midst of a “heathen camp” seeks to remind the reader that

Eastman is bringing civilization with her, not leaving it behind.

Significantly, Eastman’s immediate turn to American etiquette, with rules like knocking before entering, marks a shift in the popular representation of cross-cultural encounters from earlier pioneer narratives by women. Brigitte Georgi-Findlay argues that many women’s western narratives of travel and pioneering contain a “darkening of the window” scene, wherein the white woman, sitting in her home, sees her window suddenly darken and “finds herself the object of the exotic other’s gaze.”^* Georgi-

Findlay claims that while “teacher narratives” such as Eastman’s do not contain such scenes per se, they are still invested in a particular conception of privacy. I would add that this scene in Eastman’s autobiography represents how the threat of the Other is minimized and controlled by etiquette, as a set of social gestures through which women 47 traditionally “spoke” and asserted influence in Eastman’s world. Etiquette also separates the public from the private^ and one private space from another^ as it marks what is acceptable to do and say in communal spaces. In particular, social etiquette restricts the body, mitigating the signs of its physicality—its desires, its functions, its needs. Etiquette is part of Eastman’s reimagination of frontier, as it inscribes the margins of the nation as cultural and permeable; etiquette mediates the exchange between white women and Indian peoples. Thus, while the threat of difference (cultural and racial) does not entirely disappear in such scenes of “encounter” in Eastman’s narrative, the morality of white womanhood, as evoked by rules of privacy, clearly regulates the values and manners of the indigenous Other

In Eastman’s view, her home, the schoolhouse, and the church become the center of the village, providing an organizing principle for the community and for culture. Semioticians Yurij Lotman and B A. Uspensky argue that “the very function of the cultural assimilation of the world implies assigning to the world a systematic quality”; in the cases of education, missionary work, and propaganda, they conclude, the goal “will be to impart to an unorganized object certain principles of organization.”^ In other words, the education and missionary workers must see their culture as a system and a model that they are presenting to an incoherent Other.

Eastman notes cheerfully, for example, that “community suppers, magic-lantem shows, and other wholesome diversions were a part of our plan, largely supplanting the native dances. Since these not only involve paint and Dakota dress, but revival o f war games, late hours, and a general relaxation of all rules, church workers and conscientious government employees felt bound to discourage them” (43). While Eastman recognizes

48 and admires aspects of Sioux culture and does speak Dakota fluently, she nonetheless promotes white social norms and cultural practices as a source of order and coherency.

She enjoys her Sioux friends, but believes their traditions and mores to be a charming indication of a world that was, but can no longer be. She states, “when I first went to live among them, old customs were beginning to lose validity, but had by no means been forgotten. It was a period of changing manners and conflicting codes” (49).

Eastman realizes that her womanhood is emblematic of this conflict and confusion, as

she describes Sioux codes of modesty for young women, claiming that “no virtuous girl or young married woman might venture abroad unaccompanied” (49). Her own behavior flies in the face of her adopted community’s values, but Eastman asserts that this fact “was accepted without question” and she received the utmost respect no matter how boldly or freely she moved about. What she does not pursue in her narrative, however, is how her presence marks a kind of disorder in the community she has entered. She assumes, despite her admission elsewhere that she is challenging white

American standards of female propriety, that she represents the friture to the Dakota

people, one where codes will no longer conflict and manners will not be changing and under attack. Etiquette, education, dress, and religion operate in her text as signs of a new colonial order that efrkces cultural difference rather than reproduces it. Tribal cultures merely will fade away, in Eastman’s opinion, absorbed into the totalizing framework of America through the systematic assimilation of the Sioux.

American standards o f propriety make the frontier familiar fr}r Eastman, as such codes attempt to confine identification according to established mores. Moreover, they function in this context as part of a colonial regulation of the borders o f cultural

49 intelligibility, policing which identities can be recognized within the nation.

Throughout her autobiography, then, translation (between languages and cultures, between men and women, between the self and the nation) becomes central to

Eastman's story of frontier. In fact, language becomes the gauge for measuring the challenges to her conception of gender and propriety. Early in her account, Eastman notes, “Prim-lipped mentors had gravely advised me not to leam the language, assuring me that I would often prefer not to understand what was being said” (35). She discounts this warning, emphasizing the benefit to her work in speaking Dakota. Still, such frcility leads to further engagement with cultural practices and attitudes. For example, writing about her journey with a family on a traditional deer-hunt, Eastman comments;

I have been asked whether the plain speech of the Sioux was not offensive, and would answer that the women’s chatter was like that of a child—too matter-of-fact to be obscene.. . . Perhaps from instinctive delicacy, the men were careful of their speech in my presence. The superstitious dread of taking food from the hand of a woman undergoing her ‘mysterious’ monthly ordeal was still current, and I had been warned that it might lead to embarrassing questions. However, I was spared any personal reference to isn a ti —the solitary lodge. ( 109-110)

Women are child-like while men are circumspect in Eastman’s memory of the Sioux.

Frankness restricts the obscene. Nonetheless, her fear of personal references to her body, of frank questions about her menstrual cycle (her “monthly ordeal”), reflects her wish to remain apart from her “adopted” people precisely at the level of the body.

Eastman constructs female innocence here in two ways: the Sioux are like children, too innocent to understand Victorian mores; at the same time, white women are also

“innocents,” in need o f protection from reference to their own bodies. So, while

50 Eastman wears moccasins and a calico frock, with her hair in a braid and her skin tanned, she still rides side-saddle and maintains a protective distance when it comes to her own body and sexuality.

Difference and disavowal of difference thus structure Eastman’s story of her role in Indian education. Rather than expand on her outrage over the deaths at

Wounded Knee, she eulogizes the women that she knew on the reservation in an attempt to identify with their characters as wives and mothers. She writes, "Dear, lovable, intensely feminine Sioux women of days gone by! How affectionately I recall their devotion to their femiUes, their iimocent love of finery and gossip, eager curiosity, and patient endurance” (34). Eastman thus appropriates Sioux femininity in order to make her position as an interloper among them less strange and intrusive. She describes the native women’s dress as favorably distinct from the “prescribed figure, firmly molded of steel and whalebone” of white women’s feshions which she herself has rejected (14). Eastman repeatedly emphasizes the modesty of Dakota women in both dress and behavior, while also detailing their clothing style as more appropriate to

Plains living;

They wore straight, kimono-like gowns of brightly colored calico with wide, flowing sleeves.... The younger women added a touch of vermilion paint on the cheeks and on the straight part between two glossy, forward-turning braids, with necklaces and bracelets of brass and shell. This rather oriental effect was on the whole more becoming than the fitted frock with tight sleeves adopted by the schoolgirls and some of the mission-trained. (35)

As she herself struggles to maintain American standards of female propriety on the plains, Eastman recognizes the problem with imposing such standards on a culture already equipped with its own model of female devotion and modesty (the language

51 Eastman uses to make sense of the unfamiliar). She notes, "it seemed really unkind to teach them that they must wash dishes and make beds, make white underclothing and keep it clean, and &shion for themselves dresses with superfluous ruffles and unnecessary button-holes” (132). Yet, she follows the normal procedure of dressing her students in American clothing like “crisp ginghams and new straw sailors,” and trains the girls to sew and cook, wash and iron, while the boys cultivate the garden outside (134-135).

In representing how she modeled American home-life in her day school and in her home-making, Eastman defines the frontier through cultural and racial difference, implicitly asserting the superiority of white America as more “civilized,” a belief central to Indian reform rhetoric during the period. In her narrative of how Sioux women were both “like me” and “not like me,” Eastman ignores the legal standing of the Sioux as a sovereign nation, developing instead a model of cross-cultural identification among women that blurs the boundaries between two nations and two societies. Eastman’s story ends with her own sense of loss and fitistration following a failed marriage and a life lived in the shadow of her more famous husband, Charles

Eastman. The frontier in her narrative represents a borderland, then, but one defined by the asymmetrical power relations undergirding the programs for allotment and assimilation. At the same time, the frontier represents for Eastman an alternative space to the constraints America places on all women. She goes to the periphery of the nation in order to speak for it, a move that enables Eastman to disavow her discontinuity with the representative man of American citizenship but that is fully embedded in her belief in the representativeness of the American. 52 ‘^Self-Determination’*: Stories of Assimilation, Marriage, and Massacre

From the beginning of Eastman’s memoir, marriage represents a threat to the heady days o f personal trail-blazing. It is interesting then that marriage to a man who is

Sioux and American (his declaration) provides the uneasy closure to her memoir. Her private life, like her public work as a government teacher and journalist, is shaped by her belief that two cultures can be united as one, albeit in unequal relations of power

(national, racial, gendered). In her chapter, ‘Tirst Flight,” Eastman mentions that “an unwise family fiiend embarrassed me profoundly by a premature declaration of love, even before I had put up my hair” (13). This early disturbance frames her rejection of women’s fashionable clothing and her lack of interest in socializing with young men.

“First Flight” becomes a metaphor not only for leaving home, but for rejecting

Victorian limits on her behavior. Thus, like many New Women who come after her,

Eastman thwarts male attempts to settle her down wherever she goes. Repeatedly, she emphasizes how little such attention interested her. At Hampton, for example, she writes that “two or three nascent love affairs barely rippled the surface, leaving no profound effects.. . . I was conscious of no unfulfilled emotional needs and thought hardly at all about marriage” (18). Later, at the end of her description of the Pratt

Commission’s visit to the reservation, Eastman mentions another incipient love affair which lasts three weeks. Of this she states, “the incident had no effect on my single- minded devotion to the cause of my adopted people” (93). Still later, while on the deer htmt, a young white man asks her to correspond with him, and Eastman is grateful he does not understand Dakota and the teasing, “ft-ank comments” of her female companions. While she dismisses this incident through a discussion of the hard

53 conditions of pioneer life, she mentions later that “it had been, I suspect, in the back of my mind to meet that persuasive, blue-eyed bachelor once more, but the fates ruled otherwise. A kind ranchman helped us up a bad hill,' I wrote, ‘but it was not the one’”(lI2).

Her rejection of marriage signals Eastman’s imagination of the frontier as a site for personal individuation, as well as cross-cultural identification that seemingly challenges the national narrative undergirding imperialism. However, Eastman makes it clear that she sees native peoples as conquered. Her identifrcation with the Sioux is part of colonial discourse, as she represents the Dakota as standing at “the vanishing point of subjectivity,” where the “colonial other,” according to Fuss, “is situated somewhere between difference and similitude.”^' Eastman represents Indian peoples as capable of becoming just like her, American, but at the same time she presents her rejection of marriage as a rejection of the America available to her as a white woman—domestic, private, contained. The difference of the Sioux creates the frontier Eastman needs to articulate a different identity for herself. This tension in her narrative, between the

Sioux’s essential sameness and difference from her as a white American woman, characterizes the final chapters of her narrative, which recount the explosive violence at

Wounded Knee and her decision to marry a Christian Sioux doctor. The former stands as an enduring symbol of colonial conflict, while the latter signifies the process of incorporation that is central to Eastman’s view of Americanization on the frontier, a process which makes uneven claims on whites and Indians, on women and men, in the name o f the nation.

54 Eastman casts the army^s violence at Wounded Knee as anachronistic in the contemporary state of U.S.-Indian affairs. She writes of the Ghost Dance that “we who really knew and loved the Sioux were convinced that, with patience and redress of their grievances, the sane and loyal majority might safely be counted upon to bring a fanatical few to their senses. It cannot be too clearly understood that the clash was between two cultures—not two races” (155). Her strategy again is to emphasize the essential sameness of the Sioux with white Americans, to show that they really are (or easily can become) “just like us.”^^ However, her condemnation of the brutal attack upon the encampment at Wounded Knee is based on her belief that the suppression of the Sioux has already happened, and it is merely a matter of time until a few holdouts come “to their senses” and abandon their “fanatical” devotion to a distinct tribal identity. Wanting to maintain cultural difference is labeled as fanaticism, and the material struggle over land (of which Eastman was very aware as her articles of the time attest) is lost in her association of assimilation with sanity and survival.

The competing cultural significations of land, community, family, and nation enacted in this conflict profoundly mark the end of Eastman's autobiography. Like his wife, Charles Eastman challenged official reports of Indian violence at Wounded Knee;

“I have tried to make it clear that there was no Indian outbreak' in 1890-91, and that such trouble as we had may justly be charged to the dishonest politicians, who through unfit appointees first robbed the Indians, then bullied them, and finally in a panic called for troops to suppress them” (Deep Woods, 117). While both Eastmans painfully describe the fi'ozen broken bodies at Wounded Knee in their separate autobiographies, the tenor and focus of Elaine's description of the Ghost Dance and the massacre differs

55 from her husband's, revealing the various and competing alliances at work in their separate roles as mediators and reformers on the frontier. Both state that none of the

Sioux victims would allow any man in uniform to touch them, despite their serious injuries. Charles administers to them all, with Elaine and a few other women as helpers, but they lose most of the patients. Elaine writes, “when an army doctor appeared with the dawn to assist, the Sioux women were, quite understandably, so terrified of the uniform that he had great difriculty in approaching them" (162); Charles also states,

“the army surgeons were more than ready to help as soon as their own men had been cared for, [but] the tortured Indians would scarcely allow a man in uniform to touch them” (110). The uniform is the signifier of white colonial power and terror in both accounts, and it is her distance from that uniform as a woman that enables Elaine to nurse the injured alongside Charles. Still, Elaine’s statement manages to detach the signifier of race from the scene of the Sioux rejection (the women were “so terrified of the uniform”) while Charles more overtly makes the “man in uniform” the object of the people’s rejection and the subject of the violence enacted against them. Intentionally or not, Charles’s statement equates the white male body with the uniform of the army, the embodiment o f the Law on the reservation. At the same time, Elaine’s bifurcated frontier identity becomes the site of an increasing narrative anxiety in her tmct as the connections between epistemic and physical violence are apparent in the events leading up to Wounded Knee and its aftermath.

Charles also had to grapple with his position on the frontier between two cultures and two worlds, as his autobiography attests, but his points of identification are

(ffîërent from his future wife’s. For example, m his portrait of the days after the

56 massacre, Charles describes how he was sent out to search the snow drifts for any remaining victims; he writes, “my Indian companions” became overwhelmed, and

“nearly every one... was crying aloud or singing his death song. The white men became very nervous, but I set them to examining and uncovering every body to see if one were living” (112). Eastman's multiple identifications here are key to his representation of the scene—as a Sioux, he feels no threat from his Indian companions, but as an American, he recognizes the uneasiness of the white men with this display of cultural difference and acts to assuage their fears. Like Elaine, Charles saw the Ghost

Dance movement as ‘Tbreign to Indian philosophy,” a desperate attempt to resist the imperial forces of the United States (92). However, in his account of “The Ghost

Dance War,” he takes greater pains than Elaine to outline the wrongs committed by the

U.S. government against the Sioux, arguably making some bands receptive to the Ghost

Dance religion. Although Elaine agrees the government has cheated and starved the

Sioux, she believes the fundamental problem is a decelerated assimilation program; she emphasizes:

Educated and Christian Sioux scorned the whole matter. I knew of no church members or returned students who joined the dance. Yet all alike were victims of the natural calamity of the drought and of the broken promises of our government. It might well be said that we wronged the Indians most, not when we destroyed their wild herds or drove them from their vast ranges, but when we delayed too long the recompense of an equal share in the more advanced culture that inevitably displaced their own. (138-139)

At the moment when her &ith in the pedagogical function of the national narrative should be shaken, Eastman instead asserts the primacy of America as the most civilized, the highest on the cultural scale of evolution. Violence, as well as bad faith (on both

57 sides), could have been avoided simply by speeding up the destruction of the tribal body.

In Elaine Eastman’s closing description of the scene in the emergency hospital set up in the Church, she implicitly aligns herself with the Christian re&rmers’ vision of

America on the frontiers just befrire she makes a “gift” of herself to a Sioux man. The couple became engaged under the Christmas tree just days before the massacre, a tree which would soon be thrown out to make room for the dying victims. Elaine describes the irony of the scene which followed: “The tree was dragged out, but joyous green garlands still wreathed windows and doors, while the glowing cross in the stained glass window behind the altar looked down in irony—or in compassion—upon pagan children struck down in panic flight” ( 162). The glowing cross casts a double gaze here, one which stands in for Eastman’s view: an ironic commentary on the cruelty of the white government (which she distinguishes from the actions of reformers such as herself) and a compassionate response to the “pagan” children sprawled beneath the cross. Eastman marks the bodies as pagan to remind readers that those shot were followers of the Ghost

Dance, people who had rejected the attempts by white missionaries and educators to break their ties to indigenous cultures. She has pity for them, but as a Christian woman who views their flight from white society as folly in the end: “the old way of life was hopelessly destroyed and their more far-seeing leaders ready and eager to advance into a new world there was no choice” (85). The doubled meaning of the crucifix, itself a replication in stained glass, displaces the pain of the scene as much as it represents it.

While Eastman seeks to draw her readers into the terrible suffering of the victims of

Wounded Knee, she also reminds them that the Ghost Dancers (like the soldiers) have

58 missed the truth that she and other reformers have come to tell—there is only one path, and that is to become a part of white America. The colonization of land and the brutal suppression of resistance that she witnesses becomes aestheticized by the sentimental imagery o f the cross shining steady upon the misguided ventures of mankind. Rather than allow the violence of Wounded Knee to speak to the injustice of U.S. theft of indigenous lands, Eastman instead reduces the traditional Sioux’s legal and political position to the image of “pagan children,” childlike and ignorant in their devotion to an identity incompatible with her America.

Eastman never wavered in her support of assimilation and allotment for tribal peoples. Into her later years, Eastman published articles challenging any policy changes that would return a degree of selfdetermination and government to Native Americans, despite her familiarity with the disturbing findings of the Meriam Report. The 1928 report, based on a study of conditions on American Indian reservations, stated, “It almost seems as if the government assumed that some magic in individual ownership of property would in itself prove an educational civilizing factor, but unfortunately this policy has for the most part operated in the opposite direction.”^ Thus, Eastman publicly disagreed with the policies of John Collier, who was appointed commissioner of Indian affairs in 1933, especially the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) which ended allotment and was based on a concept of cultural pluralism. Called the Indian New

Deal, the IRA (like Collier) was controversial both in and out of Indian Country, as it sought to bring a measure of self-governance to reservations but thus sought to impose a

Western liberal model o f democracy onto tribal systems of government. Rebecca

Robbins states that “worst of all, in some w ^s, the IRA decreed an electoral form of

59 'democratic majority rule’ which was and still is structurally antithetical to the consensual form of decision making and selection of leadership integral to most indigenous nations.”^^ Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford Lytle, more sympathetic in their account of the IRA, see a different problem with the assumptions behind the legislation, particularly in terms of the erosion of traditional modes of Indian self-government during the Allotment era. They write, “many of the old customs and traditions that could have been restored under the IRA climate of cultural concern had vanished during the interim period since the tribes had gone to the reservations.”'** Allotment had left

Indian peoples somewhere between America and their traditional tribal societies, and the Collier administration clearly failed to understand the significance of that problem in its attempt at reform. While aspects of Collier’s work romanticized indigenous cultures and failed to understand their contemporary material and social contexts,

Eastman continued to represent the reservations as a lingering and malignant tether to an untenable past.

Eastman’s rejection of Collier’s plans as backward is not surprising, given the identity she continues to forge for herself in her frontier memoir. In articles published in the 1930s, Eastman expresses a position that is openly hostile to the idea that Native

Americans should be granted self-rule in any form. She argues, for example, in “Our

New-Old Indian Policy,” that while indigenous cultures should be admired, they are nonetheless conquered peoples who must accept the “language, customs and ideals of the dominant race.” Progress, for Eastman in the 1930s as in the 1890s, means forging a “good American,” not a “good Indian” or an “imitation white man.”'*^ Similarly, in an article criticizing the “Peyote Church” and the Collier administration’s sanction of

60 indigenous religious practices on the reservations, Eastman asks which practices “may safely and lawfully be continued, or revived, among a people whom for some sixty years, as a nation (and as churches Protestant and Catholic, firom the earliest white settlement in America), we have engaged to civilize and to Christianize. An outmoded phrase, no doubt—so let us say rather, to establish in secure enjoyment of the dominant culture of what is now their own United States. For Indians are no longer domestic dependent nations,’ but American citizens.”^* Eastman ultimately cannot accept the failure of allotment to bring social justice to the Dakota people, relying instead on the progressive celebration of the individually empowered citizen. Her awareness that

“civilize” and “christianize” are terms no longer in vogue leads to a somewhat peevish acceptance of the bureaucratic language of reservation administration, which has taken precedence over the stories of women missionaries and teachers Eastman has valued since the 1880s. Yet, her transposition of “civilization” into the “secure enjoyment of the dominant culture” allows Eastman to deconstruct again the national body of Indians through the figure of the private citizen.

Given Eastman’s long personal investment in the progressive ideal of assimilation and civilization, she likely was unwilling or unable to face the facts before her. She had found herself through this work, and was more able to dismiss her adopted people to a backwater of history than address the reality of the problems native peoples were facing in the present day. To admit the great harm these policies wrought upon tribal peoples would force Eastman to reinterpret the coherency of her life-story, one which she was busily inscribing into memoir during the 1930s. Eastman’s romantic vision of who the Sioux once were prevents her from imagining concrete and humane 61 solutions to the real political and material problems faced by her husband’s people. The failure of her marriage and her permanent return to New England possibly contributed to her refusal (or inability) to admit the limitations of the home mission philosophy and the model o f womanhood it helped create. Thus, Eastman’s memoir ends by subtly calling into question the nineteenth-century claim that female fulfillment could only be found at the hearth and heart of the family, disturbing the developmental narrative she posits throughout Sister to the Sioux to both her Dakota charges and herself—that women’s role as citizens is the reproduction of the nation within the family. Eastman’s uneasiness stems from her feeling that she still does not have her own voice, that her writing, like her life, has been ultimately a conduit for the expression of others. Her text becomes an exploration of personhood in the liminal context of the frontier if the frontier articulates the experience of a nation’s limits, what does it mean to write its story as your own? Alexander claims that “in finding a subject to write about for the

rest of her ninety years, [Eastman] found herself This is a fair statement, given that

Eastman’s writing on Indian reform and assimilation enabled her to create a public

identity for herself as a career woman. However, Eastman’s own disparagement of that

writing as foiling short of her own personal literary ambitions frames the problem

differently. Her memoir fragments the self-contained voice of authority by asserting

ambitions and desires that do not fît within the narrative fimne of her story: woman

heads west, fînds herself through hard work and love, and returns east triumphant,

husband in tow.

In this contort, her union with Charles can be read as an attempt to suture the

doubled narrative of the nation, the pedagogical and the performative, that she 62 encounters on the frontier in the disorienting days of December 1890. She had known

Charles only two months when they became engaged; as Frances Karttunen argues, under normal circumstances their acquaintance would have been brief. By this time,

Elaine was traveling the Great Sioux Reservation as the Superintendent of Indian schools, but was under military order to remain at the Pine Ridge Agency with all other government employees. Charles had recently arrived at Pine Ridge as the agency doctor. From the beginning, she saw her marriage as part of her ongoing experiment with her identity as well as with the Sioux’s. In her epilogue, she writes, “When, only a few weeks after our first meeting, I promised to marry Dr. Eastman, it was with a thrilling sense of two-fold consecration” (172). This dual sanctification of their union stems from Eastman’s belief that she is accepting the highest honor for woman, that of wife and mother, as well as embracing “with a new and deeper zeal the conception of a life-long service to my husband’s people” (172). Given Eastman’s work in teaching

Sioux children conventional American gender roles, this conclusion to her work among the Indians seemingly would provide the natural ending to the cultural narrative

Eastman builds her story around. However, she has trouble accepting a life behind the scenes as wife, mother, and editor, after years o f independence on the frontier. This dissatisfaction directs a final backward glance upon her time on the frontier, casting it as a place where she entered the political space of the nation. Leaving the frontier, for

Eastman, comes to mean the loss of herself to an ideal, and the few pages she devotes to her life after 1890 seems to replicate an implicit story of silencing.

Although her memoir glosses over her life after her marriage and retirement from teaching, they stand in stark contrast to her portrait of her single years on the

63 reservation as happy days of relative freedom. She writes, “From blazing a new path I

returned to the old and well-worn road, trodden by women’s feet throughout the ages....

No, I won’t say that the adjustment was easy or that I was never lonely, restless, and

haunted by a secret sense of frustration” (172-3). She notes that she bore six children

and that the family moved too often in a “series of dubious experiments,” while her life

as wife was comprised of vicarious pleasures working behind the scenes while her

husband built a reputation. Most critics agree that Eastman collaborated with her

husband on the books published under his name, as Charles himself notes in From the

Deep Woods to Civilization: “The present [book] is the eighth that I have done, always

with the devoted cooperation of my wife. Although but one book. Wigwam Evenings,’

bears both our names, we have worked together, she in the little leisure remaining to the

mother of six children, and I in the intervals of lecturing and other employment.”**

Still, according to Ruth Ann Alexander, “the price of Charles’s success was high for

Elaine. Although she contributed much of the work, she remained in obscurity while he

won celebrity and distinction as a writer and lecturer.”*^ After thirty years, the

Eastmans separated quietly in 1921 but never divorced.** Charles Eastman continued to

work on his manuscripts, but never published again. Elaine Eastman continued to

publish articles about Indian affairs, as well as a few “pot-boilers” to make money, and

a short memoir which appeared in 1937 in The South Dakota Historical Review.

However, her book-length autobiography remained unpublished long after her death, a

testament to the fading interest among white Americans in the concerns of native

peoples.** Somewhere among the discourses of reform and cross-cultural contact,

Elaine Goodale foimd herself and lost herself. Incorporation became dissolution.

6 4 Collaboration in the project of mediation between two cultures, two lives, two languages became here a recipe for silence, bitterness, and separation.

The facts of her story certainly contribute to its sadness as well as its instability—the starvation and violence she witnesses, the brutality of the Wounded

Knee massacre, and her interracial marriage, still largely taboo for white women of the period. But as her narrative shows, such facts define the material conditions of the frontier, while the encounter with difference defines the “internal frontiers” of the citizen. As Etienne Balibar describes, “the 'external frontiers’ of the state have to become internal frontiers’ . .. ertemal frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and always will be at home’.”^^ For Eastman to feel at home, to find herself, in the institutions and discourses of colonialism, she must incorporate the national boundaries as her own. Thus she never questions the assumed superiority of white American culture over that of the indigenous peoples she speaks for, rather she animates, through her writing at the time and retrospectively in her memoirs, the day-to- day world of cultural genocide through the sympathetic persona of a woman herself caught between two worlds. Not only is she in a twilight world of the late-colonial encounter of the American West, but she also interrupts the conventional rules of gender in order to speak from her lived experience on the reservation. These interruptions, however, seek to contain the eruptions of colonial violence and degradation by equating, in a sense, Eastman’s reworking o f white womanhood with the devastation wrought upon the Indians forced, by manipulation, theft, starvation, and

6 5 violence, to capitulate to white definitions of personhood and community. Thus while indigenous activists such as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa) wrote about the benefits of citizenship for Indians in terms of their %ency as contemporary native peoples in the United States, as I will discuss in Chapter Three, Eastman continued to advocate the old missionary model o f conversion—religious, cultural, and national.

And while Bonnin would find allies in a new generation of activist women for the cause of Indian rights, Eastman found herself isolated, writing a memoir that few people wanted to read.

66 NOTES

' [a Üus essay, I will use the name. "Sioux." by which refoimers commonly referred to the various bands and political groups of the Dakota and Lakota speaking peoples. The peoples known today as the "Sioux” went by the name Oceti Sakowin before European contact, which is best translated as "Seven Council Mres.” As Robert Craig states, the term covers diverse groups of indigenous peoples who share "certain political, linguistic, and geographical commonalities.” By the mid-nineteenth century, the Oceti Sakowin "comprised three geographical groups and political units who spoke different dialects of the same Sioux or Oceti Sakowin langua^”—Lakota. Dakota, and Nakota. There are various arguments for the origin of the name Sioux, inclutfing both French and Algonquian origins. See Craig. "Christianity and Empire,” /1/nertcon fnéan Quarterly 21.2 (1997): 5-7.

‘ Eastman was only four years old in 1862 when his Santee Sioux band fled the plains of Minnesota for the Manitoba wootk after an ill-fttted rebellion against encroaching white settlers. His father, among the group of fighters, was arrested and thought dead by the family for many years. Charles lived with his grantfanother until his father's return in 1873. His father had converted to Christianity and adopted white American modes of dress and farming. He took Charles home to a village of acculturated Sioux in South Dakota and soon sent the yotmg man to schooL See Charles Eastman, IruSan Boyhood ( 1902; New York: Dover. 1971) 239-247; Eastman. From the Deep (Foods to Cm/ization (1916; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1977) 1-13.

^ It remains unclear the degree of influence that Elaine Eastman exercised upon her husband’s manuscripts, but that she served as an active editor for his writing seems indisputable, a point Charles makes in From the Deep Woods to Civilization (185-186). Daniel Littlefield notes that site "apparently assisted Eastman greatly in polishing his works for publication.” See his introthiction to Charles Eastman in the Heath Anthology o fAmerican Literature, ed. Paul Lauter. vol. H. 2“* ed. (Lexington. MA: DC. Heath. 1994) 657. hi her memoir. Elaine Eastman states. "In an hour of comparative leisure I had urged him to write down his recollections of the wild fife, which I carefully edited and placed with S t Nicholas. From this small beginning grew buhan Boyhood and eight other books of Incfian lore, upon all of which I collaborated more or less” ( 173). Charles Eastman’s biographer. R^qrmond Wilson, quotes a letter by Elaine wherein she describes this woric "Dr. Eastman’s book left his hand as a rough draft in pencU. on scratch paper;” which she would prepare for publication by "revising omitting, and re-writing as necessary” (131). However. Wilson argues tW Charles ultimately resented his wife’s editorial changes of his work; nonetheless, "although Eastman apparently harbored resentment toward his wife’s revisions of his manuscripts, without her editorial assistance he was never able to publish aiçthing after their separation” Ohiyesa: Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux QJiAsara, IL: flimois UP. 1983) 163. H. David Bramble notes a contrastmg view inAn Annotated Bibliograpfy o f American IncSan and Eskimo Autobiographies (Lincoln: Untversi^ of Nebraska Press. 1981), stating. "According to Eastman’s daughter... Nfrs. Eastman did no more than copy-edit her husband’s foushedmanuscriptsr (55). See also Carol Lea Cbrk. "Charles A. Eastman (Ohqresa) and ElameGoodale Eastman: A Cross-Cultural Collaboration.” Tulsa StutSes in Women's Literature, 13.2 (Fall 1994): 271-80.

67 * Eaÿoaaa, Sister to theSota, ed. Kay Grafaer (Lincoln, ME: University of Nebraska Press, 1978). The original title of the manuscript was Little Sister to the Sioux, which Giaber modified for the 1978 publication of this text

^ A series o f devastating economic depressions gripped the United States fiom 1873-1878, 1882-1885, and 1893-1898 (he to unregulated fin an cial systems and wild speculation in the era of the American “robber barons.” Labor responded with a series of important strikes, particular^ the “Great Uprising,” a national railroad strike in July 1877, andthe PuQman strike in 1894. Farmers organized into T^e People’s Par^, a populist challenge to the two-party system. At the same time, the economic and social crises of the 1890s led to the rise of nativism and racism, fostered by groups like the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League (whirdr promoted a litenuy test to cmfo immigration), and institutionalized by segregation systems such as the “Jim Crow” laws in the South. See Alan Trachtenburg, “Mechanization Takes Command,” The Incorporation o fAmerica: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (NY : Hill and Wang, 1982) for a detailed dismssion of the celebration of mechanization during the Gilded Age, and the concurrent economic instability generated by rapid growth. Also, Alan Dawley, Strugglesfo r Justice: Social Responsibility and the liberal State (Camtnidge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991) provides a useful discussion o f Gilded Age political culture andthe rise of progressive politics at the turn of the century. For earlier seminal historical work on the perio

® Frantz Fanon, The Wretched o fthe Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (NY: Grove, 1963) 200.

' Hoirri Bhabha. The Location o fCulture (New York: Routledge. 1994) 146.

" Bhabha writes, “It is precisely in reading between th«e borderlines of the nation-space that we can see how the concept of the people’ emerges within a range of discourses as a double narrative movement The people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic bocfy politic. They are also a complex rhetorical strategy of so<^ reference: their daim to be representative provokes a crisis within the process of signification and discursive address” (145).

^ Leigh Caimat^ Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory o f Women's Self-Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994)23.

Elaine Goodale R istm an ‘“The Indian—A Woman Among the hidians.” Literature o fPhilanthropy, ed Frances Goodale (NY: Harper and Brothers. 1893) 133.

“ Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies o fGender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomingtort IN: Inffiana University Press, 1987) 2.

Frantz Fanort Black Skin/ White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmarm (NY: Grove Press. 1967) 217.

" For discussion of this dhnension of the colonrieris imitation of native (hess, see Gail Ching-Liang Low, “White Skins/Black Masks: The Pleasures and Politics of Imperialism,” .Vew F orm ations 9 (Winter 1989): 93.

Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (NY: Roude(%e, 1995) 145.

Gilmore 49.

Other well-known white women mvolved in work similar to Eastman’s include: Nardssa Whitman Elria Spalffiig, Mary Clementme Collins, and Atmie Brdwefi. Gertrude Simmons Botmm (25tkala-Sa) 68 and Sarah Winnemucca are two examples of indi^ous women who wrote about their contacts with white women teachers and missionaries.

Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton. NJ; Princeton University Press. 1992) 102.

By '%oncu!turer I do not mean that these women saw native peoples as without culture. Rather, nonculture refers to anything outside the cbminant home culture that fiâmes these women’s experiences and their political positioiL See Yurg Lotman and B.A. U spens^. "On the Semiodc Mechanism of Culture,” Critical Theory Since 1965, eds. Hazard Adams and Laoy Searle (Tallahassee. ET; University Egresses o f Rorida, 1986) 410.416.

On the archive as marking a tystem of enundability, see Michel Foucault The Archaeology o f Knov/ledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. AM. Sheridan Smith (NY: Pantheon. 1972) 129-131. He notes. T h e archive is first the law of what can be said the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (129).

“ See Eastman. "AH the Dtys of My Life.” South Dakota Historical Review 2 (July 1937): 179.

^ See Peggy E*ascoe, Relations ofRescue: The Searchfo r Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford UP. 1990). She argues, “the ideology o f female moral authority stressed universal bonds between women” ( 116).

~ Eastman’s memoir ultimately seems haunted by her sense that her writing, which includes several poetry volume, three children's novels and one for adults, a biography of Captain E^tt. nine books with her husband and maity newspaper and periodical articles, has not “lived” Her apparent belief in the power of one’s personal story to capture the essence of a complex social and historical terrain, in memoir and in journalism, becomes a driving principle behind the writing that seems finally to be most “her own.”

^ Eastman writes of her mother, “she developed a firm belief in women’s rights’ and became what is now known as a feminist—in theory, at least Although writing with some facility in verse and prose, and now and then achieving the best magazines, her unquestioned abilities were never fully developed— owing as m ndt perhaps, to a lack of emotional balance as to the chafing bonds of circumstances.” Eastman. “AH the Days of Nfy Life.” 174.

^ Sidonie Smith. “The Autobiographical Manifesto; Identities. Temporalities. Exilities.” Autobiography and Questions o fGender, e d Shirlqr Neuman (London; Frank Cass, 1991) 187.

^ See E*ascoe. especiaHy chapter 2. "The Ideology of Female Moral Authority. 1874-1900.” 32-69. E*ascoe notes that while this itfeology identified the “Christian home” with the “moral authority of women rather than the patriarchal control of men.” reliance on such imagery “created enchiring politiâl and institutional (filemmas for the search for female moral authority” (33).

^ General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, with backing fix>m the American Missionary Association, established the Hampton N orm al and Agricultural histitute in \rirginia in 1868. OriginaHy a vocational school for Afiican-Americans. the institute began a separate curriculiun fer Native American students in 1878 when Captain Richard Henry Pratt brou^t a group of twenty-two former Indian prisoners to Hampton. Pratt would go on to fimnd the (Carlisle Indian fedustrial School in Permsylvania in 1879.

^ Rnth Ann Alexander compares Eastman’s situation at this tune to the protagonist in Louis Mty^ Alcott’s Work: A Story o fEcperience (1873). She wrhes. “fit describing employment possibilities fer an uneducated but clever and mteHigent young women. Alcott depicts her heroine. Christie, as a domestic 69 servant, a governess or tntor, a seamstress and laundress, and a paid companion—the prhnary possibilities open to Elaine Goodale some ten years later,” in Alexander, ”Findmg Oneself through a Cause: Elaine Goodale Eastman and Indian Reform in the 1880s,” South D akota H istory 22 (Spring 1992): o 2 ,3.

^ In many ways, while her decision to head West may have worried her family and shocked the neighbors, Eastman’s move had a basis in women’s political culture, a basis which she discovers, in part, through her membership inthe WNIA, Women had been expanding the limits o f the private cfomestic spheresincetheCtvü War; venturing beyond traditionai limits of ecperience for dau^iter, wife, and mother in the name of home protection. According to historian Paula Baker, the nmeteenth century saw the development of a ”poIiti(âl domestid^,” wherein women extended their roles beyond the home in the care of the poor, sick, and otherwise neerfy. Along with the continued social separation of the sexes, this extension of the home not onfy gave individual women new opportunities for work and self-fulfillment, but it also ”providcd the basis for a (hstinct nineteenth-century women's political culture.” See Baker. ‘The Domesticatiott of Politics: Women and American Political Sodety,” The American Historical Review 89.3 (June 1984): 625.

^ Baker’s article and Pascoe’s last chapter, “Crisis of Victorian Female Moral Authority,” 177-207. were most helpfiil to me in formulating the shift in women’s political activism that undergirds Eastman's memoir.

^ The “Friends of the Indian” refers to a loose organization of different people and groups involved in the Christian reform efforts in U.S. Indian policy and dedicated to the ending of the reservation system with fiiU assimilation and naturalization of tribal peoples. Yearly meetings were held at the Smiley Brothers resort at Lake Mohonk. and regular partidpants induded Amelia Stone (Quinton. President o f the WNIA, and Herbert Welsh of the IRA, along with influential policymakers such as Senator Herbert Dawes. Fora good general history of Welsh, the IRA, and the “Friend;,” see William T. Hagatu The In£an Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882-1904 (Tucson. AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985) and Francis Paul Prucha. S.J.. The Great Father: The United States Government and the A m erican Int&ans. vol. H (Lincoln, ME: University of Nebraska Press. 1984). especially Part Six: "Americanizing the American Indians.”

Partha Chatteqee. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press. 1986) 17.

^ The Ghost Lod^ is central to a Sioux mourning rituaL occasionally performed upon the death of a fomily member, especially a fovorite son It culminated after two years or more in a giveaway, wherein the fam% donated all its possessions to the neecÿ. Christian reformers were very critical of the practice as thqr felt it threw the grieving fam% entirefy at the m ercy of the commtmiy Needless to sty. the dispersal of personal belongings at the death of a loved one flew in the foce of white ideals of private propery and indivichialism.

^ Nanqr Dye writes, “over the course of the Progressive & a, women reformers constracted a historical interpretation of domestic life that stressed the erosion of female control over the middle-class household. . . . When we view reform through women’s yes, redefining the relationship between the home and the community—the private s^tere andthe public—emages as central to progressivism.” Gender, Class, Race, a n dReform in th e P rogressive Era, eds. Noralee Frankie and Nancy Dye (Lexington: Universiy of Kentucly Press, 1991) 3-4.

^ Lauren Berlant argues that the political space of the nation is comprised of a complex web of the jurichcal, territoriaL genetic; linguistic and ecperientiaL See The Anatomy o fNational Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utofoa, and Everyday Life (Chicago: Universiy o f (Chicago A ess, 1991) 5.

70 ^ Ellen Caiol Dubois, “Haiiiet Stanton Blatcb and the Transformation of Class Relations among Woman Suf&agists," Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era, eds. Noralee Frankie and Nancy Dye (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1991) 163. Thus, the earlier generation used im a^ mothers, children, and the fattdfy in their riietoric, while the second generation (bom in the 1870s and 1880s) repressed their refbnn goals through the emblem of the woman wodcer. The shift maAed a move toward an emphasis on paid labor for women and aw ^ foom "'social mothering” as the route to women’s emandpatiotL

^ Lee Edelman, “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive,” Narrative 6.1 (Jatmary 1998); 21.

^ This equation of the “primitive with childhood also participates in the national search for origins that marks the Gilded and Progressive eras, wherein romantic representations of Indians came to mark an authentic American identity. Thus, with their cultures, societies, and identities condemned to the past, Indians become America’s future as well. On policies of Indian removal and the cfepiction of Indians as childlike, see Susan ScheckeL The Insistence o fthe IneSan: Race and Nationalism in the Nineteenth- Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998):90-92, and VQchael Rogin, Fathers and Ckitchvn: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation o fthe American Indian (NY: Knopf, 1975).

“ Brigitte Georgi-Findh^, The Frontiers o f Women‘s Writing: Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric o f Westward Expansion (Tucson, AZ: University o f Arizona Press, 1996) 61.

Georgi-Fmdhqr 264.

Lotman and Uspensky conclude that in order for this process to work, the dominant culture must see itself as a modeL and the community engaged in its imposition must acknowledge the culture’s systematic nature in order to use it as an instrument “for assigning system to what is amorphous” (418).

Fuss 146.

In Bistman’s memoir, éjfférence is of degree rather than kind StilL while her general opermess to Sioux practices indicates a move toward cultural relativism, Eastman’s perspective, like her allies in the WNIA, remains tied to the racialism of\^ctorian America in which differences between ethnic groups were seen as a result of “radaT differences organced on a evolutionary hierarchy. See Pascoe 198.

^ Eastman contextualizes the events of 1890 in tins way; “Rations had been cut fiom time to time; the people were insuffîdentfy fed and their protests and appeals were disregarded Never was more ruthless fiaud and graft practiced upon a defenseless people than upon these poor natives by the politicians! Never were there more worthless ‘ scraps of paper’ anywhere in the world than many of the Indian treaties and Government documents! Sickness was prevalent and the death rate alarming, especiallv among the children” (99).

'*\ewis Meriam, The Problem of fiuSan Administration (Baltimote: Johns Hopkins UP, 1928)7. The institute of Government Research in Washington, D.C. conducted a stucfy of conditions on Ihdan reservations a t the behest o f the Secretary o f the fiderior Hubert Work in June 1926 in response to mountingcritidsmof federal Indian polides. The stutfy, conducted by Lewis Mieriam and associates, appeared in 1928 under the title The Problem oflneBanA(6nimstrationaBdcaOedfotta£.csiliensioasiti U.S. Indian afifoirs. It is popularfy known as the Meriam Report See Vine Deloria, Jr. and Gifford M. hjtle, American tmSans, American Justice (Austin: Universiy o f Texas Press, 1983) 12-13.

^ Rebecca Robbing “Seff-Determination and Snhorrfmatinn- The Past, Present and Future of American rntBan Governance ” The State ofNadve America: Genocide. Colonization, andResistance. ed.\L Annette Jaimes (Boston: South BndPress, 1992)95. For a detaffed history of John ColheFs 71 career in u s ùidian policy, see Kenneth PhiIp,/ofoiCo///er’^Cmrarfe_/&r/iicffan/?e/&rm, 1920-1954 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1977).

Deloria and Lytle 15.

^ Eastman, “Our New-Old Indian Policy,” The Christian Century 27 Nov. 1929: 1+73.

■** Eastman, “Does Uncle Sam Foster Paganism?” The Christian Century 8 Aug. 1934: 1016.

Alexander 11.

” Frances Karttunen, Between tVorlds-^ Interpreters, Guides, Survivors (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 199+) 1+6. Karttunen concludes of the Eastman marriage: “Thqr went into marriage loaded with height few mortals could hope to bear. [Reverend] Wood bad promoted Charles Eastman endlessly as an object lesson of what education could do for an Indian, a shhiing example for the rest of his race to emulate, (joothile, who had behind her most of a (fecade of independent (lie, resolved to give it aH up to be a proper wife and mother and to serve the Sioux through her husbaruT (1+8).

** C. Eastman. From the Deep Woods to Civilization, 185-186.

Alexander 36-37.

They lived apart the rest of their hves, but apparently worked bard to keep their failed marriage out o f the public eye. Rnandal strain and rumors of Charles's inficfelity seem to have led to the final break. Charles spent most of these latter years in Detroit with their son. OÛyesa IL and in a cabin on the shores of Lake Huron until bis death in 1939 at the age of eighty. Elaine remained back & st in Massachusetts during these years, and continued to be active in Indian affairs until her death in 1953. Wilson argues, “theirmaniage had received national attention in 1891 and knowledge that it had failed would have been devastating to their future careers, let alone their pride and self-esteem” ( 165).

^ As Qark concludes. “Difficult as their collaboration of personalities was. it was only through the association of Eastman/C%iyesa/Goodale that either Eastman or Goodale found a voice that appealed to the reading public. Without their collaboration—which in the end essentially silenced them both—little of their complex story would have been heard or told” (278).

“ Etienne Balibar. “The Nation Form,” Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991) 95.

72 CHAPTERS

YOUNG GIRLS HEADING EAST: ZITKALA-SA

In “Indian Girls in Indian Schools,” Elaine Goodale Eastman provides an insider’s view of the strengths and weaknesses of American schools for Native American girls. Her celebration of domestic training includes a description of the curriculum at one of Bishop Hare’s boarding schools for native children:

The forty girls who are fortunate enough to receive their training at ' St. John’s,’ secure here an excellent conversational knowledge of English, the ability to read fluently and clearly, enough arithmetic and geography for ordinary purposes, a good carriage, good manners, and a really thorough knowledge of all domestic arts. If they have any depth or ^mestness of nature, they must also have acquired right views of life, and a strong impetus toward a pure and healthful and womanly womanhood. ‘

Eastman makes no allusion to the wide-spread public debates as to what constituted a

“pure and healthful and womanly womanhood” during the Progressive era in which she wrote, asserting instead a stable category o f domestic “womanhood” as the goal for

“earnest” students. Snnilarly, her vague ideal, “right views of life,” justifies her preference for white women teachers instead of men as those best able to convey a

“civilizing” cultural influence to Indian girls. Eastman’s article ends by imagining a happy “Sioux baby bom in a civilized environment,” meanmg the home of parents

73 educated by white women. She asks, “Is there not every reason to hope for the future of

such as he, whose mothers have learned to make and to keep a home?” Her conclusion denigrates indigenous models of home-makmg by claiming that the real “home” the girls are taught to keep at school provides the only hope for their future children. Invoking the long-popular model of republican motherhood, wherein the patriotic wife and mother is charged with raising virtuous (and male) citizens, Eastman seeks to include native women in the work of the nation. However, as the story of Zhkala-Sa (Gertrude

Simmons Bonnin) will show, such “inclusion” through Americanization came at the erpense o f tribal identity and fomily relations, leaving its target subjects to find their way home after spending years on a fi’ontier defined by progressivism in the name of

Americanization.^

This chapter focuses on the autobiographical essays by Zitkala-Sa (1876-1938), a

Nakota Sioux woman educated by white missionaries. Bom as Gertrude Simmons on the

Yankton reservation in South Dakota, Zhkala-Sa was the daughter of a Sioux woman,

Ellen Simmons, and a whhe man who abandoned the family before her birth. ^ She was raised in Sioux culture until she was taken by missionaries at age eight to Whhe’s

Manual Labor histitute in Indiana. After graduation, she briefly taught at the Carlisle

Indian Industrial School before heading to Boston to study the violin and concentrate on her writing. In May 1902, she married Raymond Bonnm, a Sioux workmg as an Indian agent, and moved to the Uintah and Ouray reservation in Utah. There her career focus shifted toward direct political activism for indigenous peoples, as she worked among the

Utah Indians and later, when the fomily moved to Washmgton, D C , as secretary for the

74 Society of the American Indian (SAI), an Indian Reform group founded and run by progressive American Indians/ In 1926, Zhkala-Sa founded the National Council of

American Indians, of which she served as president until her death in 1938. Rising out of her early experiences, Zhkala-Sa’s autobiographical essays and stories frequently rely on a thematics of loss, displacement, and death, challenging the institutionalized complacency of Americans toward the rights and aspirations of native peoples. At the same thne, Zhkala-Sa’s work often reafBrms the progressive vision o f America as a

“melting pot,” a idealized bastion of democracy and equality that should make a place for the “educated, refined, and patriotic Indian.”^

Zhkala-Sa’s examination of her time as a student and later a teacher at U.S.

Indian schools rejects the “natural” hierarchy of cultures and peoples which Eastman’s work assumes. Instead, she offers an alternative to the predominant Anglo-American visions of the frontier during the Progressive era, especially the nostalgic lament over a fading wilderness (Turner, Roosevelt) and the reformers’ version o f the “Vanishing

Americans” who must assimilate or foce extinction.^ While Zhkala-Sa became allied with so-called “Red Progressives,” Indians educated at U.S. institutions who promoted

Americanization and citizenship for native peoples, her autobiography also is a testament to her bicultural identffîcations as a Sioux and an American, her mutual identifications rather than her “conversion” to whhe American culture.^ Her narrative about the encounter between whhe and Sioux cultures focuses on mothers and daughters, and on relations between traditional and progressive Indians, showing how Christian boarding schools fractured many close-knh families on reservations and usurped the parental

75 rights and responsibilities of native peoples. Like Eastman's article, Zitkala-Sa’s autobiography also turns to the image of the child as the heart and future of a nation; however, h ^ narrative begins with a child’s identification with her mother’s rage at the injustices of U.S. colonization. Americanization thus becomes a process wrought out of blood and loss, as Zitkala-Sa’s story begins with the death o f a young sister on a fisrced march fiom a stolen homeland and ends with her dislocation fiom her mother because of her American education.

This maternal dislocation defines the fiontier for Zitkala-Sa, as the first chapters of her opening essay cast the days before her schooling and entrance into the language and mores of white America as peacefiil and harmonious, a quiet world shared by mother, daughter, and their Sioux community. Her eventual separation fiom her mother marks her entrance into America, and that point of departure characterizes her

«(perience of cross-cultural encounters m a colonial context. Zitkala-Sa shares fiagments of memory, isolated moments around the campfire telling stories, mornings spent leammg beadwork fiom her mother or running through the hiHs with her fiiends.

Everywhere, she feels her mother’s love and protection; her identification with her mother, she str^ses, is complete. The call to identify with the colonizer, a call which links a people’s survival to asshnilation, is aligned in her narrative with this break with the maternal, the source of traditional culture and identity for the narrator. In a progressive refiiimeris fimnework, the reproduction of an Indian identity is thus predicated upon a split with the mother, leavmg an artificial "mother” in her place—the

76 moral authority of white womanhood variously embodied by women schoolteachers and missionaries, activists, and the Statue o f Liberty.

Despite her progressive leanings, Zhkala-Sa’s autobiographical essays and stories repeatedly reveal an ambivalent relation to America and its representatives. Her symbolic use of her mother arises from this ambivalence. Zitkala-Sa places her mother at the center of her narrative, metonymically linking her to the frontier as an emblem of what is lost and found at the nation’s limits. Moreover, Zitkala-Sa challenges the progressive discourse of white female moral authority central to many Indian schools and

Americanization programs, replacing Eastman’s imagery of civilizing white womanhood with a complex portrait of the Sioux mother one young girl must repeatedly leave behind. Through the absent/present figure of her mother, Zitkala-Sa’s essays intensify the sense of missing voices, contested territories, and personal loss that lurks in the margins of Eastman’s depiction of womanhood—both white and Sioux—on the

American frontier. Like Eastman’s frontier memoir, Zitkala-Sa’s essays intersect multiple discourses of gender, race, and citizenship, but from a perspective rooted in

Sioux life and culture. In the end, Zitkala-Sa’s text undermines Eastman’s unwavering moral confidence in progressive assimilation projects, as she seeks in autobiography’s model of individualism a means to narrate an indigenous American identity defined by the micounter with whites, an encounter she ultimately wants to control through the fr)rce of her self-representation.

2StkaIa-Sa published three personal essays in the Atlantic Monthly m 1900, teOtng a story that bridged the gap between her childhood among the Yankton Sioux and

77 the Anglo-American world she entered at a Quaker Indian School.* Her first collection of stories. Old Indian Legends, was published in 1901. In December 1902, the magazine published her essay “Why I Am a Pagan,” upsetting the Carlisle progressives who once saw Zhkala-Sa as an emblem of Indian assimilation to American society. Several o f her stories were collected with these essays and published in 1921 American Indian

Stories^ Arnold BCrupat notes that Zitkala-Sa’s autobiographical writing was done by the time she was twenty-five; the years she narrates span the death of Custer through the massacre at Wounded Knee and the Dawes allotment era.‘“ Her experiences of leaving the reservation, studying at a mission boarding school, and feeling dislocated upon her return home to the Yankton agency occur during this tumultuous period. In her journeys, she engages multiple models of identity, as Government and Christian reformers, the Boston literati who encourage her writing, her family, and Sioux progressives and traditionalists all make claims upon her. Through autobiography,

Zitkala-Sa engages these competing demands and beliefo in order to stake her claim to a hybrid subject-position that simultaneously accepts and rejects the parameters for speaking as an American. In domg so, she articulates an alternative symbolic to Eastman for representing the fi'ontier of progressive reform, one defined by a progressive Indian woman yet centered around the image o f her traditional Sioux mother.

"Impressions of an Indian Childhood”: Reclaiming the Frontier

Appropriately, Zhkala-Sa opens her essay “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” whh the image of her mother’s face. Her first chapter dramatically describes the infustices committed by the “palefoces^ upon Sioux people. She contrasts the carefree

78 and colorftil joy of her young body with her mother’s: “Often she was sad and silent at which times her full arched lips were compressed into hard and bitter lines, and shadows fell under her black eyes” (7). The older woman’s sorrow over the death of a daughter and a brother during a forced removal sets the stage for her reluctance to allow her youngest child to head East to school. The writer’s memory of this sorrow tinges all three essays with the atmosphere of loss. Her mother’s foce and voice represent another moral economy at work in Zitkala-Sa’s life, even at the moment of her greatest triumphs in the white world. Her essay ends with a backward glance at the retreating figure of her mother, and an ominous tone enters her description of an exciting departure ftom the reservation in the company of white missionaries. “When I saw the lonely figure of my mother vanish in the distance, a sense of regret settled heavily upon me. 1 felt suddenly w ^k, as iff might fall limp to the ground. I was in the hands of strangers whom my mother did not fully trust” (44-45). Her decision to go to the boarding school marks for the author “the first time I had ever been so unwilling to give up my own desire that I refused to hearken to my mother’s voice” (43). The young girl, hired by the kind words of intervening whites, forgets her mother for the first time in the story, breaking custom through a defiant assertion of her individual wOl. This failure to listen will haunt the rest of her autobiography, as it fimnes a child’s life-changingdecision and recasts the frontier as a place where the author first began to turn away from her mother and her culture.

This tummg away is not complete, nor does it lead Zhkala-Sa to an uncomplicated identity as an “American.” She finds herself caught in-between, and her autobiography, written as a young woman trymg to make sense of her complicated life

79 thus 6 r, becomes an attempt to establish a coherent voice for such confusing and

difihcult ecperiences. Unfortunately, even Zitkala-Sa’s writing for mainstream

publications often was sandwiched between stereotypical representations of Native

Americans, emblematic of her attempt to find a place from which to speak to the world

as a Sioux woman and an American. Still, her intensive production early in her life

suggests she saw writing as a means not only to express her individual subjectivity but

also to contradict popular racist attitudes toward native peoples.

Thus, in her brief career as an autobiographer, Zhkala-Sa explored the

possibilities for constructing an identity out of two cultures, while retaining a distinct

sense of herself as an indigenous woman. In a study o f American Indian women’s lives,

Rayna Green concludes that Zhkala-Sa “rebelled against the traditional role assigned to

her by both Sioux and whhe society, and her political activism allowed her to escape

some of the restrictions imposed on her by both worlds.”" Zhkala-Sa begins to

articulate this identity through autobiography, as she adapts the genre’s model of individualism, which differs from most oral traditions in Native America, to her complex subject position. In her hands, autobiography becomes especially suhed for representing the often isolating experience of hybridhy under colonization. “ According to Gretchen

Bataille and Kathleen Sands, American Indian women’s autobiography is not a dhect descendant of indigenous oral forms, but thqr do share several basic characteristics, such as “emphasis on event, attention to the sacredness o f language, concern whh landscape,

[and] afSrmation of cultural values and tribal soKdarhy.”^ Autobiography focuses more on the hherior experience o f an individual than traditional stories, which allows Zhkala-

80 Sa to describe the complex feelings of loss and triumph, homesickness and rebellion, that were part of becoming an exemplar of the Christian reformers^ agenda. She is aware of how her personal story can be co-opted for a public interest, and she resists that phenomenon through autobiographical writing that defines the firontier not fi^om the perspective of the easterner heading West but fi*om the viewpoint of the Other looking back. Krupat argues that “to see the Indian autobiography as a ground on which two cultures meet is to see it as the tmrtual equivalent of the fi'ontier,” where the fi'ontier does not simply mean the end o f “civilization” but also the territory upon which two cultures interact. For Zhkala-Sa, the fi'ontier is defined by the uncivilized behavior of white

Americans, those who break treaties and perpetuate racist attitudes in the name of the nation. Yet h also bears a more personal meaning, as the place where definitions of

“home” and “identity” become fiagmented and unstable, a place of femHial rupture and individual alienation which necesshates a rewriting of the self in both personal and collective terms.

Building fi'om the work of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha has theorized how the repressed histories of subordinated peoples can intervene in the homogenizing histories of the present. He describes the “condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations” as “unhomely,” an estranging sense that what one has taken for granted, the fiuniliar, is suddenly strange, leaving oneself in-between, uncertain which way to turn to find oneself home again. The act of re-naming can be an attempt to manage that mcperience, to take control of it through the power of language to define and classify.

However, such names always retain an ofif-space, something that exceeds or escapes the

SI name’s mtentîon. As a young woman, Gertrude Simmons renamed herself Zitkala-Sa

(Lakota meaning "Red Bird") after her sister-in-law claimed that she had deserted her people by receiving an American education and should give up her family name of

“Simmons.” She wrote o f this name change to her one-time fiancé and fellow Indian progressive, Carlos Montezuma: "Well, you can guess how queer I felt—away fi’om my own people—homeless—penniless—and even without a name! Then I chose to make a name fi)r myself—and I guess I have made Zhkala-Sa’ known—for even Italy writes it in her language.”'^ This gesture marks both a break ftom her family and a reassertion of her indigenous roots in the face of acculturation. It is also, as she notes, part of the public identity Zitkala-Sa feshions fer herself through her writing and activism beginning in 1900.

The subject o f her autobiography is produced in the interstices between these two names, names which speak, in different ways, to the effects of colonization on indigenous peoples and their responses. “Gertrude Simmons” names the mked-blood person without a fether, while “Zhkala-Sa” names the identity forged through her attempt to reclahn and refeshion a Sioux identity after her American schooling. From the beginning, her self-representation as Zitkala-Sa foregrounds the role of interpretation in telling the “truth” of one’s Ihe, one’s history, one’s nation. As Sidonie Smhh argues,

“autobiographical practices become occasions for the staging of identity, and autobiographical strategies occasions fer the staging of agenqr.”^^ In her refiisal to be merely the object o f assimilation, Zhkala-Sa feshions an autobiographical subject that sets the stage fer her future activism fer mdigenous rights. By ultimately moving away

82 from what Paul Smith has called the ideological “subject,” the fixed subject positioa that represents the culturally legitimated models of identity (here the assimilated Indian and/or the Indian-American alienated from two cultures), Zitkala-Sa embraces the perft)rmativity o f the subject as the essence of narrating the self

According to Dexter Fisher, Zitkala-Sa struggles throughout her autobiographical writing ^‘toward a vision of wholeness” in which the competing parts of her life would come together. Although he values her creativity, Fisher sees Zhkala-Sa’s writing as failing in this regard, arguing that her work is “a model of ambivalences, of oscillations between two diametrically opposed worlds.”^® Moving away from the model of cultural opposition, Martha Cutter has argued more recently that Zhkala-Sa’s narratives should not be judged according to traditional “Euro-American male models” of autobiography based on integration and coherency. In 6ct, her writing can be read as actively “reject[ing] the notion of a unified, coherent, transcendent identity achieved through linguistic self-authentication.” “ Leigh Gilmore suggest reading women’s self- representational writing in terms of a text’s “autobiographies”—in other words, reading a tact’s interruptions and eruptions, its resistances and contradictions, as “strategies of self-representation.”^^ Rather than adhere to traditional genre qualifications for women’s autobiography, we should read such mterruptions as “a discursive effect of gender politics and self-representation,” one which “evidences the possibilities of and limitations on women’s self-representation.”^ Instead of seeking the integrated “I” of

America in Zitkala-Sa’s narrative, I read her self representation as an attempt to destabilize a national botty politic that depends upon a myth o f incorporation and

» homogenization. In particular, through her strategic use of memory as a mode of resistance, Zhkala-Sa rejects the call to Americanization that demands she forget all that she comes from. By allowing herself to repeatedly say o f her fridian childhood, “I remember,” Zhkala-Sa brmgs the power of her home alive and portrays hs loss all the more painfully.

One chapter especially emphasizes the central role of memory in Zitkala-Sa’s writing. “The Dead Man’s Plum Bush” begins on the day of a village feast celebrating a young man’s attainment of warrior status. Zitkala-Sa describes the excitement of the scene, the dress of the unmarried women and the broiling of venison and wild duck. But what most stands out retrospective^ is an incident that occurs while Zhkala-Sa is walking whh her mother to the feast. The young ghl stops to pick a plum from a small bush, when her mother warns her away because h is the graveshe of a young brave. Her mother warns her that his bones are woven into the roots of this bush and that the ghl should respect the dead. “The lasting impression of that day, as 1 recall h now, is what my mother told me about the dead man’s plum bush”(33). Memory is central to the act of storytelling especially in oral cultures where stories are a shared tradition. Zhkala-Sa sees herself as shaped by memory, by what and how she remembers, and she resists the expectation that self-representation be seamless and uninterrupted. Instead, her stories create the ef&ct of childhood moments rising to the surface of consciousness, waiting to be shared. Often the narrator lingers on the lastmg impression of a taste or a woman’s foce, mstead of presenting a unified voice from the past that orders those impressions mto a coherent and singular meanmg. Thus, com drymg, a ground squhrel, a bag of

u marbles, and her mother^s words comprise the pieces o f a childhood. While Zhkala-Sa constructs her essays for the Atlantic Monthly within the general conventions of autobiography, her texts seem unwilling to present memory as strictly a marker of an individual's truth. As Gilmore states, autobiographers “attempt to situate themselves in relation to discourses of truth’ and identity' while recognizing, in various ways, the insufficiency of any single discourse to ecpress the ' subject' of their writing.”^ Zitkala-

Sa’s essays are interested in authorizing the self she becomes through the violent and traumatic “truth” of her experience; her narrative also reflects an awareness that a given

“truth” can be interpreted differently, and that memory is one’s interpretation of a shared experience. In Zitkala-Sa’s case, the character of her mother circulates in her essays as a reminder o f an alternative reading of American law and custom, one which challenges colonial authority, as well as the choices Zhkala-Sa has made.

The “authorization” of Zhkala-Sa’s identity is complicated by her audience—a predominantly whhe American readership of a Boston-based magazine. Zhkala-Sa fictionalized aspects of her life in these essays, and omits key elements, such as the specific nature of her life-long rift whh her mother. She obscures certain facts, including that her father was white and deserted the &mily. The only mention of him in her narrative is part of her mother’s bitter lhany of the whhe man’s crimes: “Since then your fitther too has been buried in a hill nearer the rising sun” (10). However, this move does not discount her seffrepresentation as a “lie.” Rather, such a strategic omission points to the “discursive contradictions m the representation o f identity,” the dis-unhy necessarily at work in telling the “truth” o f one's 1^ to outsiders.^ hi writing her story for a

85 mainstream U.S. audience, Zitkala-Sa deploys ambiguity as a strategy for literal and literary survival. At the same thne, ambiguity comes to define the very conditions of living on the cultural and psychological frontiers that shaped Zhkala-Sa’s public identity.

Indeed, as Patricia Okker shows, her pieces m Harper’s Monthly and The Atlantic

M onthly appeared alongside literature about native peoples written by whites, including

Mary Johnston's historical novel. To Have and To Hold, which was filled with stereotypical and racist images of Native Americans as devilish “heathens” and

“savages.”^ This serialized novel almost doubled The Atlantic M onthly's circulation.

Zitkala-Sa's writmg for mainstream US publications likely was read as part of a continuum of representations of tribal peoples dominated by whites, circulated as part of the popular national frntasies of the American West. As Green argues, such literature participates in the popular nineteenth-century myth in the national consciousness;

“American Indians edsted as figures in the American past. They had performed a historical mission. They had challenged white settlers who trekked across the continent.”^ This myth incorporated native peoples into the narrative of national origins, where the romanticized character of the Indian was absorbed into the

Coopemian romance of the American male individual. Part and parcel of the “vanishing fridian” motif popularized in late nineteenth-century America, this story erases women as well as the specificity of tribal cultures, as Green aptly demonstrates.^ Zitkala-Sa writes in the margms of these texts, literally placmg her work between the spaces granted to writers like Johnston. Ambigui^ then may be unavoidable, given the context m which she knew her work would be situated and received.

86 This ambiguity appears frequently around the figure of Zitkala-Sa’s mother. The

first section of “Indian Childhood” is called “My Mother,” and her mother’s judgement

and sadness haunts the writer through the final pages of “An Indian Teacher Among

Indians.” Her mother’s anger over her ongoing education disturbs Zhkala-Sa, while her

time spent in the East repeatedly ends in alienation, always threatening to turn her into

“the petrified Indian woman of whom my mother used to tell me.... alive, in ray tomb, I

was destitute!” (97). The imagery of her body as a living tomb places the stories of her

mother in a new context: Zhkala-Sa fears she has lost too much of herself in her pursuh

of an American education, and that loss materializes in a mythic image from her

childhood. In these dark moments, she fears she has lost her sphh, like she has lost her

mother, to the assimilated Indian identity of the missionary and schoolteacher’s making.

Autobiography is the key out of the tomb, the vehicle to represait her «tperiences as

legitimate and powerful. At the same time, however, Zitkala-Sa does not reveal the frill

nature of this growing estrangement from her mother, which eventually culmmates in a bitter dispute over her mother’s right to a patent in fee for her land allotment.^ She must write through the loss of her mother in order to speak out against U.S. injustices toward Native Americans, but she evades addressing how a contemporary problem— allotment—helped effect the break between mother and daughter. Instead, Zitkala-Sa foregrounds her girlhood memories of her mother as the emblem of indigenous identity and resistance to colonialism, an emblem which fades in her essays as her mother also adapts and changes under new colonial policies and practices.

87 StOl, through her focus on the importance of female figures in her childhood, as well as the pain of her adult separation firom her mother, Zhkala-Sa shifts the terms of what it means to be an American as well as a citizen. As an mdividual, she seeks both full participation in America but wants her story, her culture, to be part of that entity. At the end of “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” she writes, “for the whhe man’s papers I had given up my fàhh in the Great Sphh. 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, 1 gave her up, also. I made no fiiends among the race of people I loathed. Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted firom my mother, nature, and God” (97). These pained words capture her dislocation firom both cultures, as well as her refusal to capitulate to whhe ecpectations that she see her youth as savage. Nonetheless, she supports the cause o f full enfi-ancbisement for Indian peoples m her work whh the SAI and the National

Council of American Indians. For Zhkala-Sa, citizenship provides the legitimacy for her position; h does not erase indigenous identity, but empowers native peoples to make

America over in their image. America itself becomes hybrid in her work, not a homogenous whole, but a philosophical ideal that native peoples can add to rather than shnply disappear whhin. However, to clahn a hybrid identity is painfU, and Zhkala-Sa shows m her memon how she often feels caught between two cultures and not fiiOy a part o f either one. Significantly, her “loss” of her mother—as a relationship and a view o f life—seems befamd Zhkala-Sa’s eventual self-assertion as a woman, an activist, and an la&axLm American Indicat Stories. She cannot deny who she is, cannot erase her Sioux

8S childhood or her éducation at white American schools, so instead she challenges the assumption that to hecoTD& Am erican forever excludes a life as a proud Sioux woman.

Zhkala-Sa was publishing at a time when Americans had become engaged intensely in the construction of a national history and a unffîed identity. Bhabha has described, the national past as a process of disavowal of cultural, social and individual differences among the resident population (native and alien). The national past depends not on a repression of the contradictions that inhabh the social spaces of the nation, nor does h homogenize various histories, cultures, and ethnicities into an undifferentiated whole. Rather, the creation of a national past relies on a turning away from the

“differential, disjunctive cultural present, and presence, of modem society. But in hs backward glance, the present of nationness turns ambivalent and anxious.’'^' In the context of Zhkala-Sa’s bicultural voice, this “creation” of the national past points to the possibhhy that her American readers are caught in a bipolar historical condition as well,

reading the “authentic” life-story of an assimilated Sioux to find a part of themselves, of their shared national origins. Her hybridhy resonates whh the anxious national desire to disavow the fiagmentary nature of the national body. Her refusal to become lost in the wilds of no-man’s land makes Zhkala-Sa’s autobiography distinctive because she claims

the periphery as the condition of assimilation, rejecting the national attempt to elide the colonial violence of forced acculturarioiL

This process begms whh her rejection of the whhe women working at Whhe’s

School as misinformed drudges. For «ample, she describes the death of a fiiend after a

period o f medical neglect: “The cfying Indian girl talked disconnectedly of Jesus the

89 Christ and the paleâce who was cooling her swollen hands and feet" (67). The Bible lies among the tangled bedclothes, and Zhkala-Sa appears bitterly aware of the contradictions between the promises held out by these whhe women and the reality of her hiend’s death. She declares, ‘1 blamed the hard-working, well-meaning, ignorant woman who was inculcating in our hearts her superstitious ideas”(67). In her narrative, the soothing balm of female moral authority is recast as a worn-out and callous whhe woman: “Her small, tired fece was coldly lighted whh a pair of large gray eyes. She stood still in a halo o f authority, while over the rim of her spectacles her eyes pried nervously about the room” (65-66). Her relationship to her teachers and caretakers at the school is full of conflict and resentment over their inability to value her traditional culture. Then “misinformation” stems from an uncompromising belief in binaristic models o f civilization/savagery and survtvalZ&ctinction that cast the young ghl's Sioux home as something akin to a death warrant, charming as an ancient artifact but deadly as a way of life. By portraying the whhe women as spiritless and superstitious, Zhkala-Sa turns the binary law of the nation on hs head, locating the primitive in the hearts of her captors.

Nonetheless, although hurt and angry, the young ghl finds that sustained bitterness and blame only strengthen the c h ain swhich bind her “individuality like a mummy fer burial.” Sîgnffîcantly, the school geared toward the mculcation of

“American” values such as individualisai appears in her story as a vise which chokes all independence out of hs charges. In response, Zhkala-Sa determines that active, albeh subtle, resistance agamst the indoctrination of the school is the only way to survive. She

90 must forge an independent path, outside the normative behavior constraints of the Indian school, a decision that requires a rejection of the assumed moral authority of white female missionaries and teachers in charge of her education.

However, to step o ff this path does not mean one’s former roadway is still nearby. Zhkala-Sa writes of her return to the reservation and her mother’s home after three years at the Quaker school as “four strange summers,” where she does not know who she is. “I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid.... I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a wild Indian nor a tame one”

(69). At first, she links the pains of adolescence to assimilation, a pairing that fits with the contemporary popular belief in “cultural evolution” which privileged Western society as the teleologr of social development. Zhkala-Sa then immediately unsettles this reading when, crying because she cannot go out with her older brother and his school- educated ftiends, her mother gives her an Indian Bible as consolation. “'Here, my child, are the white man’s papers. Read a little ftom them,’ she said most piously” (73). She takes the book from her mother out of polheness, but does not read h as “h afforded me no help and was a perfect delusion to my mother” (73). Instead, she “laid h unopened on the floor, where I sat on my feet. The dnn yellow light of the braided muslin burning m a small vessel o f oil flickered and sizzled m the awfUI silent storm which followed my rejection of the Bible” (73). Her mother leaves the house to weep privately over her daughter’s unhappiness, m another key moment of distance and miscommunication between mothm* and daughter. Zitkala-Sa listens to her “mother’s voice wailing among the barren hills which held the bones of buried warriors. She called aloud for her

91 brothers’ spirits to support her in her helpless misery” (74). The mother feels helpless in the fece of her daughter’s suffering, yet Zitkala-Sa sees her mother does not feUy understand the nature of her estrangement from her home.

Over her mother’s protests, Zhkala-Sa soon leaves once more to continue her education back East. The Bible as the language of the nation held out to her by missionaries and now by her mother cannot suture her sense of rupture and dislocation, nor can h bridge the emotional distance between Zhkala-Sa and her mother. Once again, she describes herself as lifeless as she writes, “I sat stony,” and her fingers grow “icy cold” as she realizes that her mother’s weeping means that “she was grieving for me”

(74). She turns out her light before her mother’s return and dreams of running away.

When she does board the East-bound train not long after this incident, she imagines that

“h would bring me back to my mother in a few winters, when I should be grown tail, and there would be congenial fiiends awaiting me” (74). Her hope instead foreshadows the opposite, an ongoing physical and emotional separation that wül never be healed.

The Devil’s Tongue

Zitkala-Sa never tries to reclaim the Bible in her autobiography, an important rejection of the central text of America according to her missionary schooling. From the begmnin^ her mother has reminded her of the seductive power “of the white man’s lies,” and textualÆiterpersonal miscommunications and misrepresentations remain a central theme in her autobiography. For mcample, Zhkala-Sa’s subsequent successes with essay writmg and oratory are marred by racist attacks on her right to represent her college in competition. Because she refuses (or cannot, all progressive rhetoric aside) to elide her

92 difference and claim an American identity at the expense of her Sioux culture, Zitkala-

Sa’s appearance on the public stage unsettles the philosophical and moral underpinnings of Indian education and reform. In particular, the very language with which she attains success at college, and which she uses to construct an autobiographical self for American readers, often represents betrayal as well. She describes the scene of the oratory competition, where she is insulted by supporters of a competing school; “There, before that vast ocean of eyes, some college rowdies threw out a large white flag, with a drawing of a most forlorn Indian girl on it. Under this th ^ had printed in bold black letters words that ridiculed the college which was represented by a 'squaw’”(79).^ She wins a prize at the contest, but the racist slur “squaw” registers the ways in which language is used ag a in st her as well as her in a colonial context. Moreover, the colonial deployment o f a raced and seced body as a sign of what is not American adds another dimension to Zitkala-Sa’s exploration of a frontier line demarcated by the bodies of women—her own, her mother’s, and the progressive white women she meets and later works among.

Zitkala-Sa dismisses her attackers at the contest as guilty of “worse than barbarian mdeness” (79). She manipulates the sign of “barbarian,” central to colonial discourse, redirecting its signffîcation toward the oppressor. Bhabha argues for a theory of the nation’s peripheries, in order to describe the power of the margins not only to disrupt the center but to reveal its frmdamental instability. The “periphery” captures the spatial hnagming of the nation, connotmg the borderlands that delimit and defy the nation’s determinacy. My understanding of frontier as marking a literal and figurative

93 borderland in the American imaginary resonates with Bhabba’s claim that the turn to the nation’s past is always “part disavowal, part elliptical idealization, part fetishism, part splitting, part antagonism, part ambivalence.”^^ Through her appropriation o f the colonizer’s claim to “civilization,” Zitkala-Sa enacts the ambivalence at the heart of an imperialist national past. This theme, in fact, appears repeatedly in her essays, as she challenges the alleged civility of American society from her early encounters with whites on the train east (of staring children, she writes, “their mothers, instead of reproving such rude curiosity, looked closely at me, and attracted their children’s further notice to my blanket”) to her treatment at the hands of white teachers (on being tossed in the air playWy by a teacher, she writes, “nqr mother had never made a plaything of her wee daughter”). Again, Zhkala-Sa holds her mother up as the emblem of propriety and civility, through stories of communal manners strictly observed among her mother’s people and her childhood admiration of her mother’s calm and respectful demeanor.

Zhkala-Sa uses the story of a childhood dream she has to equate whhe missionary discourse whh hs own image of evil, requiring her readers to look upon

American “civilization” from the perspective of an outsider who reveals the inhumanity behind colonial justifications for forced acculturation. Once more, her mother plays a crucial role in the resolution of this dream’s conflict In the dream, which Zhkala-Sa has afro^ a teacher shows her a Bible’s illustration of Satan, she is chased around her mother’s home by the devil. “He did not speak to my mother, because he did not know the Indian language, but his ghttermg yellow eyes were fastened upon me” (63).

Althou^ 25tkala-Sa runs to her mother fr)r protection, the devil “did not fear her,” and

94 continues chasing the frightened child. Her mother does not seem to understand the danger, and it is only when the devil “stooped over me with outstretched claws [that] my mother awoke fr’om her quiet indifference, and lifted me on her lap. Whereupon the devil vanished and I was awake” (64). The ability to speak English, to read the “white man’s papers,” makes the child in this dream vulnerable to great evil. Her mother’s inability to speak English both protects the older woman fr'om the devil but makes her unable to understand her daughter’s terror. The message is straight-forward: the return to the mother, to her Sioux home, destroys the power of this disturbing figure. He ceases to signify. Zitkala-Sa reenacts the conclusion to this frightening dream by returning to the school-room with the children’s illustrated Bible Stories and defricing the book. “With a broken slate pencil I carried in my apron pocket, 1 began by scratching out his wicked ^es. A few moments later, when I was ready to leave the room, there was a ragged hole in the page where the picture of the devil had once been” (64). The hole m the book marks the absence of a legitimating center for America, as she rqects the binary between good and evil she is being taught at the school. Again she takes up the periphery, the circle rather than the oppositional binary, as the place fr'om which to tell her story.

Nevertheless, Zhkala-Sa cannot return “home” so easily, a theme which surfaces repeatedly m her essays. In too many ways, the daughter has been forced to “give her

[mother] up.” Throughout her autobiography, her mother’s disapproval signifies the individual and collective rupture that de&ed the national program of allotment and asshndation for Native Americans. “The School Days of an bidian Girl” ends whh her

95 feeling depressed despite her triumph over the racist students at the college competition;

“I laughed no more in triumph when thus alone. The little taste of victory did not satisfy a hunger in my heart, fii my mmd I saw my mother fer away on the Western plains, and

she was holding a charge against me” (80). This essay is followed in American Indian

Stories by “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” which describes her encounter with the

6mous patriarch of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Captain Richard Pratt. Despite an illness that prevents her completing college, she feels unable to return home and face

her mother’s rebuke. “Had she known of my worn condition, she would have said the white man’s papers were not worth the freedom and health I had lost by them” (81).

Instead, Zitkala-Sa heads to Pennsylvania, where she teaches at Carlisle for a year (1898-

99). Arriving at the school worn and tired, she sits surveying the dreary furnishings of her small room. Then, she writes, ‘T heard a heavy tread stop at my door. Opening it, I met the imposing figure of a stately gray-haired man.... I was awed by his wondrous height and his strong square shoulders, which I felt were a finger’s length above my head” (83). Her small stature and tired countenance lead her to think she disappoints this leader in Indian education, a man with whom she will repeatedly disagree during her year in his employ. After he leaves, the tired woman considers fodng herself up, but instead falls asleep on her bed feeling as if “years of weariness” lay upon her. Indeed, her representation of her work at Carlisle is covered with an atmosphere of sleep, as if marking the period before her political and literary awakenmg.^*^

Leaving the reader with the hnagery of her leaden sleep, 2Stkala-Sa says nothing more about her eq)eriences as a teacher, instead describing her nect trip home where she

96 finds her mother impoverished and angry at the latest round o f‘Svhhe robbers" invading their lands. Her mother teOs Zhkaia-Sa that she is praying to the “Great Spirit” to

“avenge our wrongs,” at which point Zitkala-Sa pleads, "Mother, don’t pray again! The

Great Spirit does not care if we live or die!” (92). However, her mother rejects this attitude, saying “do not talk so madly” while she strokes her prodigal daughter’s head

“as she used to do”(92). The visit ends with a curse the mother casts upon the twinkling campfires of white homesteaders that appear in the hüls around her home, a powerful image Zitkala-Sa bears with her back to the Eastern school. While Zhkala-Sa admits her mother has adopted certain elements of Euroamerican culture, such as the log cabin she lives in, she emphasizes her mother’s ongoing anti-colonial stance. The vish has the effect of a “wake-up” call in her narrative, as she returns to her progressive project at the

Indian school energized by her mother’s vehemence.

Zhkala-Sa concludes “An Indian Teacher” whh a short “Retrospection” chapter wherein she outlines the Wings of the government boarding school. Speaking now fi'om the “inside,” Zhkala-Sa refuses to tow the line. She rejects the inherent “civilizing” value of the “iron routine” of government boarding schools, which stifles creativity and independent thought, and details the injustices she saw enacted upon the identities and physical well-being o f numerous indigenous children. She decries the smug satisfaction of Eastern visitors to Indian schools as th ^ come to see “the children of savage warriors so docile and industrious,” yet W to witness the abuses of the ^stem. Her conclusion?

“Many have passed idly through the Indian schools during the last decade, aff erward to boast of their charity to the North American Indian. But few there are who have paused

97 to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization” (98-99). The recovery of her spirit in the fece of the brutalizing force of

American “civilization” becomes the project of her narrative, rather than a celebration of how she came to be an “American.” Zitkala-Sa supported citizenship for Indians and incorporation into America. What the nation means, however, is a question she believes she is as entitled to answer as any other American writer. America is something other than what she has learned at school and heard from the missionaries. At the same time, it is also more than the great evü of her mother’s stories. The nation is part of who she is, and she is part of it.

Zhkala-Sa and her mother’s relationship to each other, to Sioux culture, to

America, and Christianity grow more complicated whh each autobiographical essay she wrote. As Ruth Spack has noted, Zhkala-Sa began to make h increasingly clear that she rejected the equation of America whh Christianity, a point that comes to fruition whh the publication in H arper's of her essay “Why I Am a Pagan.”^* Repeatedly encountering the racism inherent in the past and present of America, she finally settles on “a new way of solving the problem of my inner self’(97). She leaves teaching to study violin at the

Boston Conservatory of Music, and to focus on her writing about her life and Sioux culture. Her rejection of Carlisle and the “whhe man’s papers” comes to Iherary fiuhion in “Why I Am a Pagan,” placed out of chronological order in the 1921 collection

American Indian Stories in order to follow “An fridian Teacher Among Indians.” Her turn toward a Pan-Indian spirituality figures centrally in this “new way” of articulatmg her identhy.^^ Spack argues that, through this arrangement, the essay serves as a

98 transMon from the story of one individual’s experience with Christian efforts to assimilate native peoples to “the larger project of destroying all of Sioux sacred culture.On two levels then, this essay represents Zitkala-Sa’s complex understanding o f the voice of memoir, as she tells her story more through the resonances among various pieces than as an attempt to create explicit bridges among her lived experiences and the stories she tells, between her own life and the lives of her people. Similarly, her decision to 6shion her own spirituality based on the traditions she learned as a child marks her recognition that she can never simply go back home; instead, the present is shaped out of her refashioning o f the past—of tradition, of memory, of culture—in order to find a way to live through as well as on the peripheries of America. It also marks her attempt to bring the pieces of her mother’s stories and their shared memories together in a philosophical declaration of her identity.

This attempt to define her identity through an interpretation of indigenous spirituality ultimately leaves more questions in its wake than a coherent image of

Gertrude Shnmons Bonnin and Zhkala-Sa. “Why 1 Am a Pagan” appeared in The

Atlantic Monthly in 1902. As noted, h immediately follows the three autobiographical essays in the collection American fncSan Stories; significantly, two versions of this collection were published m 1921, both by Hayworth Publishmg House. In one, the origmal title, “Wly I Am a Pagan,” was used while the other version changed the title to

“The Great Spirh.” Their endings also differ, a point to which 1 will return. The essay focuses on the narrator’s close identification whh nature, begmning whh the declaration,

“when the sphh swells my breast I love to roam leisurely among the green hills” (101).

99 Her reverie grows until she loses the sense of her body’s distinction from the land. “My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand,” she writes, as she is surrounded by “the loving Mystery” (101). After this meditation on the banks of the

Missouri River, the narrator returns to her mother’s home, following “an ancient trad.”

On her return, she sits at her desk still feeling in touch with everyone around her, to the point where even racial distinctions—so powerful a force in her earlier essays— disappear “The racial lines, which once were bitterly real, now serve nothing more than marking out a living mosaic of human beings. And even here men of the same color are like the ivory keys of one instrument where each resembles all the rest, yet varies from them in pitch and quality of voice”(I04). Unfortunately, her sense of interconnection and peacefulness is disrupted by the coming of the “native preacher” to whom she listens respectfully, “though he mouth most strangely the jangling phrases o f a bigoted creed”

(105). Suddenly, the discordant sounds of a religion that tried to split her from her mother, her people, and a way of life fills the room, falling aptfy from the mouth of a baptized Sioux. The atmosphere of the room shifts and grows heavy, as the narrator listens to the words of reward and punishment, of heaven and heU, in her kinsman’s reading of the Bible.

In this scene, Zhkala-Sa tries to splh word and body asunder, as she separates the native botfy^ of the preacher from his colonized speech—he moutiis “most strangely” the words of “a bigoted creed.” The strangeness is his rejection of the frhh of his people; his estrangement from that identity speaks to the narrator’s need to resolve her own experience of dislocation «pressed in Zhkala-Sa’s earlier essays. The preacher tells her,

100 “Cousin, I was taught long years ago by kind missionaries to read the holy book. These godly men taught me also the folly of our old beliefs” (105). She responds hospit^ly, noting, “I offered midday meal to the converted Indian sitting wordless and with downcast fece” (106). His speech on heaven and hell renders the preacher silent; in the final moments of their encounter, he is silent and downcast. At the same time, the Word he has come to speak to the narrator temporarily ruptures her sense of interconnection with the world and humanity; visions of hell, “torturing flames,” and “evil hands” fill her head as she prepares the meal.

Silence repeatedly fills the room during this visit, broken by violent images and troubling memories. The narrator watches her visitor sitting quietly, clasping and unclasping his fingers, until into her mind “like instantaneous lightning flashes came pictures of my own mother’s making, for she, too, is now a follower of the new superstition” ( 106). The narrator quotes her mother’s story of how their cabin was saved fi'om the burning taper of vandals through the power of the Bible. Miraculously, the taper burnt out before it could damage the home and was found lying directly below a shelf with the Bible on it. Her mother declares, “Surely some great power is hid in the sacred book!” ( 106). Her inclusion of her mother’s voice in quotations allows the narrator to invoke her mother’s presence once again, but this time as evidence of the elder woman’s colonized identity. The mother’s story is powerfiil, and the daughter refiises to accept or reject her interpretation of the Bible’s mystical power. Instead, she lets the quote stand alone, movh% back to the im%e of the silent and downcast preacher who hurries away at the first sound of the church bell. What the narrator does reject is

101 the erasure o f Indian identity in these phrases and stories she hears. Her representation of the native preacher signifies the rhetorical violence of a missionary discourse that discounts her culture and religion, leaving the man silent while Zitkala-Sa finds her voice. 39

Zhkala-Sa wrhes that her encounter whh the preacher reminded her of an article in a missionary paper in which “a Christian’ pugilist grossly perverted the spirh o f my pen” (107). This perversion of her text draws a parallel to the perversion of indigenous belief that she sees in both the preacher and her mother. The beliefs they now hold seem to splh them apart from the reality of the world in which they live; the natural world and the political world of America which shapes their experiences of the land are overshadowed by their adopted Christian dogma. The narrator concludes:

1 would not forget that the pale-6ced missionary and the hoodooed aborigine are both God’s creatures, though small indeed their own conceptions of Infinhe Love. A wee child toddling in a wonder world, 1 prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. (107)

Her conclusion thus returns to her opening imagery o f union and harmony. She rejects the “hoodoo” of dogma for an agnostic relation to nature where she wanders like a child, somehow fi'ee and apart fi'om colonialism. Significantly, the figure of her mother finally has lost its force as well, mired in a colonial belief-system which her daughter, school- educated teacher, author, and musician, now rejects.

However, the contented tone o f the essay cannot entirely evade the disruptive presence of the native preacher, and her mother’s stories o f the Bible’s power still shoot

102 through the narrator like a lightning bolt. Zitkala-Sa’s narration of a Pan-Indian form of spiritual identity attempts to leave these troubling presences behind, as the narrator adds no further comment on her mother’s story except to lump her into the category of

“hoodooed aborigine.” Her dismissal is telling. Zitkala-Sa elsewhere wrote about specific native peoples as “ignorant” and “superstitious,” revealing her ambivalence about native cultures, as well as about Christianity, despite this portrait of a close connection to nature as reflective of indigenous identity.^ The problem of the two endings in the 1921 versions of this essay perhaps best encapsulates Zrtkala-Sa’s ambivalence and ambiguity about her identification as an American and an Indian. The original essay ended with the sentence, “If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, 1 am a Pagan.” The version entitled “The Great Spirit” cut this last sentence, adding instead:

“Here, in a fleeting quiet, 1 am awakened by the fluttering robe of the Great Spirit. To my hmermost consciousness the phenomenal universe is a royal mantle, vibrating with

His divine breath. Caught in its flowing fiinges are the spangles and oscillating brilliants of sun, moon, and stars” ( 107). The original ending seems defiant, claiming a position as

Pagan in an era when belief in any religion in America other than Protestant forms of

Christianity was firequently suspect. The second version has no reference to Paganism and concludes with overblown imagery that seems to echo familiar Biblical images as well as the Greco-Roman statuary so popular in this period fi)r memorializing the nation.

Why this change in 1921, and why in only one version of the text? The odd publication history o f this essay points to the possibility that Zhkala-Sa was trying to evade or could not answer the question of the “truth” of her identity as a mediator between two

103 cultures, two religions, and two worlds. The title change perhaps is most telling, as

“The Great Spirit'* renders her t&ct as a discourse on a Pan-Indian agnosticism rather than as a declaration of indigenous religious identity opposed to Christianity (“Why I am a Pagan”). While the body o f the essay remains the same in both versions, the changes in the title and concluding paragraph nonetheless shift the reader’s attention away from

Zitkala-Sa’s strong assertion o f a distinct Indian identity and toward a figurative hybrid of Christian and Sioux beliefr floating in the sky above her.

Life as Fiction, or Fiction as Life?

In the stories included in the 1921 collection, Zitkala-Sa continues her erploration of conflicts between traditional and progressive attitudes on the reservation and contradictory actions/messages on the part of the larger American community.

These stories, originally published in the early 1900s, expose the problems faced by

Zitkala-Sa’s contemporaries on American reservations, depicting in detail the localized effects of U.S. colonial policies that take native lands and attack mdigenous communities and cultures. The first story, “The Soft-Hearted Sioux,” picks up Zitkala-Sa’s concern with intergenerational rifts, this time fr)cusing on how colonialism takes a son from his destined path and ultimately divides him from a father he loves. Under colonial influences, the young man veers from his community’s traditional path and does not

“grow up the warrior, huntsman, and husband I was to have been” (112). Instead, he goes to a mission school and returns to his people as a minister. His &ther has grown old and sick, and the young man is separated from his parents by their divergent “ideas and 6 ith ^; sitting by his father’s death bed, the narrator states, “I did not feel at home”

104 (114). The narrator grieves for his parents’ “unsaved” souls, and soon bans the village’s

“medicine-man” from his fomily’s home, leaving his father to weep with fear. However, such actions quickly turn upon the young man, who has lost sight of how colonization has gripped his people in a stranglehold that the Bible in his pocket foils to address.

When he tries to begin his “life’s work” of converting his people to Christianity, the rejected holy man challenges imn in front of the entire community, asking, “what loyal son is he who, returning to his fother’s people, wears a foreigner’s dress?” (117). He can only watch helplessly as the Sioux leader declares, “With his prayers, let him drive away the enemy! Whh his soft heart, let him keep off starvation! We shall go elsewhere to dwell upon an untainted ground” (118). Whh that, the people disband, leaving the narrator and his fother’s tepee alone on the plains, cut off from their essential support— the tribal community.

As his father weakens, a terrible winter ensues. Isolated on the plains, the “soft­ hearted” minister fails to feed his aged parents because he no longer is a skilled hunter and the buffolo herds have been devastated. In desperation, the narrator finally poaches a steer from a rancher’s herd, murdering a whhe man in the process. He returns home, only to find his fother has starved to deatii, and the story ends whh the converted Indian focing the gallows, wondering “who shall come to welcome me in the realm of strange sight” (124). IBs mother has returned to her people, leaving her son to die alone, cast out by the whhe community he had adopted and through which he had sought to bring to his people as the path to salvation. After his training at an American mission school, he has found hhnself caught between two worlds, unfit to help his fomhy and now sacrificed

105 to his adopted cause of bringing “God” to the heathens on the frontier. As he awaits his

«cecution, the narrator contemplates whether he wiH be saved or dam ned He hears his fkther^s condemnation on the wind that rattles the bars of his cell: “Your soft heart!

Your soft heart will see me die befi)re you bring me fijod!” (124). He wonders whether

“the loving Jesus [will] grant me pardon and give my soul a soothing sleep? or will my warrior &ther greet me and receive me as his son?” ( 124). This juxtaposition of

Christian salvation (the return to God the Father) to an imagined reconciliation with his

“warrior father” encapsulates the problem Zitkala-Sa seeks to represent: what has the young man lost in order to be “saved”? Ifr as his father’s rage and sadness implies, he has lost his soul as an Indian man, then what is left for him to save as an American

Christian?

The narrator answers the last question with peaceful resignation; he too is departing the terrifying colonial landscape that promised so much and left him covered in blood. He declares, “Serene and brave, my soul awaits the men to perch me on the gallows for another flight. I go” (125). His execution becomes the only path to freedom; flight becomes a metaphor fr)r death. The Word, which cut him ofT from his people and made him unfit for winter living on the plains, agam leads to silencing, manifested in the protagonist’s death. He laughs in the face of his captor, but he also dies in doubt. He dwlares, “I go,” but he is traveling to an unknown and uimamed place.

Stfll, as he looks out at the vast ecpanse b^ond his prison walls, the Soft-Hearted Sioux glimpses the answer he is seeking: “Soon, soon I shall know, for now I see the east is growing red. My heart is strong. My fiice is calm” (125). The lost son is gomg home.

106 Despite the terror and injustice of his 6te, the story’s ending resonates with Zhkala-Sa’s image of her own wandering self^ a daughter traveling through the unhomely territories of the frontier, longing for a maternal homeplace that grows ever further from reach.

The trials of “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” stem from the narrator’s loss of a viable identity for his social and cultural context. The interference of the colonial boarding school set the young man on a path away from his intended destiny as a warrior and husband, leading him to the gallows. This ending is much darker than the conclusion to

Zitkala-Sa’s essay, but not by much, as she closed “An Indian Teacher” by wondering

“whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization” (99).

Perhaps this story is part o f her answer, as this wayward Sioux man finds hope and peace through a vision of the sky “turning red,” symbolically marking new life through his death as an acculturated Indian.

Building on this theme, in “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star

Woman,” Zitkala-Sa explores the implications of colonial interference with indigenous systems of frmSial and tribal affiliation through a multi-layered narrative about land disputes and white law on the reservation. She also grapples with the same questions of personal and communal identity that are central to her autobiography, as the main Sioux characters repeatedly are forced to articulate their identity in relation to a colonizing nation. Blue-Star Woman has spent years trymg to prove her membership in the Sioux tribe, as required under U.S. laws to qualify for a land allotment. Who am I?’ had become the obsessing riddle o f her life” (159). Years of bureaucratic wrangling have left her poor, isolated, and vulnerable to manipulation. Zhkala-Sa writes, “The unwritten

107 law of heart prompted her naturally to say, 'I am a being. I am Blue-Star Woman. A piece of earth is my birthright’”(159). However, because she was an orphan, she cannot prove her tribal status, either to the government officials or to her people, who do not know her. Her “being” has no legal status, rendering her landless and nameless. As a result, she is taken advantage of by two “shrewd schemers,” Indian men working as intermediaries for the U.S. government. This inability to have her name recognized as a result of orphanhood connects to Zitkala-Sa’s autobiographical justification of her own adopted name in the face of criticisms that she had “disowned” her femily through her progressive alliances. Unlike Zhkala-Sa, though, Blue-Star Woman is unable to wrhe herself into her people’s history, ultimately losing the little she has because no one recognizes her name.

Although Blue-Star Woman recognizes that her vishors are tricksters, she feels powerless against their promises in the 6ce of her own desperate need. She is alone, without 6mily or community support. Agreeing to their usurious terms in return for their help whh her claim, Blue-Star Woman declares, “In bygone days, brave young men of the order of the Whhe-Horse-Riders sought out the aged, the poor, the widows and orphans to aid them, but th ^ did their good work without pay. The Whhe-Horse-Riders are gone. The times are changed. I am a poor old Indian woman” (169-170). Whh her acquiescence to the two men, who have eaten all her food like hungry wolves, Blue-Star

Woman is 1 ^ alone once again. Unwittingly, though, she has triggered a series of bureaucratic actions that rock the Sioux reservation. Like Blue-Star Woman, the Sioux

108 leaders find themselves powerless in the face of government dictates fi'om Washington that rupture the material and social supports on which their communities depend.

The story turns to the distress of Sioux leaders upon learning that some o f their precious land will be given to a woman they do not know, and the failed attempt of Chief

îfigh Flier to win a hearing with the U.S. government. He declares, “We were not asked to gwe land, but our land is taken fi'om us to give to another Indian. This is not right.

Lots of little children o f my tribe have no land” (172). The Government appears only as a distant, but powerful force in the story, one which can take land and interfere in tribal af&irs at its seeming discretion. Zitkala-Sa traces how U.S. Indian policies, such as allotment, work on a local level, insidiously turning allies against each other through the quiet legal machinations of U.S. representatives. Rather than tell a story of land theft that pits white characters against native peoples, Zitkala-Sa focuses this story exclusively on Indian characters: the outcast Blue-Star Woman, the Sioux elders, the manipulative

Indian government agents, and the Indian policemen who eventually must arrest High

Flier. Given her own conflicts with her mother and oldest half-brother over allotment, conflicts she suppresses in her autobiography, the plot allows Zhkala-Sa to explore how colonialism works to divide hs subjects and thus reduce resistance, certainly a central aim of the progressive policy of allotment.

Zitkala-Sa also agam takes up the question of whhe progressive women’s relationship to the “Indian Question.” As part of his desperate attempt to preserve his tribe’s claim. Chief Ifigh Flier has his granddaughter wrhe a letter for hnn to a

“prominent American woman,” asking her help in the matter “My heart is sad.

109 Washington give [sic] my tribe’s land to a woman called Blue-Star. We do not know

her” (172). He quickly heads off to mad the letter at the agency ten mdes away, but

when he nears the government buildings, he decides his mission is in vain. He is old and tired and, as he rides along the road, he reflects on the destruction of Sioux culture by the forces o f colonialism; 'Untold mischief is now possible through these broken ancient

laws. The younger generation were not being properly trained in the high virtues. A

slowly starving race was growing mad, and the pitifully weak sold their lands for a pot of

porridge” ( 174). Overcome by grie^ High Flier dismounts and budds a smad Gre. He bums the letter, sending “his message on the wings of fire.... He yet trusted that help

would come to his people before it was too late” (176).

However, the scene does not close with this sorrowful yet hopefid gesture. As

High Flier rides back home, he is overtaken by Indian policemen, “hirelings” sent by the government superintendent to arrest the old man for attempting to bum down the government agency. They don’t want to arrest him, but declare, “The superintendent says you are one of the bad Indians, singing war songs and opposing the government ad the time” ( 177). Astonished by this unjust charge and saddened by the young men’s complicity whh the government. Chief Pfigh Flier returns whh the men to jad. In his ced, he grieves for ad the loss and pain experienced by his people. “He was the voiceless man of America” (178). He and his people had suffered much, and “the chagrin of h ad, his utter helplessness to defend his own or his people’s human rights, weighed heavdy upon his spirit” (178). Like the Soft-Hearted Sioux, Edgh Flier endures a spiritual crisis in his jad ced, as he too hangs “upon hope for the day of salvation” (179). Here, his salvation

no is located in his 6itk in “good people,” and his belief that rescue will come to his troubled community through the intervention of his Mends. He wants only that his people’s independence and treaty rights be respected and that they be allowed to pursue their lives in peace. At the same time, ffigh Flier also has taken a risk, resting his hope upon that distant white woman and her allied “Friends of the Indian,” praying that they will intercede on his people’s behalf

One night, ffigh Flier has a vision. “Lo, his good friend, the American woman to whom he had sent his messages by fire, now stood there a legion! A vast multitude of women, with uplifted hands, gazed upon a huge stone image. .. . The stone figure was that of a woman upon the brink of the Great Waters, facing eastward. The myriad living hands remained uplifted till the stone woman began to show signs of life” (179). The figure is the Statue of Liberty, who had once turned her back on Native peoples, says the narrator, but whose face is now “aglow with compassion.” In the final moments of the vision, “her torch flamed brighter and whiter till hs radiance reached into the obscure and remote places of the land. Her light of hberty penetrated Indian reservations. A loud shout of joy rose up from the Indians of the earth, everywhere!” (180). The vision gives

High Flier the strength to finish his prison sentence and emerge whh hope to the joyful arms of his people. A new America has been borne in his mind through the figure of progressive whhe womanhood, and he finds a “mute dignity” in the compassionate gaze o f this female personification of America.

Undoubtedly, ZhkalarSa’s turn to the female embodhnent of America, Lady

Liberty, is not without hs hony, as the Chief is released from prison after this vision and

III forced to make a deal with the same two swindlers who cheated Blue-Star Woman.

Indeed, the story’s scene speaks to failure of the model of fomale moral authority, signified by ffigh Flier’s letter to a sympathetic white woman, to prevent the theft of tribal lands and the destruction of traditional communities. Instead, her conclusion offers another, darker story of how liberty is bought and sold in America. Amidst great fonfare, the Chief is released fi’om prison to his people. H s son greets him, along with the two Indian agents, who have a document for High Flier to sign. H s son says, “It is our agreement. I pledged to pay them half of your land if they got you out of jail” (181-

182). The older man sighs, and remains silent. “Words were vain. He pressed his indelible thumb mark, his signature it was, upon the deed, and drove home with his son”(182). Here the word and the body are linked once again, as his unique thumbprint becomes the sign which “authorizes” the Chiefs loss of land. He gives his “word” by pressing his thumb to a legal document, aware that his own voice is useless; his claim, his nation, his words are all vain when his own kinsmen have become the agents of

“Liberty.” A story that began with the riddle “Who am I?” thus ends as it began: with an

Indian’s inability to make himself recognized to America. Despite his vision. Chief Hgh

Flier loses his land; Liberty casts her gaze upon him, but his freedom comes at a high price. He goes home, but his land is lost and another promise is broken.

Throughout her career, Zitkala-Sa developed a progressive formulation of hidian rights from the perspective of a woman who left the reservation and eq)erienced both great loss and personal triumph as a result. L ik^se, American Indian Stories is her attempt to assert a distinct voice as a woman who walks among the stories, beliefo, and

112 laws of two cultures, committed to the right of both to exist. The frontier is always a contact zone, and Zhkala-Sa’s tects demonstrate how it is a territory marked not only by difference and separation but by hybridity, cross-cultural communication, and play.*** By calling the frontier a contact zone, however, I do not want to evacuate the historical specificity of the unequal power relations that fiame Zhkala-Sa's encounter with

American society. The contact zone, as Zhkala-Sa’s stories and essays show, is the site of conquest, struggle, and resistance, and many lives are destroyed or lost in the process.

By placing her mother at the meeting point between two cultures, Zhkala-Sa recasts the frontier’s symbolism in terms that speak to her personal experience.

In the context of the Indian boarding school and progressive efforts to end the reservation system, the frontier becomes an arena of “incorporation” as well as differentiation. The process of incorporating Indian peoples depended upon the

“legalized” theft of Indian lands and the destruction of tribal cultures and identities.

Progressivist Indian reform, promoted by whhe Americans and indigenous groups like the SAI, saw America as both insatiable in hs need to expand and expansive in hs ability to incorporate others. However, this incorporation, as Zhkala-Sa’s writing shows, was built upon a disavowal on the part of the colonial subject; deny yourself and save yourself In writing her life, Zhkala-Sa turns this law of incorporation inside out; intentionally or not, her narrative refuses to weave the pieces of her life into a coherent, triumphant emergence into American being. The frontier becomes an indeterminate territory—a space, a place, and an identity founded upon a critical engagement whh, rather than a passive mcorporation into, America.

113 An important she of that critical engagement appears in Zhkala-Sa’s representation of her relations whh whhe and indigenous women, particularly women missionaries and progressive reformers on the one hand, and her mother on the other.

American Indian Stories ends whh an essay entitled “America’s Indian Problem,” in which Zhkala-Sa advocates foil citizenship for Native Americans.^ She proclaims,

“Now the time is at hand when the American Indian shall have his day in court through the help of the women of America. The stain upon America’s fair name is to be removed, and the remnant of the Indian nation, sufiering from malnutrition, is to number among the invhed invisible guests at your dinner tables” (186). At this time, Zitkala-Sa was working whh the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to establish the national

Indian Welfare Committee (1921), and soon she would found the National Council of

American Indians ( 1926). Spack states that central to her activism was a deshe to challenge any reform agenda that would lead to the erasure of indigenous cultures from the American landscape."” Thus, Zhkala-Sa worked whh white women (newly enfi^chised whh the vote) in order to help her own people without succumbing to the cultural evolutionary model which underlay the agenda of the various “Friends of the

Indian,” including Elaine Eastman. The phrasing of Zhkala-Sa’s statement is signffîcant, as she allies whh “the women of America” to erase the “stain upon America’s frir name.”

She has moved forward, embracing the later generation ofNew Women activists who lead America’s social clubs and reform societies m her quest to find room at the table for native peoples.

114 Moreover, Zhkala-Sa reproduces the popular identification of America whh whhe femininity (‘Tair name”) and creates a domestic image for the nation's collectivity—the dinner table. Whhe women thus appear both as agents o f imperialism and as symbols of an ideal America in her writing. More strange perhaps is Zhkala-Sa's description of the malnourished Indian diners as ready to number among the “invhed invisible guests” at America’s dinner tables. Whh this Christian reference, she erases an indigenous presence in America precisely at the moment when they gain access to the national community. They are present but invisible. At that moment, perhaps unwittingly, Zhkala-Sa seems to capitulate to American fears of the disintegration of the national body through the inclusion of the Other. Instead, she seems to reify the assimilationist assumption that to invhe a person into America will render them somehow

“invisible,” indivisible firom the national body and thereby indistinguishable. More important, their incorporation wiH pose no threat to the meaning of America, desphe the troubling history o f colonization, genocide, and resistance that the “Indian” also signifies.

In the end, “America’s Indian Problem” actually becomes a study in such intertextuality, as the essay concludes whh a series of eccerpts firom a 19IS report based on an investigation into corruption and mismanagement at the Indian Bureau. Zhkala-Sa decides here to let the words of an American investigation into hs own government enthy speak for hself. Lhtle more than a decade later, the Meriam Report would appear, documenting at length the failure of allotment and the Indian Bureau to bring justice or security to native peoples, hidigenous peoples, granted citizenship m 1924, would

115 continue to be kept from the bounty of America’s table, as allotment continued and U.S. policy legislated against self-determination and sovereignty for Native Americans.*”

In her stories as well as her autobiographical essays, Zitkala-Sa challenges (and occasionally employs) the image o f white women on the frontier as gentle missionaries and dedicated school-teachers, the noble but genteel counterparts to the sturdy pioneer- women. In their stead, she places the figure of her mother, also a construct of memory and imagination. In describing how she came to walk between two worlds, Zitkala-Sa subtly charts the changes her mother undergoes because of encroaching white settlement.

However, she also obscures that her mother had close contacts with whites well before her daughter’s birth, having experienced forced relocation by the U.S. government, marrying three white men, and living occasionally off the reservation.” She romanticizes her mother and Sioux women in general as part of an American tradition of writing about tribal peoples and the West that was so popular by the century’s turn. At the same time, Zitkala-Sa clearly had a different agenda for such romanticization, one less interested in a nostalgic beatification of a lost national innocence embodied by the mythic figures of the West—the noble Indian, the pioneer, the teacher, the missionary, the cowboy. Her autobiographical and fictional writing offers an alternative symbolic for the West, one in which indigenous women play a central role. In that context, the sense of struggle, survival, endurance, and love that marks pieces like ‘Impressions of an

Indian Childhood” and “Why I Am a Pagan” provides a testament to the legacy of her mother’s own endurance and sacrifice, a sacrifice that in the end included her young daughter.

116 NOTES

Eastman. '^Indian Girls in Indian Schools.” The Home-Maker 6.3 (June 1891): 202

* For a good introduction to the development of the U.S. models for Indian ethication. see Jorge Noriega, ”American Indian Education in the United States: Incfcxdrination for Suborcfination to Colonialism.” The State o f Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press. 1992). For example. Noriega states, ”It was not unusual. ..fo ra child to be taken at age six or seven and to never see his or her home and family again until age seventeen or eighteen. At this point, they were often sent back, but in a condition largely devoid of conceptions of both their own cultiures and their intended roles within them” (381).

^ Since she published her autobiographical essays andAmerican In£an Stories under the name Zitkala-Sa. I will use that name to refer to Bonnin in this chapter. She also published other articles supporting progressive Indian causes under the name Bonnin.

^ This organization supported the aims of progressive Indian reform, such as citizenship and assimilation, and feequently published pieces by Elaine Goodale Eastman and Charles Eastman, as well as many other Indian and white progressives.

* Zitkala-Sa. “An Indian Citizenship Campaign.” The American Indian Magazine: .4 Journal o f Race Progress VU.2 (Summer 1919): 63.

^ For a detailed discussion of the Indian as the “vanishing American” in U.S. culture and legal policy, see Brian Oippie. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown. CT: Wesleyan UP. 1982).

^ “Red Progressive” is Hazel Hertzberg’s term for acculturated indigenous activists working during the Progressive era, including Dr. Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai). Dr. (Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux). Gertrude Simmons Zitkala-Sa (Nakota Sioux). Rev. Sherman Coolidge (Arapabo), and Arthur Parker (Seneca). Thqr were members of the Sode^ of American Incfians. dedicated to the “uplift” of Indians through Americanization, founded in 1911. Se&Hsszà.aextàxxg,The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modem Panlnddan Movements (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. 1971). A good comparative text to read alongside Ztkala-Sa's autobiograpfty is Charles Alexancfer Eastman. From the Deep Woods to Civilization (Lincoln. NAraska: Univ. of Nebraska Press. 1977). An autobiograpfty by a gratbiate of the Carlisle school who activety rgected his Apache heritage is Jason Betzinez. IF o u ^ t with Geronimo (New York: Bonanza Books. 1959).

* Tb& Atlantic XIonthfy published fier teds in its January. February and March issues in 1900 as: “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” “The School Days of an Indian Girl.” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians.”

117 ’ Except fbr a few poems and short stories that she published in Indian rights mag^nt» as well as the Carlisle hrdian School newspaper, these two books constitute the bulk of her literary career. See Dexter Fisher, “Zitkala-Sa; The Evolution of a Writer,” American Indian Stories, Ztkala Sa (Lincoln, ME: University of Ndnaska Press, 1979) xiii.

Arnold Krupat, Native American Autobiography: An Anthology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994) 281.

" Rayna Green, fFomen in American Indian Society (NY: Chelsea House Publishers. 1992) 79.

Homi Bhabha, The Location o f Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), argues that, in a colonial context, identities/subjectivities emerge which display and displace the binary logic that Bequently constructs identities along differential lines, e g. Black/White, Self'Other, Civilized/Savage. He writes, “this imerstitial passage between Sxed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (114). While expressions of hybridity play central roles in anti-colonial resistances, such poststructural “play” can also have psychic and material costs, as Ella Shohat reminds us in “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,” Social Text (31/32, 1992): no.

Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands, ,4/raerrcan Indian fVomen: Telling Their Lives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) 3.

'■* Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Came After: A Study o fNative American Autobiography (Berkelty: Califtmia UP. 1985) 33. While Krupat's definition of “bdian autobiography” here would exclude acculturated Native Americans like Zitkala-Sa, his comment is still instructive as her writing ekes represent an ongoing encounter between two cultures (fefined by a geographic (the reservation) and a cultural/ptychologicai (the boarding school) experience of the fiorMier.

Bhabha, Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990) 9. His unrkrstanding of the “unhomety” is derived fiom Sigmund Freud’s essty on the “uncaimy.” wherein (to simplity) the familiar becomes strange and the strange fiunihar.

‘“ (Jtd. inMsherx.

Sicknie Smith. “The Autobiographical Manifesto: Identities. Temporalities, Politics,” Pdttobiography and Questions o f Gender, ed. Shirley Neuman (London: Frank Cass, 1991) 189.

Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Mhmeapolis: University of Nfiimesota Press. 1988) 103. Also see Sitknie Smith 190.

19Fisher xviii.

^ Martha Cutter, “Zitkala-Sa’s Autobiographical Writings: The Problems of a Canonical Search for Language and Identity,” Melus 19.1 (Spring 1991): 32.

^ Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory o f Women ‘x Self-Representation (Ithaca. NY ComefiUP, 1994) 42.

^Gilmore 49.

118 ^ Gilmore 124.

^ Ruth Spack, ‘‘Re-Visicnmg Sioux Women: Zhkala-Sa's Revolutionary American Indian Stories,” Legacy 14.1 (1997): 29.

^ Gilmore 42.

^ Patricia Okker, ‘^Native American Literatures and the Canon: The Case of 25tkala-Sa,” American Realism and the Canon, eds. Tom Qnidr and Gary Schamhorst (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1994) 89.

^ Green 9.

^ See Green, especially Chapter I, '‘Rethinking the Indian Woman” (13-19).

^ Fisher .xi. He states that the controversy stemmed from Zitkala-Sa’s anger that she would not be entitled to argr of the profits firom the sale of her mother’s land.

^ Her writing as editor o f American Inchon Magazine, a mouthpiece for the Socie^ of American Indians, is interesting to consider in this regard The organization advocated full citizenship for Native Americans and fieerbm fiom the control of the Indian Bureau. Zitkala-Sa, who published here nncfer the name Gertrude Bonnin with Zitkala-Sa bracketed in parentheses, profiers a reformed "uplifierT Indian as the ideal representative of such a cause, citing the heroism of Indian men in WWl as well as the efforts of other “red progressives” like Charles Eastman. Along with claims of “race pride,” Zitkala- Sa clearly advocates assimilation as necessary to Indian survival. She writes, for example, “the tenaci^ with which Indians cling to the belief in the democratic (kxarine of justice to all is characteristic of the race." American IneCan Magazine: A Journal o fRace Progress VH. 1 (Spring 1919): 5. Her writing in this political publication remains firmly within the progressive paradigm of remaking “red into white,” offering a telling counterpoint to her autobiography.

Honri Bhabha, “Anxious Nations, Nervous States.” Supposing the Subject, e d Joan Copjec (Loncfon: Verso, 1994) 205.

^ “Squaw” is a derogatory term used by white settlers to refer to all indigenous women. Ri^na Green states that “squaw” is derival fiom an Algonquian word for a married or mature woman, and later become a demeaning term applied to all Indian women (14). For a brief history of women’s roles and titles in various indigenous nations see also M Annette Jaimes and Therese Halsqr, “American Indian Women,” in The State o f Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), esp. 316-320. For a more specific discussion of nineteenth- century outsider images of Plains Indian women, see Katherine Weist, “Beasts of Burden and Menial Slaves: Nineteenth Century Observations of Northern Plains hidian Women,” The Hidden Half: Stupes o f Plains IntBan Women, ok. Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine (Washington, D C. : UnrversiQr Press o f America, 1983).

33Bhabha 203.

^ Spack states thatZtkala-Sa wrote the three Atlantic pieces in 1899, apparent^ just after she left the Carlisle School (33).

^ Spack states that “An Indian Teacher” reveals one of Zhkala-Sa’s goals is “to confient and attack the colonizer’s

^ Spack 33. She notes that several of the stories which follow this essay were actually published a year earlier, in 1901.

^ Spack 33.

^ Spack, n. 12,40. Spack notes that she has been unable to determine why these changes occurred The current Bison Books edition o fAmerican IneSan Stories, ed Dexter Fisher (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), uses the amended essay under the title T h e Great Spirit," which seems to be bowing to pressure to make a less subversive andor more mainstream text

For a discussion of rhetorical violence as a technology of women’s autobiography, see Gilmore 163- 165.

40 Spack n.11,40.

■” Mary Louise Pratt Imperial Eyes: StucBes in Travel Writing and Transculturation (NY : Routledge, 1992) 4.

^ See Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation o fAmerica: Culture and Societv in the Gilded Age (NY: Hill and Wang, 1982) 27-37.

^ She also published this essay in EcBct Magazine in December 1921.

Spack 38.

Allotment would not end officially until the start of John Collier’s "Indian New Deal” in 1933. Collier was appointed Indian commissioner under Franklin Roosevelt and he advocated among other things, the end of land allotment the beginning of collective and corporate use of Indian property, day schools rather than boarding schools, and more Indians in government jobs on the reservations. Sec Kenneth Philp, John Collier's Crusade fo r Int&an Reform: 1920-1954 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1977). For an overview of the struggle fbr Indian Self-Determination, see Rebecca L. Robbins, "Self-Determination and Subordination: The Past Present and Future of American Intfian Governance,” The State o fNative America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Vine Deloria, Jr. and Clifibrd Lytle, American ImSans, .American Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Ward Churchill, Struggle for the Land (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. 1993).

^ Fisher ix.

120 CHAPTER 4

“THE UNMAPPED WAY”: LOST AND FOUND FRONTIERS ON THE KLAMATH RIVER

When Mary Arnold and Mabel Reed collaborated on an account of their work in the upcountry wilds of California, they set out to write an adventure story. They eschewed the high and mighty rhetoric of national enlightenment endemic to many reformers’ reports of the American West, opting instead to tell a story to which many readers “back East” could directly relate. More important, while Arnold and Reed initially cast their narrative as a “Wild Wesf ’ story, they quickly turned to another element of the Western romance, the motif of self-transformation. Rather than a depiction of how they transformed Indians into Americans, Arnold and Reed come to explore how they were changed by their experiences. Indeed, from the start, these young women saw themselves as traOblazing a personal path beyond the charted territories for their gaider, as well as their class and race. While offidally they entered

Karuk country in 1908 as government agents, Arnold and Reed understood their role as more indeterminate and open-ended, a situation that suited them just fine m the end. In

The Land o f the Grasshopper .Sb/ig'thus depicts an elusive American frontier, a place

121 both real and im agined, where two unconventional and politically progressive women could create a life together in the name of the American domesticity and yet defy the essential underpinnings of that code as part of a progressive vision of America. At the same thne, the authors knew they would have to return '%ome" again, and that what they learned about themselves and their nation on the rivers of Northern California would be difficult to translate in the parlors and meeting rooms of Eastern society and government officials alike.

Arnold and Reed were lifelong companions who lived together for close to seventy years. As young women already experienced in progressive causes such as housing reform, they jumped at a chance to work as field matrons for the U.S. Indian

Service among the Klamath River peoples in Northern California. Although they came to doubt the efficacy o f their position to help the people they met, they hoped a memoir of their experiences would ben^t a larger American reading public. As they declare in their foreword, “We have feh that the value of this story lies in the authentic account it gives of the customs and habits of thought o f Indians who could remember what life was like before the coming o f the white man, and its picture of conditions in what was the last of the old fi'ontier.” What they actually produced, however, is less an anthropological report o f the Karuk Indians and more a story about their relationships with several native people who helped them survive the rough conditions on the Klamath

River. Nonetheless, their story is important because it r^ects a mode of identffication with a cultural Other that moved beyond nmeteenth-century models of fomale political action as “rescue.” While reformers such as Blame Eastman saw themselves as

122 connecting with Native Americans in order to rescue them from an untenable identity as

American primitive, Arnold and Reed’s tect, deeply rooted in a progressive feminist

discourse, attempts to identify with the Native as a means of redefining themselves as

American, particularly white American women They draw upon a well-worn trope, the

frontier, because it provides a femiliar language in which to read their ecperiences.

However, rather than helpmg their story cohere, the frontier bulwark begins to crumble

under the pressure o f a narrative double-voice that seeks simultaneously to become

Indian and American.

To begin to understand the conflicts undergirding this narrative, a brief history of

the job that brought Arnold and Reed to the Klamath is necessary. In 1891, the U.S.

government, under the auspices o f the Office of Indian Affairs (CIA), gave official

sanction to a new program fbr assimilating American Indians into Anglo-American

culture: the field matron program. From 1891 until 1938, white Christian women were

sent to reservations to model “civilization” fbr the benefit of Indian women and their

families.^ Their primary mission was to set up a model home on the reservation and hold

classes in such domestic activities as cooking, sewing, and housekeeping fisr Native

American women. Thomas J. Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Afrairs, outlined ten

points fbr the field matron’s duties, covering instruction in home-making, cleanliness and

hygiene, food preparation and presentation, sewing, laundry, home-decoration, care of domestic annnals, making of dairy products, bee-keeping care of the sick, child-rearing,

mchidmg “the introducing among them the games and sports of white children,” and observance of the Sabbath.^ At its inception, the field matron program upheld Victorian

123 constructions of femininity, celebrating the white woman as the essence of civilization despite the waning of Victorian domestic ideology. At the same time, proponents such as Emily Cook saw the field matron as a kind of super-lady, possessing “all of the virtues and most of the graces.... [Who] must be somewhat mature m years, must possess tact, judgement, winning ways, must be very strong physically, and utterly indifferent to personal comfort.”^ Drawing many of its workers fi’om the missionary and Women’s

Indian societies, the field matron program was another cog in the wheel of acculturation that gained momentum in the latter half of the nineteenth-century. Its support was tied to allotment in severalty on the reservations and the transformation of Indians into citizens through the institutionalization of private property, individualism, and the nuclear family

(with its attendant gender roles) among tribal peoples.^

The program also was a sign of the growing secularization of women’s refiarm work at the turn of the century, as its workers were civil servants rather than employees of a church or mission school. Their agenda was vague compared to the goals of missionaries and schoolteachers, as each reservation and native community presented its own set of material, social and cultural conditions in which the field matron had to setup shop. The program’s proponents erpected native women to emulate the visiting white woman’s “skills,’’ remaking then homes and identities in the field matron’s image. To insure that this process had begun, field matrons visited Indian homes and families while setting up then own establishment, teaching native women and men American gender norms for work and home. However, as many field matrons would report, they faced

124 great difficulty in overcoming the material problems on the reservation as well as resistance to them as colonial agents/ One matron described in 1892:

While many are industrious, and in a sense provident (and a few are able to buy whatever they need), many more are very poor, scarcely able to provide for a day, begging food from the agent or from those who have a little surplus... . The same poverty (and nomadic habit) interferes with teaching the 'adorning of homes with pictures, curtains, etc.’ When people find it difficult to get sufficient food they have nothing to spare for adornment, and my stock of supplies is limited.*

Many other matrons discovered that cross-cultural mirroring in a colonial situation is fraught with problems, and saw themselves as allies of Indian interests in the face of white encroachment rather than allies of that encroachment.

White male reformers of U. S. Indian policy emphasized a model of Christian manhood for the new Indian citizens produced under allotment policies (thus largely ignoring women); meanwhile, some women reformers believed that the violence, mismanagement, and misunderstanding of American Indian policy was perpetuated by men, making room for a model o f female moral agency as an alternative model for the assimilation of Indian women and their children.’ The reformers’ support for the field matron program during the 1890s reflected this belief. However, by the time Arnold and

Reed headed to the Klamath, nearly twenty years had passed and much had changed in terms of Americans’ approach to remedying social problems. In her history of the matron program, Lisa Emmerich concludes that a second phase began for the corps following its civil service classification in 1896; by 1911, field matron appropriations were being combined with those for Indian Service farmers, under the classification

“Industrial Work and Care of Timber.” This change likely reflects an official shift

125 toward a more pragmatic, progressive-era emphasis on expertise and professionalism

&om the nineteenth-century discourse o f moral reform.^ Arnold and Reed^s field matron

experiences should be read within this programmatic transition, as their text clearly is shaped by progressive views on social refijrm and on women’s role as workers rather than as solely wives and mothers,’ At the same time, their memoir also reflects more than the difficulty of achieving the goals o f the program; it captures the ambivalence and ambiguity ecperienced by these socially and politically progressive women who in many ways were themselves on the margins of America.

Arnold and Reed saw themselves as entering one of America’s last fi-ontiers and their book attempts to create this romantic effect of a land that is both fundamentally

America (its “virgin” territories and authentic natives) and essentially different fi’om the

America of their contemporaries. Their text captures an essential component of fi^ontier mytholo^, as they envision a place that takes you back in time to the “roots” of America

(the open range, Indians, and cowboys) but is always inaccessible (both in their own ecperience, and in their memoir where they claim to describe a world now gone forever).

As with all such stories, the firontier is an imaginative construct, but one bearing the

weight of cultural validity. And, like many reminiscences by white reformers, travelers, and settlers in the American West, Arnold and Reed imply that the authentic Indian of their experience has disappeared. Not surprisingly, Karuk writers throughout the twentieth century would complicate this representation. Moreover, their fiiendships with

Karuk people such as Essie and Steve serve, in the text, to legitimize their presence as field matrons on the Rivers, and Arnold and Reed take great pains to animate these

126 characters’ individual personalities rather than confine them to a singular portrait of the

Native. It is important then to understand the specificity of the “fi-ontier” of Arnold and

Reed’s making, as it is shaped by the particular country and community they entered at a specific moment in U.S. Indian policy.

“The Unmapped Way”: The Field Matrons Enter the Rivers

Having received appointments as field matrons, Reed and Arnold took up residence in California among the Karuk Indians. The name Karuk (Karok in some spellings) means “up-stream” or up-river in their native language, distinguishing the community firom their down-stream neighbors or the Yurok (Urok). Anthropologist

Alfi-ed Kroeber found several distinct indigenous languages spoken in this region, with the Hupa speaking Athapaskan (a language popular in the Southwest and Pacific

Northwest), while the Yurok’s language is related to the Algonquian family (whose speakers largely resided in the Northeast Woodlands). The Karuk speak a completely difièrent language, part of the Hokan group." Julian Lang, a member of the Karuk tribe, describes the relationship among these difièrent tribal groups, neighbors in a relatively small 200-mile area: "While we have sustained our linguistic diversity, we have certainly developed a shared culture. We share dances, material culture, economic system, many fundamental religious concepts and beliefs, and the story of creation. The bird’s-eye view reveals cultural uniformity, a closer view, however, reveals distinct ways and subtle difierences of meaning and purpose.”^ Lucy Thompson, a Yurok woman, similarly describes the upper and lower divisions of the Klamath Indians as part of the same tribe and intermarrying frequently.

127 The upper and lower division of the Klamath tribes marry very freely, being the same tribe, with the erception that their language is different. The two divisions are so closely associated with each other that many of our people speak both languages fluently. It was always considered a good marriage fbr a man of the lower division to marry a woman of the upper division, or a man of the upper division to marry a woman of the lower division.^

Arnold and Reed do not discuss the differential relationship between the Karuk and

Yurok peoples and the other tribes on the rivers, but instead structure their text around a

recurring theme; the Indian versus the White Man. While their text does describe the

elements of Karuk culture they encounter, they are not anthropologists and what socio­

cultural information they provide comes in fragments, local color for their frontier

adventure.

In their desire to tell an “authentic” frontier story, Arnold and Reed also

downplay the effects of white incursion into the area, an experience Lang likens to a

“tornado,” and Thompson decries as wicked and inhumane.'^ Their frontier imagery fails to evoke the extreme brutality and societal turmoil visited upon the northern native

peoples of California beginning in the ISSOs. The gold rush entered the northwest in

1848, and miners began to develop extensively the gold resources along the Klamath and

Trinity rivers in 1850." During the 1850s, the native population fell by eighty percent to approximately 30,000 people, a direct result of the gold rush and its onslaught of disease, starvation, displacement, and murder of native peoples." The Karuk and Yurok did not escape this devastation. In his introduction to Lucy Thompson's 1916 autobiography. To The American Indian: Reminiscences o fa Yurok Woman^ Lang argues that “from 1849 to 1916 the pace of change on the Klamath River had ripped

12S through the traditional culture like a tomado.”^^ This tornado had a lasting impact on the peoples of the River, as Lang describes:

Within a very short time the rape of the Yurok people and Earth was evident everywhere. With each day the unrelenting subjugation of the faith, values, mores and traditions of the old Yurok society progressed. The old ones watched as the Earth was literally being flushed in to the river by the white man in his frenetic search for gold. One can only imagine the impact to their psyches. For them the desecration of the Earth resulted not so much in loss of land, but, by their belief the destruction of God itself To the Indians of the Klamath River, the Earth is God. Where once-proud villages and spiritually ordained geography stood, now lay utter ruin and decay."

Indeed, Thompson’s autobiography frequently seems a testament to a dying people rather than a narrative of endurance and survival. She writes:

At a single blow our laws were tom asunder, loathsome diseases we had never known crushed out the life and beauty of our physical bodies and demented our spiritual minds with lowly passions. Poisonous spirituous drink has set the brain on fire, degrading man and womanhood. Thus as a race we have perished, and this great land, the richest the world has known, the land of our forefathers for so many thousands of years."

Arnold and Reed rarely engage such narratives of loss that must have permeated the

Klamath River communities during their visit; they note instead the material changes in

Indian life, like the adoption of white modes of dress and the use of certain tools, as signs of inevitable acculturation. While they are sympathetic to indigenous land claims and legal matters, and take up their cause with government officials at various points,

Arnold and Reed also render the destructive American quest for gold on the Rivers as long-past and relatively mild m its impact, claiming that beyond such “obvious changes in custom, the influence of the white man came to an end. In the sixty miles between

Happy Camp and Orleans, the social life o f the Indian—what he believed and they way

129 he fêh about things—was very little affected by white influence” (preface). What they

could not see, or perhaps did not want to see, was the nature of the Karuk survival in the fece of ongoing colonial measures, including the program Arnold and Reed represented.

hi part, Arnold and Reed’s suppression or ignorance of these details enables their text to participate in a progressive story of “reform” that sought to mitigate the violent

legacy of U.S. colonialism.^** Similarly, Arnold and Reed rely on gender difference to

cast themselves as distinct from the violence of the gold rush years and American colonization of the California native population, differentiating the colonial work of

“reform” from the marauding terror of white frontiersmen. By invoking a masculinist

frontier mytholo^ to create an alternative woman’s frontier, they fashion an interstitial subjective space between two tropes (reform/colonization), even claiming the position of

“Indian” at points in order to navigate between the native voices they recreate in their memoir and their own whiteness. Their autobiography begins, then, with frontier symbolism, intended to conjure for the reader the popular mytholo^ of the American

West within and against which the narrators read their own story. Although the memoir was written in 1909, it was not published until 1955. In their foreword to that fest edition, we see how Arnold and Reed cast the place they found as somehow “other” than

America, and yet fundamental to the American story th^r hope to tell:

All around us was gold country, the land of the saloon and of the six- shooter. Our friends and neighbors carried guns as a matter of course, and used them on occasion. But the account given in these pages is not of these occurrences but of everyday life on the frontier in an Indian village, and what Indians and badmen did and said when they were not eng%ed in wiping out their friends and neighbors. It is also an account of our own two years m Indian country where, in the sbcty-mile stretch

130 between Happy Camp and Orleans, we were the only white women, and most of the time quite scared enough to satisfy anybody. (Preface)

In this tect, the gun symbolizes the masculine frontier, a region wha-e the rule of law is the quick draw and the intimidating gaze of the outlaw. Arnold and Reed begin with this vivid imagery, situating their story of “everyday” living’ on the rivers in the context of the larger American frontier narrative of‘Indians and badmen.” Then they subvert this narrative through their autobiography about the peaceful inroads they made with the

BCaruk on the Klamath. Thus, having solicited the “roughest field in the United States” fr)r their venture into Indian afrairs (13), Arnold and Reed make quick use of the dramatic image of themselves as the “only white women” in a sixty-mile range of woods and rivers, contrasting their (feminine) fear with the violence of men, both Indian and white, on the edge of America.

A New Frontmen Self-Invention and the Pmject of Progressive Reform

Arnold and Reed find themselves in a familiar quandary encountered by workers in the Indian reform movements of the time; namely, what does “reform” mean in a colonial context? The trope of reform is central to the narration of Self in a text such as

Arnold and R eed\ yet rather than adding a unifying element to the story of their Indian adventures, “reform” unravels as a construct precisely at the site of their public and private identities. Progressive reform was comfortably ethnocentric, resting on ideals of virtuous white womanhood, middle-class mores, and a heterosexual nuclear family structure. As lesbians mvolved in cooperative housing movements, tenement reform, and fominist peace initiatives during the First World War, Arnold and Reed’s personal

131 story inevitably comes to challenge, however implicitly, the contemporary mainstream identity that Indian reformers ofScially intended to graft onto native peoples and cultures. They are troubled by the injustices done to the Karuk people and, beyond t^ching classes in English and arithmetic, th ^ seem uncommitted to their official duty of transforming the Karuk people into white Christian Americans. Instead, their memoir begins to turn on the very problem of their identity on the Rivers—who they are and what they represent as whites, as women, and as field matrons, to the Indians and assorted 'tough" men who live on this particular margin of America. And rather than finding a narrative coherence for their story through the trope of reform, Arnold and

Reed create a firontier identity for themselves, one which enables them to move back and forth across cultures without overtly challenging their initial pretenses in telling this story.

Although their autobiography begins with the popular story of the West as lawless, dangerous, and masculine, Arnold and Reed’s memoir is generally a good- humored and chatty account of their fiiends on the Rivers and the culture they encountered. The fear they claim in their forward resurfaces at various moments in the text, most fi-equently in regards to an unfomiliar landscape (e.g. panthers in the trees or a steep and narrow trail) or armed and angry men; however, this foar is often a means for the narrator to poke fim at their situation and themselves, two young Easterners wandering out in the woods, trying to hide their unease and inexpertise fi'om the residents they are intended to help. These women realize that to make any progress at all in their venture, they must be accepted to some degree into the community. T h ^ will

132 need help finding a place to live, getting supplies, learning the trails, meeting people and trying to communicate, and generally setting up shop as government ofGcials. The first step in gaining this acceptance is to distance themselves fi'om that government, the women find, both in their mindset and in their approach to people in the Karuk community. They create this distance by maintaining an ironic stance to their assigned mission as “field matrons” in the Indian Service.

While traveling to their assigned location, Arnold and Reed spend the night at

Witchpec, where the Klamath and Trinity Rivers meet, with the resident field matron, a

Mrs. May hew. Mayhew tells them about her work among the Yurok, including a breech-birth she had midwifed. Arnold and Reed are alarmed: “That night in the s a g g in g bed we clutched each other and tried to keep warm. The Government had evidently made a mistake when th ^ appointed us as field matrons. If the sort of thing Mrs.

Mayhew did was what they wanted, we were just not qualified” (27-28). In fact, health care was becoming one of the field matron’s primary tasks at this time, a shift that would eventually lead their supervisor in 1927, Elinor Gregg, to advocate replacing “matrons” with field nurses.^^ Arnold and Reed’s anxiety stems fiom the vague nature o f their mission overall, a problem voiced repeatedly by field matrons in the early years of the program. Still, there was no professional requirements attached to field matron service, and through the First World War, few had any fi)rmal background in nursing or medicine. Nonetheless, conditions on many reservations required that they assist in health care in some capacity.^ Although they apparently never encountered such serious medical emergencies as Mrs. Mayhew did, Arnold and Reed find that th ^ must define

133 their role as field matrons as they go along, including improvising medical treatment with minimal skills and supplies.^

Their doubts about their role as government representatives heighten when th^r meet with disdain and/or disinterest in the early days of their journey. As white middle- class women fi'om the East, they likely appeared to be dilettantes looking for an escape from their “real” lives back home. Although they were veterans of tenement-house reform in New York City and allied with progressive concerns at home and abroad throughout their lives, Arnold and Reed found themselves initially at a loss when they encountered the political and social realities of their long-imagined American frontier.^

The autobiographical voice they construct out of their journals reflects their anxiety as well as their belief in a progressive vision of America, as it slides between “we” and “I,” marking the relationship between a collective female voice of reform and the individual subject trying to put progressive idealism into action. Moreover, as lesbians, Arnold and

Reed’s collaborative voice allows them to capture their sense of communion without

Mplicitly defining their relationship to the reader. From genres like the Western and ethnography, their text evolves into a much more personal memoir about their travels and their homemaking, as well as their fiiendships with several men and women on the rivers.

Still, although the book carries both their names as authors, the‘T” of the text is

Mary Arnold. Of their collaboration, Arnold and Reed stated that afler a long day in the field, “we would thankfully close the door, eat anything we could find, and write down exact^ what had happened since we set out m the morning. We would then compare

134 our two separate accounts in order to arrive as nearly as possible at a true statement of what our fiiends had said and done in the Indian country in the year 1909” (prdkce).

The result is a tort that speaks for both women, but often reverts to the first-person perspective of Mary. While on one level, this collaborative‘T ’ reflects a pragmatic rhetorical choice in the narration of a joint experience, it also points to the problems feced by any women living and working without a man during this period—namely, that their bodies are still marked by discourses of the feminine within the gendered economy that firamed work and identity in the Progressive era. As Sidonie Smith argues,

"Autobiographical practice... is one of those cultural occasions when the history of the body intersects with the deployment of female subjectivity as the woman writer struggles with multivalent embodiment.”^ In writing their memoir, Arnold and Reed, personal companions and public colleagues, rely on a dual strategy of selftdeprecation and self- assertion a s women; by moving between a ‘we’ voice and an ‘I’ voice, their text also manages to evoke a sense o f merger and individuation, one which reflects their cross- cultural engagement with the Karuk people as well as their ambivalent position in relation to the U.S. government. White women writing for a white audience during an era of tremendous social and cultiual change, their narrative must engage the lingering nineteenth-century id%l of the female refermer as mother/nurturer/moral center, as well as the progressivist construction of women’s referm work in professional terms. The field matron program itself reflects the tension between these two representations of women’s reform work. Arnold and Reed’s 1909 autobiography likewise provides a

135 glimpse rato how white women wrote themselves into a new story of America after 1900

through intersecting discourses o f femininity, kminism, race, and sexuality.

The first problem they confront is their gender. Judith Butler argues that “gender

ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex

(a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production

whereby the sexes themselves are established.”^ For these two women, gender becomes

the means to access a public role as citizens—government workers in a sec-specific

role—as well as the limitation placed upon their rights as citizens (as disenfiranchised

female activists).^ The field matron was the companion role to the OIA’s vocational

training fbr Indian men as farmers, blacksmiths, carpenters, etc. Her role was tied

closely to popular nmeteenth-century American discourses of the home, motherhood,

and domesticity. What brought the matron into being, however, also restricted her

efhcacy as the field matron was to “have all of the virtues” of refined womanhood, as

Emily Cook stated, yet be “utterly indifferent to personal comfort”—in other words, indifferent to the ideal home and comfort she was intended to model. This paradoxical

position is reflected in the initiai impression Arnold and Reed make on the Special Agent fbr California Indians. “Mr K els^ looked at our pleated skirts, seven yards around the bottom and down to within an inch of the floor, and his eye hardened” (12). When they finally make it to Korbel, from which thqr will begin the long trail joum ^ on horseback to Somesbar, Arnold emphasizes that th^r packed away much of their less practical clothing to put in storage fr>r the duration of their service, a sign that th ^ are leaving

136 bebmd the more conventional gender markings of the moment as part of their travels on

“the unmapped way.”

When they reach the Hoopa Indian Reservation, they meet with the Indian agent, who has little guidance to offer for their mission. He tells them, “About your duties, it is a little difScult to say. I think the Government’s idea in appointing field matrons is that women will have a civilizing influence. Of course, that is what we want to do—civilize the Indians. As much as possible you want to elevate them and introduce white standards” (24). Their “field” lies outside the reservation, two hundred square miles along the Klamath and Salmon Rivers; beyond that, the agent provides little information, concluding that “we shall have to trust to your own good judgement. After you get up into that country, you wül have a much better notion of what you ought to do” (24).

When they do reach Somesbar, they must search for their mission’s targets; most of the people on the Rivers want nothing to do with them Arnold writes about their initial concern: “The Government was paying us each thirty dollars a month and traveling

@cpens% to come to Somesbar and civilize the Indians, yet so far the only Indians we had seen were little twelve-year-old Bessie, who helped Mama Frame in the kitchen, and an Indian with his hat pulled down over his eyes.. . . He did not seem to want anyone to speak to him” (34). The whites in the town are perplexed by the women’s assignment, and offer little assistance beyond racist comments like “I don’t hold much with hidians”

(34). Arnold and Reed had not anticipated that the white settlers they would meet would not hold the same enthusiasm for theft adventure, or at least reflect theft own objectifying desfte to “see some Indians” in a “realfy rough country,” a wish that had led

137 them to take on this job in the first place (12). When they do find some Karuk villages in

T-Bar, they meet rejection at every turn: “They didn’t like us and th ^ didn’t want us and that was all there was to it” (40). They are interlopers invading the privacy of a community with a nearly sixty-year history o f abuse at the hands of white Americans; the

Karuk people are not anxious to learn American methods of sewing, cooking, and cleaning fi'om two strange women suddenly knocking on their doors.

However, just when they are growing desperate, Reed hits upon an idea inspired by a Karuk woman who asks them if they are “schoolmarms.” Th^r say no, and she shuts the door in their faces. On the trail home, Reed declares:

Schoolmarms! A nice familiar occupation that everyone understands. It’s bad enough fbr us to be women. No one thinks much of women in this country. And no one likes them. And missionaries are worse And government agents are worst of all.... But schoolmarms are safe. And everybody knows about them. They may not particularly like schoolmarms but at least they think they are harmless. (41)

Rather than try to create a new category for themselves as official field matrons, Arnold and Reed become “schoolmarms,” holding reading and math classes for adult students and a Sunday school fbr religious instruction and prayer. They decide this familiar female role is “safe” because it rdlects the American association of the grade-school with the home, and education of younger children as the provenance of women.^ They can distance themselves fi'om the two official organs of colonization—the Church and the State—while associating themselves only loosely with a thnd—the school. Indeed, the classes they hold are infiirmal and irregular at best, and only last for short periods during the their two years on the Rivers, with no element of compulsory attendance

138 attached or any outside “official” supervision or regulation o f their classroom activities.

They adopt this role because th^r see it as a sign that thqr will do no harm, and thus implicitly recognize that their role as government agents is far less benevolent than they may have imagined at the outset.

“No One Thinks Much of Women In This Country”: Embodying the Field Matron

Significantly, Reed’s recognition that “no one likes” women in this country arises mainly fi’om their dealii^s with white men, and the treatment of women, both Karuk and white, by these men. This anecdote about how they came to be schoolmarms is immediately followed by their departure fi'om Somesbar and the family with whom they had been staying. Mama and Papa Frame and their adult son, Sam. The family runs the only store and hotel in Somesbar, and Mama Frame has grown old with little female company. Sorry to see them leaving fbr Kot-e-meen, where they will set up house.

Mama Frame tells Arnold and Reed her story. At sixteen, she had left Texas by prairie schooner and headed to Arizona. The wagon train began to fall apart with internal strife and material hardship, and she and her mother were regularly beaten by her drunken stepfather. During a brief stop-over at a roadhouse in Gila Bend, the owner asked her mother for her daughter in marriage. Mama Frame recounts, “'You’d better marry

Frame,’ Nbma says to me. You see how it is. I can’t do nothing fbr you and he may get worse. ’ So we were married and Mama and my stepfather they got in the wagon and drove on and I never saw Mama again” (42). The young woman, married to a strange man and working hard to meet the needs of the continual stream of passengers to the roadhouse, ffiids one day that she does not feel “so good.” Her husband left fbr a week

139 to get horses, even though he knows she’s feeling badly. She continues, “One day I got to feel pretty bad. I couldn’t seem to get about good,” so the hned man goes out to a nearby wagon camp to see if “there’s a woman with them.” Finally he returns with a woman, who “come over to the bed and looked at me and she says, 'My God, you’re going to have a baby! He never told me. ’ And she begun to run up and down the room and scream. Thai Sam was bom” (43). Mama Frame’s calm story of her abusive family, her arranged marriage and loss of her mother, and her son’s birth reveals the young bride’s ignorance about her own body, as well as her isolation from other women in a lonely frontier waystation. Her life signals an alternative version of the popular Western narratives Arnold refers to frequently, placing the female body on the frontier not merely as the object of exchange or the symbol of civilization but as an experience shared by the narrator and her storyteller.

Arnold makes this memoir work across several registers: as an adventure story, a travelogue, and an autobiography. She both wants to “neutralize” the significance of their female bodies on the frontier in terms of their updated “western” story, while also foregrounding their difference as white women from white men engaged in the colonial project. Smith argues that, “until recently women who wrote autobiographically... had to make sure that their body had been neutralized before, in both sense of the word, their text. Women had to discursively consolidate themselves as subjects through pursuit of an out-of-bo(fy «perience precise^ because their bodies were heavily and inescapably gendered, intense^ fabricated.”^ The joum ^ to the “frontier,” to the limits of the nation, is set up by Arnold and Reed as a universal story of whiteness. Their story is

140 framed by race, evinced by their gaze up at the mountains when they first arrive in

Northern California: “Ahead of us were the mountains that we had seen fr'om the deck of the Pomona. And somewhere m the far distance, beyond the mountain’s farthest rim,

was Somesbar and Indian country” (17). When they finish their assigned term and head

back into Korbel, they state, “We were white people in the white man’s country”(313).

This construction of America as “white man’s country” allows Arnold and Reed to

create an autobiographical subject that de-emphasizes gender, and they stress that the

value of their story lies in its “authentic account” of the “customs and habits” o f people

living on the “last o f the old fi'ontier,” not in their personal experiences as field matrons

(which in the end is what the book is really aU about).

The 'neutralization’ of the female body is ambiguous in Grasshopper Song, as

the women foreground their gender as a means to distance themselves firom the explicit

violence of colonization, which they attribute to men. Arnold thus includes Mama

Frame’s narrative to lend authority to their presence as women (as this is a story that

Mama Frame was likely to share only with other women). Still, Arnold does not

comment on the story at all, leaving it to close a chapter entitled “Innocents Abroad in

the Land o f the White Man.” The “land o f the white man” is Somesbar, the place where

Reed and Arnold first begin to understand the new world they have entered. The title

casts Arnold and Reed as innocent in the face of the violence, racism, and misogyny of

the White Man. The chapter is finmed by concerns about the body, m terms o f race (who

is white? who is Didian?) and m terms o f gender (proper gender roles in a cross-cultural

fiontier context), and can be read allegorically as a comment on America and its racist

141 and patriarchal society. Significantly, Arnold and Reed attempt to distance themselves firom that power through an identification with another white woman who has suffered much on the range, while they reject a connection with the mine owner’s wife who says of the Indians, “they know their place and the [white] men here see that they keep it”

(37). In this way, th ^ construct a complec autobiographical subject, one which denies the female body through the semiotics of the western (by asserting a radalized body) and also foregrounds their womanhood to disassociate themselves fi-om the violence of the

White Man’s Iand.^“

Exploring the connection between teriual self-invention and the body. Smith asks what does skin have to do with autobiography and autobiography with skin?^‘ While her argument centers on the production and suppression of the gendered body in women’s autobiography. Grasshopper Song raises that same question in terms of both gender and race. The memoir does not turn to a familiar rhetoric of reform in order to justify the women’s presence among the BCaruk; instead, Arnold and Reed use the appeal of the

Other, an adventure into the “prhnitive” which enables them to look back wryly upon their ladylike identities. Throughout the tect, they show the incongruity between their official job description and the life they actually led on the Rivers, a disparity first raised by their relationship with Essie, a powerful Karuk woman with two husbands. After leaving Somesbar, Arnold and Reed rent a house m the Indian rancheria Kot-e-meen fi'om Mart Hamill, a “half-breed” married to Essie, whom they describe as “a fhll-blood

Indian, small and dark, with a soft, low voice and very pretty manners She is one o fthe few Indians we have met who speaks English” (47-48). Essie lives with two men. Les

142 and Mart, and her son Eddy horn another marriage. Although Arnold and Reed claim

Essie is married to both. Mart later tells them that Essie bad ended their marriage some time back. Nonetheless, Essie’s relationships pose a problem for the field matrons; “We all sat around the fire and made conversation, and it was a very pleasant affiiir. But we were a little doubtful... whether we were upholding the standards Mr. Kyselka, the

Indian agent at Hoopa, had talked about when he sent us up into the Indian country”

(48). However, they know better than to interfere, thus rejecting the primary tenet of the field matron program: to enforce assimilation to white cultural norms. Arnold states,

“if Mart and Essie and Les are all satisfied, it really does seem as though it were their own personal concern. On the other hand, two husbands at the same time would scarcely be tolerated in most white communities.... But we couldn’t help being impressed by the way Essie carried off the situation. Socially, she put her two husbands on the map” (48). Here Arnold works out a complicated problem created by her and

Reed’s rejection of traditional female roles, their official status as field matrons, and their growing identification with the Karuk people. Given their assignment to “civilize” the

Indians, th ^ ask, what position should they take on cultural difference, since they clearly depend upon Mart and Essie and Les for help with their home and housekeeping? While

Essie’s fiunily might not be “tolerated in most white communities,” their point is that they are not in a white community, they have left that land and now must try to accommodate themselves to the people who are their neighbors.

In many ways, their text turns on the construction o f a seemingly absent whiteness, one which resides in the outlying towns and beyond the mountains and defines

143 them as progressive reformers—they have gone outside’ America in order to meet the alien and remake her into something akin to themselves. However, their relationship with Essie and her fomily ultimately leads Arnold and Reed to fashion an ancillary identity to their roles as field matrons/white women; they begin to represent themselves as white and not-wbite at the same time, through a cross-cultural identification premised on their desire for adventure and a rejection of traditional norms for American women.

Unlike Elaine Eastman, whose identification with Sioux women is always in the service of asshnilationist goals, Arnold and Reed’s identification with Essie rests upon an admiration for her unconventional (by white American standards) behavior, which they see as implicitly emblematic of the old frontier of popular imagination. They write:

Ever since we came to the Rivers, we have been wondering why this part of the country is not more Uke the westerns you read in books and m%azines. Mr. Kesley said he was sending us to the roughest place in the United States, and people certainly do get killed here.... But when people write westerns, although the things they write about may actually have happened, the pace they set is terrific. On nearly every page, someone gets killed or murdered or abducted.... (58-59)

Westerns are defined by violence, by accidental deaths and murder, kidnapping and gunfights; moreover, westerns time life into a fost-paced series of dramatic events with little room for emotional «perience or reflection. Unlike these occiting stories, Arnold notes, “here on the Rivers we take things much more leisurely. Of course, everybody packs a gun and has probably used it on occasion. But most of the shootings or knifings we hear about are a long way off.” Inst^d, thqr stress, “what really does concern us at

Kot-e-meen—the things we talk about most—are river crossings and what happened the last ti postheree (high water) and salmon smokes and bears and eels and hidian gambles

144 and, of course, apruan (Indian devils), and things like Indian marriage” (59). The distinction between the world o f westerns and life on the Rivers is ironic, as Arnold quietly pokes fim at popular expectations for frontier life. While the Rivers may not be teeming with gunslingers and stagecoach robberies, its difference from “America” is still keen fr)r Arnold and Reed, as they share Karuk daily concerns with river crossings and food and listen to favorite stories shared around a warm fire. For Arnold and Reed, the

“frontier” had signified the world outside conventional Anglo-American morality, a place where badmen and Indians fought it out and women apparently ran for cover. In their tect, the frontier undergoes a transformation, as they begin to cast it as a kind of borderlands defined more by cultural difference and exchange than by bloodshed and high drama. While this move is understandable and laudable, demonstrating Arnold and

Reed’s general respect for Karuk cultural and society, it also is a colonial strategy, as their story of cross-cultural sharing suppresses the history of violence experienced by northern Ca#)mia Indians at the hands of white settlers and miners. Not insignificant, then, is their recasting o f the frontier as a shared space between white women and

Indians, with white men on the margins of this contact zone as sheriffs, government ofGcials, trappers, and storekeepers. ^Vhite men still implicitly hold the keys to colonial power in this text; however, that power is mediated by the discourse of women’s reform.

“Refr>rm” fimctions as a trope that not only justifies Arnold and Reed’s presence on the frontier as women without men, but also negotiates the terms of colonial power (social, cultural, political) with white men.

145 This negotiation takes place in part through their meditation on whiteness itself^ and their relation to a white America that Arnold and Reed recognize as hostile to native peoples. From the moment they arrive in Somesbar, Arnold and Reed seem fascinated by mixed significations o f race, embodied by 'half-breeds’ and ' squaw men’ in the villages. For «cample. Mart Hamill, Essie’s husband is three-quarters white. ‘To look at him you would not think he had any Indian blood. He is big, blue-eyed, and fair-haired”

(31). After spending time with Mart and Essie and Les in Kot-e-meen, Arnold and Reed still remain interested in the problem of who Mart essentially is. Mart tells them that he and Essie aren’t married any longer, because he was unfkithftil to her. After he leaves,

Arnold and Reed sit thinking:

We kept thinking about Mart, who was white, for all his Indian grandmother. Mart had the white way of doing things. You couldn’t think of Mart as an Indian. He was white, with his blue eyes and his fair hair and his magnificent broad shoulders and the way he felt about Essie.... And we thought about Essie. Essie, who was small and dark and very Indian. Or was she? No other Indian woman was quite like Essie. And Essie cared very much for Mart, and couldn’t forgive him for what he had done. (62)

This passage reveals a complicated anxiety about the intersections between race and culture, identity and social contact. Arnold and Reed cast Mart as white, despite his active life in a Karuk community, while Essie becomes suddenly “less” Indian because of her assertive behavior and her sense of love and pride, attachments Arnold and Reed apparently see as the bastion of white culture. At the same time, it is Essie’s di& raice firom them as an Didian that makes her so appealing to Arnold and Reed, and, hence, their official agenda all the more unlikely:

It was always an adventure to be with Essie and Les. If we crossed the river with them or made a garden with them, it was the same. Lifo was 146 gay and fiill of adventure, and we were glad we were alive. We liked Mart very much. We grew to like Mart more all the time. We were fond of Mart. But Mart was white. Working in the garden wasn’t an adventure to Mart. It was a chore. Crossing the river in the dugout wasn’t an adventure to Mart, as it was to Essie and Les and ourselves. It was a chore. Of course, we were fond o f Mart, but when you came right down to it we would much rather go off for the day with Essie and Les. With them we always felt glad we were alive and were living in the Indian village of Kot-e-meen.... White people were all very well. We were white ourselves. But white people were dull, after you had lived with Indians. (63)

Their repetitious assertion of their fondness for Mart serves to reassure Arnold and

Reed, as well as their white readers, that th ^ are not disowning an important part of themselves—their race as the sign of “civilization” and superior culture. At the same time, they reject the very premise o f their mission—namely, to improve the quality of life for native peoples by teaching the women the ways of genteel domesticity. Arnold and

Reed clearly have little interest in staying home and sewing when they could be out on the River coHectmg eels with Essie and Les, and they take great interest in the various battles Essie wages against men who wrong her, including the mixed-blood sheriff Frank

OfSeld. As Sam Frame tells them, “You can’t kick a man, not where OfBeld got kicked, without his getting sore about it. There aren’t many women do the kind of thing Essie does. You better keep clear of her” (32). Of course, Essie is the woman they soon beftiend and seemingly would be a prime object for their civilizing efforts as field matrons. However, Arnold and Reed appear to prefer building a fiiendship with Essie and learning about the Karuk world through this alliance than in remaking her in their im%e.

147 Whiteness thus becomes associated with a dull civility as well as a masculine violence. Arnold and Reed simultaneously reject conventional women’s roles (albeit in the government service of domestic virtue) as well as the gendered hierarchy those roles support. Moreover, anticipating the shdt during the Collier era toward a modicum of interest in the integrity of tribal cultures, Arnold and Reed see an alternate and more

“alive” mode of being in their Indian friends, Essie and Les.^^ Their romanticization o f the BCaruk world surAces throughout their narrative, as for example in their recounting o f “deviling” stories they hear from Essie and Mart. They include these stories in lively detail, always with an implicit wink and a nod at their white readers (71-73). In these moments, they employ their assumed feminine vulnerability as part of the joke, as when they describe their haphazard participation in an eel gathering mcpedition on the Rivers;

Under circumstances like these, there is a marked advantage in our being considered the most feminine sort of young ladies. The soles of our shoes were as slippery as glass. We minced from rock to rock, hesitating before we took the required leap. Yet we only acquired merit for our performance. On the other hand, if we had worn trousers instead of skirts, our shoes might have been quite as slippery and it would have been wise for us to display an equal amount of caution. But would we have acquired merit? We would not. We should have been considered tenderfeet and treated with the contempt we deserved. No, if you want to go into a strange country, by all means go as women. You take it easy and acquire merit at the same time. (66)

This statement appears in marked contrast to Reed’s earlier declaration that “no one thinks much” of women in this place, but its gentle selMeprecating humor is part of the same strategy Arnold uses throughout the text to undercut the effect of her and Reed’s rejection of conventional white womanhood through their work and their relationship.

Here, they are very aware of the significations of dress, and the traditional sign of

14S woman^s difference from man—the skirt—enables their triumph on this outing; without the skirt, th ^ would be only ordinary and contemptible “tenderfeet,” but the skirt serves as a reminder that women “like them” would not ordinarily be out there hopping from rock to rock on the river. Gender thus becomes the vehicle by which Arnold and Reed access “a strange country”; th ^ both employ and subvert the semiotics of white womanhood encapsulated in their public role as field matrons and their private role as white women traveling together.

Indeed, Arnold and Reed appear quite aware of how gender materializes on the frontier between two cultures, here the Karuk and Anglo-American, as well as differentiates agents of the colonial project. This awareness reveals itself consistently in their discussion of what constitutes “ladies” (the quintessential sign o f white womanhood in the text) as opposed to their real lives and identities. For «cample, Arnold describes a visit they had from two white men, foresters who come to visit them when they set up a new home farther North on the River at I-ees-i-rum. “Now Mr. Hunter and Mr. Wilder are white men. They take us very seriously, and coming to call on us was an occasion.

The Indians do not take us at all seriously. We are just friends of theirs. But to Mr.

Hunter and \fr. Wilder we are not only white women, we are ladies—the kind who have

Sunday schools, and never say a bad word, and rustle around in a lot o f silk petticoats’^

(emphasis theirs, 181). The foresters are uncomfortable in their presence, afiraid of offendmg these refined women with their rough mannas, while Arnold and Reed take pains to make a decent diim a despite the feet that aU their tables and chairs are stQI wet with paint, which th ^ all sit on anyway. Arnold notes, ‘I t is true that we wear divided

149 skirts and Stetson hats, and never rustle, but the foresters make nothing of that and cling to what we ought to be as womenkind. We do the best we can and listen to what th ^ say and try to act as though we never, never did such unladylike things as ride trails and cross rivers, but it isn’t always easy for the foresters” (181). What they ought to be as white “womenkind” is marked by table manners and dress, restricted movement and language, which Arnold clearly casts as unsuitable not only to survival on the Rivers but to their alliance with the Karuks at I-ees-i-rum. The foresters want to visit Arnold and

Reed yet are uncomfortable with the matrons, because they see them as different from white women like Mama Frame and men like themselves. Arnold and Reed are educated and have the time to teach Sunday school and reading classes, thus inflecting gender with class status as well. Clearly, there are different kinds o f white women in Hunter and

Wilder’s view, just as there are different modes (male and female) of colonial contact by whites on the frontier (war v. reform, «(termination v. identification).

This scene appears as another humorous anecdote asserting the matrons’ growing disparity with mainstream American culture through their relations with their

Karuk friends. However, in many ways it implicitly reifies the gender ideology behind their ostensible mission to “civilize” the Karuk. The manners of the men, them anxiety about eating too much food and passing the butter property, reflect the rules of decorum when two men dme with two unmarried young women. Moreover, part of the irony in this scene is what remains unspoken. As Teresa de Lauretis argues, “the movement in and out of gender as ideological representation is a movement back and fiarth between the representation o f gender (in its male-centered flame of reference) and what

150 that representation leaves out or, more pointedly, makes unrepresentable.”^^ Arnold casts gender through the hegemonic discourse of heterosfôoialîty, as they attempt to live up to the social ecpectations of the two woodsmen which can only represent women in relation to men.^** Women rustle and mince across rocks; they do not ride rough horses through high rapids and look boldly back in the 6ce of bad language. They need to be protected by men, a representational fiamework contradicted by their lives on the

Klamath. Rather than directly challenge these expectations, Arnold and Reed do their best to appear “ladylike,” while reminding their readers, of course, that they are not truly such firail creatures. The appearance of white men on the scene requires that they play the part, even in their memoir, albeit with great irony. Indeed, their memoir is what constitutes the necessity of playing the part in one sense, as these white men signify the assumed expectations o f Arnold and Reed’s American audience. Clearly, the humor in the scene can only be shared by those who understand why Hunter and Wilder act they way they do, and why Arnold and Reed feel the need to respond so politely. They have brought “civilization” to the frontier, however crudely, and when white men appear on their doorstep, they feel the need to oblige as the quintessential emblem of America— white ladies}^

Nonetheless, a “space-ofT exists within this dominant representation—Arnold and Reed’s personal relationship which lasts close to seventy years, framed by their progressive understanding of gender and experiences in reform-oriented communities.

De Lauretis defines “space-off’ as not outside of discourse, power, ideology, but rather as “a movement from the space represented by/in a representation, by/in a discourse,

151 by/m a sex/gender system to the space not represented yet implied (unseen) in them.”^®

For Arnold and Reed, the possibility for this “space-o£P* within the mainstream

representation of middle-class white women is created by the frontier; in their

autobiography, the frontier is a cultural location as well as a physical territory, one

shaped by progressive discourses of “rescue” and “reform,” assimilation and American-

ness. However, as I have shown, Arnold and Reed are for from doctrinaire in their

adherence to progressive ideology which promoted unification of American society and

culture under an umbrella of Anglo-American identity /^ Rescue and reform help them

gain access to the frontier (as field matrons) but what they seek is an opportunity to

«tplore their identities as women and partners rather than to change the Indians into

Americans. Instead, “reform” works in this context as a trope that opens possibilities for

Arnold and Reed to re-form themselves into something other than what the two foresters see. The object of their reform, the Indian, becomes a trope for their own experience of difference and estrangement from the colonial project and, more generally, from the world of white men (and hence heterosexuality and domesticity).^* For example, the success o f their first Sunday school at I-ees-i-rum is defined not by the “white hymns” they get everyone to sing (frequently making up new lyrics as they go along) but by their ecperience o f communion with the Karuk in the room: “The room was frill to overflowing with Indians. Suddenly we did not foel white at all. We felt hidian, just as we had felt at Kot-e-meen” (173). Gradually, as their text sets up a “tropics” of rrfbrm which distinguishes them from the overt violence of colonization, Arnold and Reed begin

152 to Êtshion an Indian identity for themselves as the emblem o f their fi'ontier ecperience and their autobiographical subjectivity.

This identification with the Indians becomes evai more overt in the chapter, “We hitroduce White Customs in the Form of Two Christmas Trees, and, for a Moment, Fear

We May Regret It.” Their regret stons fi'om the feet that, after deciding to have a

Christmas tree set up at Somesbar, they discover that a “white dance” has been plarmed at Carrie's place for the same time. White dances mean drinking and violence on the

Rivers, and Arnold and Reed fear their Christmas party will lead to more people attending the white dance. They are caught in a bind, between representing “good” white customs and implicitly supporting “bad” ones, like whiskey and gunfights. All along, th ^ note, “we back the Indian dances to the limit, with all we had. Month by month, the Indian singing and drumming became more popular. Month by month, the popularity of the white dances had waned” (206). Rather than discourage traditional indigenous practices, the field matrons actively work to support Karuk dances in order to counteract the bad effect of white (and implicitly male) culture. Fortunately, the Carrie dance occurs without trouble, and Arnold and Reed hold their party successfully. Then th ^ head back to I-ees-i-rum for another party, complete with tree and presents. Here they can fiilly relax, as “only Indians came to the Christmas tree at I-ees-i-rum.” The

“unrestrained enthusiasm” of the party does not worry Arnold and Reed now, for “they were our own people. They were our fiiends and it was their Christmas tree. They could be as gay and as Indian as they chose, without any loss of dignity, because we had been adopted by I-ees and were not white any longer but Indians like themselves” (212).

153 In his reading of minstrelsy and white adoption of “blackface,” Eric Lott has noted that

“to assume the mantle of whiteness... is not only to 'befriend’ a racial other but to

introject or internalize its imagined special capacities and attributes,” a phenomenon at

work throughout this memoir. Lott stresses that “the other is of course already in us,’ a

part of one’s (white) seK” and that the resultant “... (racial) splitting of the subject

actually makes possible one whole area o f white desire—[while] it also insures that the

color line thus erected is constantly open to transgression or disruption.”^® The

culmination of Arnold and Reed’s joum ^ up the Rivers, from Somesbar to Kot-e-meen

to I-ees-i-rum, is their transformation into “natives,” but this nativity is carefully

circumscribed by their identities as white women and government representatives,

identities of which the Karuk surely never lose sight.“ At the same time, their claim to

be “Indians” does not eradicate racial diSbrence but rather redraws the boundaries; the

“Indian” becomes a trope that enables the autobiographical subject to occupy a space

both inside and outside the hegemonic construction of gender (white womanhood).

Becoming “Indian” allows Arnold to create a metaphor for the frontier that casts Indians

and progressive white women on one side of the border, and white men (and perhaps

“half-breed^’ like Mart) on the other. And, in fact, their power to transgress that color

line of their own making becomes m many ways the driving power behind the plot of

them autobiography.

Going Home: Dm and Out o f Field Matronhood

In the Land o f Grasshopper Song is organized around the entrance into and

departure from the Rivers. Almost no mformation about Arnold and Reed’s lives b ^ r e

154 or after their tenure as field matrons is given. The opening chapter is titled, “The

Unmapped Way, and How, Finally, We (fit the Trail, and the Mountains Closed Around

Us,” while the final two lines of their story read, “We were white people in the white man’s country. We were down below” (313). Similarly, the few trips they take out of the Rivers during their appointment come to represent not only the difference between

Indian country and the white man’s, but also to signify the women’s ability to cross-over, to disrupt the various “fi-ontiers” of America—regional, racial, and gendered. During their one visit back East to visit their families in the land of‘iced tea, iced coffee, fiied chicken, and ice cream,” the power of their status as white women is asserted, first by their feilure to live up to the image; “as we flew down the platform with our conspicuously discolored saddle bags and our spurs clanking, the Pullman porter gave us one horrified look and sternly waved us toward the day coach” (139). Yet, they gradually appease the Porter’s expectations with a modest dress change and a good scrubbing, although their riding boots and sombreros continue to trouble him.

Nonetheless, by the tune they reach Chicago, they can assert themselves as Eastern women of privilege, happily accepting the porter’s “humble” assistance with their bags and pleased with the “sensation” they create back in New Jersey. On the trip back, though, they immediately become “Westerners going west. We spent our m on^ fireely..

.. We tipped in a big way” (139). Region becomes part of their firontier masquerade, as they move easily (m their minds) between signs of Eastern “culture” and Western newness, unconventionality, and brass.

155 Their white womanhood also grows more prominent again when they hit the trails “home.” On the trail to Somesbar, they stop off at Mr. Grant’s, a prospector and

“squaw man.” While his 6mily sits silent at dinner, Mr Grant chats eagerly with them about the East and his childhood home in Pennsylvania. Before Arnold and Reed leave, old man Grant calls his sons out to take one last look at them. “These are white womai,” he said, “I want you always to remember that you saw them” (142). Grant’s association of white womanhood with the East (and his own origins, at the eq)ense of his sons’) becomes an element Arnold seeks to subvert by the time of their Christmas party a few months later. As they weep over gifts they receive and the success of their

Christmas tree, Arnold thinks of their families back East and declares, “The family had better stop worrying about us off here in the wilds of the Coast Range. When we do come home, we plan to greet Somerville and Plainfteld, New Jers^, with a war whoop, and it may be that our skin will have become a trifle dark, that we will have high cheekbones, and wiH have turned into real live Indians” (213). This stunning passage reflects Arnold and Reed’s imbrication in the ongoing cannibalization of native identities by whites seeking a more “authentic” American identity, one bom out of a new-found connection to the land, to community, and/or to spirituality.'*^ It also represents how

“Indian” functions as a narrative trope for their memoir’s “space-ofl^” quietly absorbing their transgressions against patriarchy and heterosedsm in America.

Thus, it is an unintentional irony o f the text that Arnold and Reed most strongly assert their identities as white Americans to the Karuk as representatives o f the Law.

T h ^ act in the service of the federal government, and find themselves repeatedly caught

156 up in conflicts shaped and distorted by the encounter between Karuk and U.S. legal systems, emblematic of the discursive terrain that creates and perpetuates frontier ideolo^. Gloria Anzaldua has defined a borderland as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”^^ While she is writing specifically about the U.S./Mmdcan border, Anzaldua’s description of the borderlands resonates with contemporary recastings o f the American frontier in a variety of locations, as well as with Arnold and Reed’s representation of their days as field matrons.^ The place/space th ^ occupy is structurally indeterminate as they have few supplies and no supervision in their attempt to further the OIA’s agenda for assimilating the Indians.

Moreover, they become caught within the confusing and traumatic transition the Karuk are forced to undergo because of colonization. Troubled by Essie’s multiple marriages

(forbidden in white society) and enamored with the freedom they themselves experience from conventional womanhood (built upon multiple prohibitions), Arnold and Reed find they stand in for American Law in the minds of the Karuk. When conflicts arise between

‘Svhite law” and Indian law, Arnold and Reed encounter the disembodied presence o f the colonial power in legal disputes involving land, money payments, marriage, and child custody. As field matrons, they represent the U.S. government to the Karuk; as white women in an entry-level Indian Service job, th ^ see themselves as powerless to change the dictates of 6raway government agencies. Still, th ^ manage to work out several disputes, usually through a hodge-podge approach that mmgles Karuk custom and white conventions to reach an equitable settlement. For «cample, Arnold and Reed must early

157 on negotiate an settlement between Essie and Frank Offield, the sheriff she kicked, saying “we were sorry for Essie because it was an awfol thing to kick an oflScer of the law. Probably she didn^t understand about it” (80). They make peace by going around to different homes, talking with various parties involved in the complicated dispute that led up to and followed the kick, and finally getting Offield to drop the charges.

Similarly, once the women are installed at I-ees-i-rum, their new fiiend and benefactor, Steve, comes over one day to ask about “white law” regarding a custody dispute over a baby. A mixed-blood woman, Agnes, gave birth to a baby without marrying the fiither, either under Indian or white custom. Steve tells Arnold and Reed that Agnes is planning to marry another man. Rube, according to Karuk tradition

(including a bride price) because the father, Clint Albers, had abandoned her. The next thing they know, the Albers 6mily steal the baby firom Agnes and the field matrons are called upon by Steve to assist in the matter. "In the evening we discussed white law and

Indian law with Steve. We told him of the status of a white, unmarried mother, and asked him what was the Indian way” ( 190). Steve tells them that the baby gets a “bad name,” but that the baby would still belong to Agnes. Arnold and Reed concur that this would be the response under “white law” as well, and try to get the sheriff involved to retrieve the infont, but he is nowhere to be found. Fearful that the situation is about to erupt in violence, Arnold and Reed send a message to the district attorney in Yreka, but have little hope: “White law in Yreka, four days away over trails and w%on roads, doesn^t mean much to the Indians on the Rivers, or to the white men either, for that matter” (191). In the end, they are forced to conduct the tense negotiations between the

158 armed âmilies themselves. As they head across the river from Steve’s to the Albers’ place, Arnold notes, “everyone was watching us. This was white law we were carrying across the river, and everyone wanted to see how it would work” (191). Once in the main room of the Albers’ home, Arnold and Reed begin the discussion pragmatically, joking about river trips and other casual events; ^Tt might be white law that we represented but we approached it with Indian tactics” (194). But these “Indian” tactics primarily involve a threat, the intervention of outside white (male) authorities. Arnold states, “I broke in and said white people always wanted to find out what the facts were, and what the law was, before they did anything. We had written to the district attorney in Yreka. He was the representative of the white law for all this district. He had written us. I asked Rube to give Herman [Albers] the letter” (194). Arnold passes the letter around, but since the audience cannot read English, she then reads the letter herself

Herman listens carefully, but then declares it doesn’t matter “what they say” over in

Yreka.

The scene is reminiscent of Homi Bhabha’s description of the “discovery” of the

English book as a trope in colonial literature. He writes, “the discovery of the English book establishes both a measure of mimesis and mode of civil authority and order.”^

The district attorney’s letter serves here as the tect of the “civilizing mission”; Arnold wants the Indians to see the physical paper, hold it in their hands, so as to establish the metonymic relationship between the Law and the colonial Father, the Solomon-like arbiter m this fight over a child. Feeling powerless in her own body to represent the force o f the Law, Arnold turns mstead to the letter. However, Herman rejects the

159 lawyer’s claim, mstead asserting that bis son, Clint, has returned and the baby belonged to Clint. In asserting a di%rent order of patriarchy against both the Indian mother’s and the white women’s claims, Herman and Clint Albers both mimic and subvert the claims of the colonial order.

Arnold, however, is not willing to admit defeat. Rather, she and Reed persevere in their invocations of white law and, implicitly, the power of white men over Indian men. "We mcplained the question very slowly: first, firom the standpoint o f Indian law; then, fi-om the standpoint of white law. 'Now,’ we said, ‘you all understand just what the white law is in this case. It is not good to go against the white law. Will you give back the baby?” (195). Herman and Clint refuse, and Arnold and Reed politely leave, saying “that is everything that we wanted, Mr. Albers” and taking their entourage with them. Agnes and Rube are doubtful, but the field matrons’ bluff works. The baby is returned. Not only that, but the matrons get Agnes and Rube to marry the “white way” as well, so that their custody (in white legal terms) of the baby is ensured. Their victory, however, represents the ambivalence at the heart of their colonial mission. Bhabha argues, “the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference.”'*^ The ambivalence of the colonial presence here mdsts both in Herman and Clint Albers’ complicated response to the letter of the Law, and in Arnold and Reed’s position. The

Albers mimic and subvert, rduse and acquiesce, while Arnold and Reed are fi)rced to rely on the metonymic presence o f white male authority in order to assert an Indian woman’s rights to her child. The d ^e re n c e then that splits the colonial subject in this

160 instance operates across two axes, race and gender, leaving Arnold and Reed ag a inboth

the sam e a s and different from the “origins” of colonial authority.

This ambivalence is perhaps most clearty apparent in the story Arnold tells of

another trip she and Reed make out o f the Rivers during their work as field matrons, this

time when they travel to Yreka to make a petition to county authorities on behalf of an

Indian named Mark-faced Steve. Steve had built a bridge for the county, but had never

received payment; now in debt to a dangerous man, Steve needed his money, and the

field matrons agree to make a trip to see what they can do. Soon well out of “their

field,” Arnold and Reed spend the night in Hamburg, and begin to feel the futility of their

Journey; “We were in a man’s world at Hamburg. Snatches of song and laughter came

fi^om the saloon. Any man who travels in their country can be sure of warmth and comfort and companionship, although maybe a little unsavory. But women have not

much chance in this white man’s country” (250). Clearly outsiders, the two women

spend a lonely night wahmg for morning and their ride out of Hamburg. However, once they arrive in Yreka, they encounter a dififerent, albeit more familiar and manageable

problem: their role as ladies. “When we finally drew up to the hotel in Yreka and were installed in the ladies’ parlor, we tried to live up to its reputation. We tried to look the way that ladies ought to look in this country. We have hats and veils, and, fi’om what th ^ tell us, we shall need every advantage that a dressy appearance can give us, for it seems that our case is considered hopeless” (251). Recognizing a woman’s space and a woman’s place becomes the strategr Arnold and Reed must employ in their quest for

Mark-fiiced Steve’s due.

161 They politely present themselves as the dutiful field matrons to the contingent of five men responsible for appropriations. What th^r encounter at the Courthouse is the kind of bureaucratic mess that U.S. government dealings with Indians are inAmous for

“Everyone at the table agreed that [the bill] should be paid. Everyone also agreed that it had not been paid. But no one saw how it could be paid now” (252). Ever so refined in their hats and veils, Arnold and Reed quietly refuse to take no for an answer, until the

“stout man” valiantly comes to their rescue, roaring, “And I say pay ’em the money... .Pay ’em now. And send ’em home happy” (253). Finally satisfied, with the payment for Steve safely in hand, Arnold and Reed “told everyone how grateful we were, and everyone leaned back in his chair and look very pleased with himself ’Now what you want to tell those Indians down there,’ said [two men] in chorus, is not to do any work without a legal authorization firom me’” (253).

Their successful venture is again marked by their ability to manipulate colonial power through the multiple significations of their white womanhood, both its strengths and weaknesses; they play their parts as “ladies” at the courthouse, creating the opportunity for the stout man’s gallantry. At the same time, when they return to the

Rivers and give the money to Steve, he received it “with truly Christian resignation.

Evidently it was no more than he expected” (254-55). For Steve, their status as field matrons and white women necessarily leads to the solution o f his problems with the government; he never considers that they would have to play the part of women in need so a room fiiH of men could each &el “very pleased with himself’ at the sign of their gratitude.

162 Arnold and Reed leave their posts as field matrons not long after this success, and they do not give any reason for their departure beyond a vague re&rence to the lack of OIA support for their request for “a much broader method of meeting the needs o f the

Indian on the Klamath” (298). They are not optimistic that their plan will be approved and, indeed, they never do return to their post on the Rivers. As Brigitte Georgi-Findlay suggests, a number of progressive-era women “who wrote about their experiences in the

Indian Service took a critical stance toward the rhetoric of both the home mission and

Indian reform, focusing as much on personal growth through learning as on the transformation of the tribal people.”^ In the Land o f the Grasshopper Song reflects this trend, as the narrators tell a story that is as much about a transcultural experience of boundary-crossing (race, gender, region, sexuality) as it is about “reforming” the Indians.

Instead, the autobiographical subject of Arnold and Reed’s memoir, a collaborative production of both “we” and “I,” seeks to create a homepiace for two women who may have sought to alleviate an experience of “homelessness” in America (as liberal white women and as lesbians) through their decades-long work in housing reform, cooperative home-building, women’s peace movements, and the Indian Service. As Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty argue, “'not being home’ is a matter of realizing that home was an iUusion of coherence and safoty based on the seclusion of specific histories o f oppression and resistance, the repression of difi^ences even within oneself.”*^

Writing in the early part of this century, Arnold and Reed do not overtly contest the ethnocentric narrative that lay behind progressive discourses of social reform, assimilation, and uplift m America. At the same time, they are unwilling to advocate the

163 eradication of tCaruk culture, and instead concern themselves with assisting the Karuk in dealing with government officials. While their fondness for their Eastern hometowns and

Gunilies surffices periodically, they also assert their difference from the conventions of that world through the tropes of frontier, refr)rm, and the Native. Thdr racial “cross- dressing” cannot be justified, but it can be understood within the contect of Progressive- era formulations of America, race, and gender, as well as white American’s enduring fondness for romanticizing Indians in order to create a more “alive” and/or authentic version of one’s own American self. Nonetheless, Arnold and Reed’s autobiographical voice is fissured by a growing awareness of the perspective of the colonized, unsettling the “exclusion” of other histories and voices necessary to create such a coherent

A m erican self out of the ashes of the Other. The voices of Essie and Steve, Mart and A- su-na-pee, linger in their tect as a reminder that a “home” was made for these two white women, interlopers on the Rivers, despite the violent legacy of American conquest and native resistance in the gold country o f Northern California.

164 NOTES

‘ A few Native American women served as field matrons after 1896. many of whom were graduates of schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School or the Hampton Institute. However. Lisa Emmerich shows that the Office of Indian Affairs generally felt that Indians could not serve effectively in such an asshnilationist capacity, and for roughly twenty-fbur years of the program's existence, it apparently did not employ any Indian field matrons. Ackhtionally. only one African-American woman served as a field matron, and she was dismissed fiom her post on the basis of unproven misconduct charges in 1911. Lisa Emmerich. "T o Respect and Love and Seek the Ways of White Women’: Field Matrons, the Office of Indian Affitirs. and Civilization Policy. 1890-1938” diss.. U o f Maryland. 1987. 1I5-II9.

■ Thomas J. Morgan. Sixty-First Annual Report o fthe Commissioner ofIndian Affairs to the Secretary o fthe Interior (Washingtoiu D C.: Government Printing Office. 1892) 101.

^ Emily Cook. "Field Matrons." Twenty-Fourth Annual Report o f the Board ofIndian Commissioners 1892 (Washington. D C.: Govermnent Printing Office. 1893) 61.

For a detailed discussion of the origins of the field matron program, see Emmerich 15-41.

’ For a review of indigenous peoples’ responses to the presence of field matrons, see Emmerich 137- 146. For example. Josephine Babbit was unable to take up her assigned post at the Santo Domingo pueblos in 1903. because tribal leacbrs stated, according to the Indian agent, "thmr don’t want her or anyone else in that capad^. that thqr will not rent any quarters for her. nor win they permit her to five in the pueblo.” (C.J. Crandall to Honorable Commissioner of Indian Affairs. December 9.1903. LR 1903/80537. RD 75. BIA. NA. c) Cited in Emmerich 142. Emily Miller found at the Yakima agency that the women fled at her approach, forcing her to follow them, "even into the fields a they were shy with strangers and sometimes afiaid.” while \riola Blough claimed a warm welcome awaited her at the Colville Agency in 1919. Emmerich 143.145.

® Emily Miller. “Report of Field Matron at Yakima Agenqr” in Morgan. Sixty-First Annual Report, 509.

^ Elaine Goodale Eastman, for example, wrote "I will say that my nine years of work among the Indians has given me a better opinion of their capad^ and a worse opinion of the system under which, and the men by whom. thQr are managed, than a majority of people entertain. If a number of women, as good and as bright as are so many of our sex. could be pot into the field at once as Indian Agents, as hispectors. as School Superintendents and Supervisors, with a small am y of capable women teachers and field matrons uncfer them. I have no doubt that the day of salvation fi)r the red man would be brought much nearer than it is to-d^.” Eastman. "The hidian—A Woman Among the hufians.” The Literature o f Philanthropy, Ed. Frances A. Goodale (NY; Harper and Brothers. 1893) 139-140. On the

165 development o f an *^ideology of female moral authority,’^ see Peggy Pascoe, Relations o fRescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (NY: Oxford UP. 1990) 32-69.

* Emmerich 105-106.

^ Pascoe argues that the concerns of female moral authority in the late nineteenth-century extended far bqmnd the home, but its advocates still “believed that women’s moral influence stemmed fiom their positions as wives and mothers” (33). This formulation changes under the dictates of progressive women’s reform, as Ellen Carol Dubois argues: “The second generation of women progressives, bom in the 1870s and 1880s. had similar reform goals but expressed them quite diSerently. If the mother was the symbolic center of the first generation’s uncferstanding of womanhood, the woman worker was the emblem of the second. Paid labor, not social mothering represented their route to women’s emancipation” ( 163). Dubois. “Harriet Stanton Blatch and the Transformation of Class Relations among Woman Suffiragists.” Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era. etb. Noralee Frankel andN anqr Dye (Lexington. fCY: University of Kentuclw Press. 1991) 163.

They stayed with the “Karok” Indians, who traditionally have no ethnic name for themselves, calling themselves “people.” arara. See Alfi%d Kroeber. Handbook o fthe Int&ans o f California (Wash. DC.: Smithsonian Institution. 1925) 98.

" Kroeber 98.

*■ Julian Lang, “Introthiction,” To the American Indian: Reminiscences o f a Yurok Woman. Lucy Thompson. Che-Na-Wah Weitch-Ah-Wah (1916; Berkeley. CA: Heyday Books. 1991) xvi. This statement points out the difficulties faced by outsiders in understanding the subtle variations among the customs and societies of these neighboring nations. Kroeber. for example, wrote. “The ECorok are the up-river neighbors of the Yurok. The two peoples are indistinguishable in appearance and customs, except for certain minutiae; but they difi’er totally in speech” (98).

" Thompson 189. Thompson describes the territorial division of the Karuk and Yurok as follows; “we are all one tribe fiom the source of the Klamath River to its mouth, and down the coast as far as Trinidad (Cho-ri) and up the coast as far as Wilson Creek, which we call Ah-man. We are classed in two divisions, and term ourselves as Po-lick-la’s along the coast and up the river as far as Weitchpec. designated as the lower division o f our tribe. From Weitchpec on the river to its source we term as Pech-ic-Ia. the upper division of our tribe” (75).

Lang xxii; Thompson 220.

For a discussion of the development of Indian-white relations in the different mining regions of California (fairing this period see Albert Hurtado. Incûan Survival on the Califamia Frontier (New Haven. CT: Yale UP. 1988) 100-124.

‘^Hurta(fa> 1. He notes that when Hispanic settlement of the region began in 1769. an estimated 300,000 native people lived within what is now California. At the end of Spanish rule in 1821, that number was down to about 200.000 and dropped to 150.000 by the time o f the gold rush. See also. Jack Norton. When Our Worlds Cried: Genocitk in Northwestern California (San Francisco: The Indian Historian Press. 1979) 37-58.

Lang xxii.

'*Langxxii- 166 19Thompson 74.

^ The basic premise of American Indian reform groups like the Indian Rights Association, the loose- knit “Friends of the Indian meeting yearly at Lake Mohonk, and the Women’s National Indian Association was that the Indian now needed to be saved &om white Americans. For example. Henry Dawes, in “Solving the Indian Problem.” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the 'Friends o f the IneSan ’ 1880-1900, ed Francis Paul Prucha (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1973), declared: “To those who would do something in compensation for the wrongs that have been heaped upon [the Indian} in the past by the greed and avarice and inhumaniQr of so-called civilization, [government poliqrj opens a way for co-operation.... soon I trust we will wipe out the disgrace of our past treatment, and lift him up into citizenship and manhood, and co-operation with us to the glory of the country” (30).

Helen M. Bannan, “True Womanhood’ on the Reservation: Field Matrons in the United States Indian Service.” Working Paper No. IS. Southwest Institute for Research on Women (Tucson. AZ: UniversiQr of Arizona Press, 1984) IS. See also Elinor D. Gregg, The Inchans cmd the Murse (Norman: University of CHdahoma Press, 1965). Emmerich states that the origins for this shift to nursing can be found as early as I90S. when the Geld matron program began to move away from “its origins as a civilization plan and moved more in line with current public health and social welfare movements” (244).

~ Emmerich 190-191. She notes that it was not until I9I3 that the OfiGce of Indian Afihirs began regularly to issue medical supplies to Geld matrons ( 192). Although Civil Service classiGcation was extended to Geld matrons in IS96 (thus making the civil service examination a requirement), the Grst educational requirement to work as a Geld matron did not come until 1924: schooling to the eighth grade. Beginning in 1927. Geld matrons neetted eighteen months practical nursing experience or one year of home management experience (n. 13. 191). On Geld matrons and health care, see Barman IS­ IS.

^ Emmerich quotes a letter ftom Mary Arnold to Cornelia Taber where she (kscribes how she and Reed treated a seriously ill Indian woman with an unmarked bottle of lotion that they thought was medicine. The woman recovered, but they later learned that the lotion was hair tonic (a fact they kept secret Grom their patient). Emmerich 199.

Arnold, for example, was an active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freetbm, fotmdedby Jane Addams as a peaceful response to the violence of the Rrst World War. Both worked on cooperative housing projects in Canada and the East coast Arnold worked as a chief organizer ft>r the U.S. Employment Service in New Yoric State, and then worked with Reed on several successful cooperative ventmes, including cafeterias and an apartment building in New York C i^, miners' housing in Nova Scotia, cooperative credit unions among lobster Gshermen in Maine, and the Tanguy and Cheynqr Cooperative Homesteads in the Philadelphia area. Arnold was an earfy Treasiner of the Cooperative League, and was a member of the Providence Monthly Meeting a Quaker Organization.

^ Sidonie Smith, “IdenG^’s Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Ashley, Gilmore, and Peters (Amherst, MA: University (^Massachusetts Press, 1994) 271.

2 6 Judith Butler, Gender Tremble: Feminism end the Subversion o f Identify (NY: Routledge, 1990) 7.

167 ^ As white women representing American social mores and norms, they participate in this popular personification of the nation while their progressivism points to a new vision of an ordered unified America.

^ Throughout the nineteenth century, white women came to constitute the vast majority of elementary school teachers in American public and private schools, a feat Ann Douglas points out was not accomplished ly women in any other country and which causes “immense uneasiness in the men involved in American ethication by the turn of the twentieth century.” Ann Douglas. The Feminization o fAmerican Culture (NY : Knopf. 1977) 76.

^ Smith 272. '

For a compelling discussion of the adoption of tropes of innocence by white settlers, both men and women, and contemporary Westerners in the face of federal regulation, population growth, native peoples, etc.. see Patricia Limerick. The Legacy ofConquest: The Unbroken Past o fthe American fVest (NY: Norton. 1987) 35-54.

Smith 266.

^ See Limerick 200-210. Also Kenneth Philp. John Collier’s Crusade fo r Indian Reform, 1920-1954 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. 1977) 46-70.

^ Teresa de Laureds. Technologies o f Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington. lA; Indiana UP. 1987) 26.

^ De Lauretis (fescribes this paradigm as “the male-centered fiame o f reference in which gender and sexuality are (re)produced by the discourse of male sexuality—or. as Luce Irigary has so well written of it. of hom(m)osexuality” (17).

^ Fm thinking here of the persistence of the figure of the white woman as the essence of America, an essence that is at times threatened on the finntier. the female captive, and other times is the force of civilization and domestication of the West (of both Indians and white men) as seen in the iconography of the pioneer woman, the missionary, the schoolteacher.

“ De Lauretis 26.

For a detailed discussion of progressive reform and the assimilation of “new immigrants” in settlement work, see Rivka Shpak Lissak. Pluralism and Progressiyes: Hull House and the Mew Immigrants, 1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1989) 25-33. On progressives and tenement house reform, which Arnold and Reed worked on in New York before heading to the Klamath River, see Roy Lubove. The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in Mew York Oty, 1890-1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1962).

^ Hayden White argues that “tropes generate figures of speech or thought by their variation fiom what is ' normally' expected, and by the associations thqr establ^ between concepts normalfy felt not to be related or to be related in w ^ (figèrent fiom that suggMtedinthe trope us«L” Tropics o f Discourse: Esscq/s in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. 1978) 2.

Eric Lott. “White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness.” Cultures o f United States Imperialism, Eds. Anty Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham NC: Duke UP. 1993): 481. 168 ^ Indeed, Lucy Thompson makes reference to two Geld matrons being on the Rivers around the time Arnold and Reed would have been there. After the death of Mr. Johnson the government put two lacfy matrons on the Klamath River to look after the interest of the Indians. They at once began to look after this store [which sold whiskqr to Indians! and made reports against if' (23). Qearly, she saw them in their ofBcial capad^ as government representatives.

Many critics have studied white appropriations of native cultures in the United States. See, for example, Philip J. Deloria, Marianna Torgovnik, Wencfy Rose, Ward Churchill. Jimmie Durham, Mary Louise Pratt

^ Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizo (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. 1987)3.

^ For example, see Limerick, Richard Drinnon, Annette Kolodny. Mary Louise Pratt.

^ Homi Bhabba, The Location o f Culture (NY : Routledge, 1994) 107.

" Bhabba 107.

^ Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, The Frontiers o f Women "s Writing: Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric o f Westward Expansion (Tucsoit AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996) 285.

Bidcfy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With It?” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomingtoit LA; Indiana UP. 1986) 196.

169 CHAPTERS

CONCLUSION; IMAGINING AMERICA IN MARY AUSTIN’S EARTH HORIZON

Each of the women in this study struggled to find a voice for her story within a specific Western landscape. Linked by their involvement with U.S. Indian policy, their autobiographies reflect the changes in popular views of native peoples and the American

West, as well as of women’s roles in American society. Elaine Goodale Eastman saw herself as an advocate for Indian reform, supporting assimilationist programs such as allotment and day schooling while de&nding the Sioux against charges of irredeemable savagery. Zitkala-Sa challenged popular imagery of an undififerentiated national body, arguing for her integration into America as both a citizen and a Sioux. Mary Arnold and

Mabel Reed imagined a féminine symbolic for the fi*ontier, shaping the colonial rubric o f female reform and progressive ideology into a narrative space wherein the subjective and social fimneworks for their own identities took center stage.

In these tmcts, American Indians and white women play pivotal roles in the story of the national mcorporation of the West. These autobiographies struggle with the meaning o fthe raced and gendered body in the context of the nation and white/Indian

170 relations. As the previous chapters demonstrate, especially in the cases of the white writers, a model of cross-cultural identification sur6ces to negotiate the troubled political and cultural waters of colonialism. The meeting point of identification and incorporation varies, but the figure of a 'reformed’ America lurks throughout these stories as the progressive vision of a collective national destiny, a homeplace that, as

Etienne Balibar describes, “each o f us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and always will be—at home’."' Balibar argues that citizens must internalize the nation’s fi’ontiers to naturalize an experience of being “at home” Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty, however, have shown how feeling “at home” depends on an illusion of coherence, one which often represses differences within the subject, occluding other histories, perspectives, and/or identities.^ This concluding chapter takes up such questions of home and nation, gender and reform, and private and public historiography as raised by these disparate autobiographers, focusing on a final «cample—the autobiography of Mary Austin (1868-

1934), a writer and activist who sought art and God in the lands and peoples of the

American West.

In various ways, these writers struggle to feel at home in America. Progressive reform directed at Native American peoples sought to reinvent an American Indian identity as part of an idealized nation. However, such reft)rm eftbrts raised questions about the definition and significance of “nativity," specifically in terms of gender, race, and culture, cpiestions which led these writers to then ask about their own lives and stories. It is telling that these activists chose to write autobiographies, exploring their

171 personal experiences in relation to the work of making “Americans.” Each finds that she has to address key questions of national identity as part of her self-narration, and in so doing, she discovers that “home” is not so comfortably constituted as natural once it has been left. Writing about Freud’s essay on the “uncanny,” Priscilla Wald concludes, “the uncanny sends us home to the discovery that 'home’ is not what or where we think it is and that we, by extension, are not who or what we think we are.”^ The quest for

“home” at the heart o f progressive refisrm eftbrts is laid bare in these examples, as the

reformers sought to legitimate their own marginalized identities through political work

on the borders of the nation. Through reform, the authors had a chance to speak for the

nation, to publicly embody a national ideal, even on a remote frontier location. To

understand their personal experiences, they turned to the nationalist narratives that

commissioned their work: discourses o f social and individual reform which directly and

indirectly invoked hegemonic representations of gender, class, and race. However, as

Wald argues, “national narratives of identity seek to harness the anxiety surrounding

questions of personhood, but what they leave out resurfaces when the ecperiences of

individuals conspicuously fail to confi)rm to the definition of personhood offered in the

narrative.”'* Time and again, these authors cast the frontier as uncanny, a murky territory

where the unfamiliar becomes familiar (adopting aspects of a cultural Other), and the

fiuniliar becomes strange (the self becomes a stranger). Autobiography allows these

women writers, outsiders aO, to define themselves within and against the “legitimate”

models of cultural identity, leading to intentional and unintœtional critiques of the

172 sanctioned national identities imbedded in the Indian reform movement’s view of the representative A m erican. ®

Progressive Indian reform, aimed as it was at the reconstitution of outsiders

(Indians) as model American citizens, depends in these memoirs on a public staging of identity; these women had to embody America on the reservation as well as in their autobiographies, emulating an official definition of womanhood and citizenship as part of a larger national effort to incorporate native peoples into the American body politic.

This movement was not uncontroversial, coming after decades o f warfare and broken treaties between the United States and Indian nations. Nonetheless, progressive social principles gained power in the general political consciousness during this period, and more voices were added to the public perception that America now, at the very least, owed something to its “conquered” Indians. Others would go farther, updating an old

American tradition o f romanticizing the native as a means o f defining a new white

Americanidentity (as opposed to European, and especially British “whiteness”).

Both of these impulses are at work in the autobiographies selected for this project. Elaine Eastman headed West in order to escape the limitations of Victorian womanhood and to “do good.” Her memoir reenacts the strategies of self-representation she employed in her work among the Sioux. She relies on the association of white womanhood with civilization and moral integrity, popularized by women’s social reform work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while her autobiography repeatedly returns to the restrictions placed on women during this period. Arnold and Reed’s memoir reflects a later era in the Indian reform movement but, like Eastman, they are

173 commissioned to model America, a task laden with irony as their memoir shows;

sometimes they nmst announce their status as white women to gain legitimacy and, at other times, they find themselves trapped by the limitations o f those conventions.

Zhkala-Sa’s complex social and cultural location acts as a bridge between the other texts, as she was removed fi’om her Sioux mother and sent to White’s Indian School, attended college, and later became an active proponent o f Native American civil rights.

Her early autobiographical writing attempted to map out the territory of her hybrid subjectivity, as she sought to make sense of her loss of home by arguing for a Pan-Indian identity as part of America, included in the body politic but not absorbed into a homogeneous Christian whiteness. Looking back over these tects then, reflective of a forty-odd year period in U.S. Indian policy and women’s political rights, several questions stand out; how and why do these writers stage their identities through the remaking of Indians into A m erican:^ What histories of the body are inscribed in their autobiographies and which ones are excluded? What story emerges to account for a reformed national identity, one which they themselves actively participated in shaping?

Before concluding with a brief review of these issues in the memoirs by Eastman,

Zitkala-Sa, and Arnold and Reed, I want to address them role in shaping the autobiography of an important literary voice for the American West during this period, a woman actively inventing American identity to suit her needs through her writing, her activism, and her mcperiences in the American West.

174 The Artût as Native: Mary Hunter Austin’sEarth Horizon

When writer, ecologist, mystic, and activist Mary Hunter Austin began her autobiography, she must have imagined it as part of a great American epic. She casts her life against the backdrop of the middle and far west, among sprawling generations of

Emilies who settled first in Illinois and later headed to California in search of prosperity, adventure, and fireedom. However, her project is much more specific, as Austin attempts not only to recount the events that led her to a life of art and spiritual ecploration but also to capture the emotional ecperience of a woman struggling to find her artistic voice in an era still deeply committed to traditional roles for women. To find that voice,

Austin developed a complex spiritual and political life, one which complemented her quest to write. A committed sufiEtagist and feminist, Austin was also very active in efibrts to reform U.S. Indian policies in the 1920s and 1930s; she joined the public campaign against the Bursum bill, which sought to reduce Pueblo land rights, and she sought legal and financial support for traditional native arts and cultures in the

Southwest.^ At the same time, Austin became an ardent Indian “feddist,” adopting native styles of dress and writing poems and verse in “Amerind” voices as part of her public artistic persona. Her autobiography. Earth Horizon^ weaves together these various impulses in an efifert to paint a se^portrah of an American woman artist as rooted to the land and woven into the febric of traditional cultures, both hidian and

Anglo-American. The limitations of such a project, ranging fir>m racist stereotyping to colonial appropriation, essentialism to self aggrandizement, must be reckoned with as part o f a discussion of Austm’s essays, fiction, and autobiography; nonetheless, read in

175 light of her connection with the natural world and her political commitments to feminism and indigenous rights. Earth Horizon is useful to consider as a conclusion to this study of women’s autobiography, Indian reform and American frontier mythology, as Austin also sought to tell the story of the American West as part of her own story as a progressive white woman on the cusp of a newly imagined American frontier/

Mary Hunter was bom to George Hunter and S u sa n n aGraham Hunter in

CarlinviHe, Illinois, in 1868, part of a close-knit Methodist family rooted in the history of the Middle American West. Her father was an Englishman who had emigrated to the

United States as a young man and was a decorated captain in the Civil War, while her mother came from a long line of pioneer women. Mary was very close to her father as a young girl, and his influence on her as a storyteller takes center stage in the early pages of Earth Horizon. However, her father died in 1878, forcing the family to move and her mother to go out to work as a nurse. Although their relationship was strained from early in Hunter’s childhood, her mother’s struggle as a widow deeply affected young Mary, who later wrote, ‘'Mary suffered through her mother the strange indignities offered to widowhood by a society which made out of the w ^ ’s economic dependence on her husband a kind of sanctity which was violated by his death” (91). After Mary’s graduation from college, her mother moved the family to Southern Calfrbmia to Join her oldest son in a homesteading venture at Tqon in the San Joaqum Valley.

T h ^ arrived m the midst of several seasons of drought, which made survival in the desert near hnpossible; nonetheless, after suffermg a nervous breakdown, Mary begins to define herself as an artist through her desire to get “to know” this harsh and

176 beautiful land: was consumed with interest as with enchantment. Her trouble was that the country 6iled to explain itself. If it had a history, nobody could recount h”

(194). While her 6mily frets about Mary’s lethargic behavior, she takes to wandering the hills, following bobcats and antelope, SMrcbing for clues among the rocks and brush.

Finally, she discovers wild grapes in the Tqon canyons, and her spirits and energy level greatly improve. Her family finds it humorous and peculiar, but Austin sees something much more important in the incident when she writes about it in Earth Horizon. By following her desire to walk among the dunes and canyons, she learned “that there was something you could do about unsatisfàctory conditions besides being heroic or a martyr to them, something more satisfactory than enduring or complaining, and that was getting out to hunt for the remedy. This, for young ladies in the eighteen-eighties, was a revolutionary discovery to have made” (195). During this period, Austin begins to formulate her need to understand the nature and rhythms of a region, the history of a landscape, which melds with her early feminist sensibility to create not only a desire “to know” but also to write.

By the time she was a young married woman, struggling with her husband to find decent work and a good place to live, Austin knew “she was to write of the W est.. . . all her interior energies were bent on sorting her really voluminous notes about strange growths and unfamiliar creatures, flocks, herders, vaqueros, Henry Miller, pelicans dancing on Buena Vista, Indians, phylloxera, and a vast dun valley between great swinging ranges” (228). She had married Stafford Austin in I89I, a man from a family o f means who seemed destined to wander from occupation to occupation, a habit which

177 grew increasingly frustrating for the aspiring writer he had married. The Austins moved frequently, heading to San Francisco to a remote town in Inyo County, California; sedcmg teacfamg Jobs, Mary frequently had to live apart from her husband, adding to the pressures on their relationship which eventually ended in divorce. In addition, Austin gave birth to a daughter, Ruth, not long after their move to Inyo. The child was later found to be developmentally disabled, and her care fell occlusively on her young, isolated mother.* Austin institutionalized her daughter at the age of twelve, where she died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Eventually, Austin separated permanently from her husband, pursuing her writing friU-time in a career that took her from Carmel to London,

New York City to New Mœdco, and included nearly thirty-five books and dozens of articles.^

Austin’s memoir relies on three narrative personae—Mary-by-herselft I-Mary, and I. Shifting between first and third-person, and a hybrid of the two (I-Mary), Austin attempts to capture the fluidity of subjectivity and her mystical understanding of the artistic process. Casting herself in the third person, Austin affects an air of distance and objectivity, creating an unapologetic history of a new kind of pioneer woman—the artist.

‘T-Mary” refers to the artist within, the guiding principle that enables Austin to withstand emotional isolation from her mother and the hardships of her early marriage. The‘T’ voice surfaces periodically when both objectivity and philosophy fail for Austin, and the pain and joy of her private life can only be «pressed in the singular, personal “I.” It also signals the autobiographer’s narrative control, as she interrupts the story to convey

178 necessary infonnatioa or a later perspective before plunging ahead. About her early career, Austin states;

There was that stream of knowingness which ever since adolescence I bad folt going on in me, supplying deficiencies, affording enterions ofjudgement, creating certainties for which no warrant was to be found in my ordinary performance, setting up in me the conviction, which as experience I have named I-Mary, that all I know has always been known by me and used as known. At any rate, it was as I-Mary walking a log over the creek, that Mary-by-herself couldn’t have managed, that I wrote two slender little sketches.... (230-231)

Throughout her autobiography, Austin argues against narrow conceptions of womanhood, writing her complaint out of her own experiences of discrimination. Her t®rt actively negotiates between her sense that identity is multivalent and collectively forged, and her desire to project a unique writerly voice. Mary-by-herself is the rejected daughter and neglected wife, the misunderstood writer and activist; I-Mary is the

“remedy,” the interior self named as experience, the experience of self-overcoming in the name of art, spirituality, and politics. Sidonie Smith has argued that “the tensions set in motion by contradictory collocations of subject positions and identities incite. .. self- conscious encounters with the politics of identification and catalyze identity around specffic and oppositional contours of'I-ness.”’^^ Clearly, such a process is at work in fiar/A H orizon, as Austin divides her subject into several powerful identities, selves forged by the loss of home and her lifelong quest for “ro o tle in the West” (281). For her, it was the loss of the “certification of ladyhood” that fostered this understanding, the realization that she had been displaced fi'om the familia r life of home and hearth, leading her on a “distressful search for a new center of personal direction” (275). ^ Caught within the cross-currents of late-Victorian and progressive social mores, Austm finds she

179 can only begin to express how she found her voice by claiming several “Marys” as her own. Significantly, it is through her interest in the land and native peoples o f the far

West and her later involvement in Indian reform, specifically cultural preservation causes, that I-Mary seems to move to center stage in Austin’s public and literary lifo.

What should be clear from the discussion of Earth Horizon thus far is that Austin creates a multi-voiced autobiographical narrative, making public the very private process of her artistic development. That she turned to the American West as her primary subject matter is not surprising, given her roots in pioneer American lives and her coming of age in the California deserts. However, her interest in native peoples and her subsequent self-promotion as an authority in Indian matters raises the concern voiced by

Elizabeth Ammons, who asks what “are the ethics of advantaged white women adapting other people’s cultural perspectives to their own personal ends?”'^ For Austin, who struggled to make a living as a writer her entire career, Indians did provide “good material” that she hoped would sell to audiences back East. Mark Hoyer, in a recent study of indigenous influences on Austin, argues that she was engaged in a project of cultural mediation that was certainly shaped, directly and indirectly, by the political climate of the era. He casts “Austin as a figure from the dominant culture whose artistic and religious vision was profoundly influenced by—even directly indebted to-a

'nontradhional’ native tradition.” He concludes that while Austin undoubtedly romanticizes her subject matter, her texts reflect an ongoing critical tension in the studies of Native American cultures: “the tendency to fix native cultures as part o f a pristme and

180 unachievable past is called into question by a counterfbrce, a witnessing to the adaptive resilience o f native cultures.”^**

These critiques by Ammons and Hoyer speak not only to Austin’s memoir but also to the previous texts considered in this study, as each of these reformers/autobiographers sought to tell a story of a lost frontier while also testifying, with varying degrees of consciousness, to the dynamic endurance of native cultures in the face o f ongoing colonialism. Similarly, each of these writers, in different ways, romanticizes aspects of native cultures as part of her story. Mary Austin makes her incorporation of “Indian-ness” the central theme of her autobiography which she names

“Earth Horizon.” She follows the announcement of her birth with a description of her tract’s central metaphor “In the Rain Song of the Sia, Earth Horizon is the incalculable blue ring of sky meeting earth, which is the source of racperience. It is pictured as felt, rays of earth energy running together from the horizon to the middle place where the heart of man, the recipient of racperience is established, and there treasured” (33).

Through this trope, Austin situates her story in relation to a universal racperience of nature and spirit, ultimately arguing, in her autobiography as well as other writings, that what constitutes the (quintessential American identity is this harmony between land and soul. What she omits in order to create this image of an ideal new American is a question that I will now address.

Unlike Eastman, Zhkala-Sa, Arnold, and Reed, Austin did not live or work directly on an hidian reservation. However, she lived near Pahite villages in Southern

Cal^m ia and the Pueblos in New Mradco frir ractended periods and claimed a deep

181 spiritual connectioa with both desert landscapes and their Native American inhabitants,

one that defined her most famous books as weh as her autobiograpiqr. She fashioned a personal story of spiritual enlightenment out of her Methodist upbringing and her encounters with different Indian beliefs, arguing in Earth Horizon that it was through her realization o f God via an Anglicized cooptation of indigenous philosophies that she found the path to artistry. While Austin opposed the assimilationist programs supported by Elaine Eastman and, to a far lesser extent, Mary Arnold and Mabel Reed, her interest in “protecting” Native American cultures retained the primitive/civilized paradigm at work in earlier reform movements.'** Like John Collier and supporters o f the “Red

Atlantis” movement, Austin believed that the United States ought to preserve Indian cultures as a sort of a “national treasure,” arguing in 1924, for «(ample, that U.S. Indian policy should be placed ‘in the hands of a group of properly qualified people who wiD remember that the Indians do not belong to them, but to us, and will hold themselves reasonably sensitive to public opinion on the subject.”'^ Native peoples were, in a sense, owned by white Americans in Austin’s view, cherished for their “backwardness” and

“dependence” as essential elements in the formulation of a cpiintessential American character. In works such as The American Rhythm mû. Land o f Journey's Ending,

Austin advocated an ‘indigenous” identity for all Americans that would develop out of a blending o f Indian and Anglo-American beliefo and cultures; at the same time, through mismformation and romantic stereotyping, Austin adopted an ethnocentric position that saw Indian cultures as the possessions of white Americans, and especially possessions of white artists trying to find a new voice fiir America in the Southwest.

182 Austm went further than merely proclaiming a vested national interest in native peoples; she also built her public literary persona around her self^lescribed spiritual connection with mdigenous cultures, and asserted an ecpertise in ‘Indian” matters in order to gain recognition and publication." Like Eastman, Arnold, and Reed, Austin fashioned herself as Indian at times as a way to make sense of her own marginalized position—both as a woman and, in Austin’s case, as a Western writer trying to gain national stature." While living in Carmel, California, Austin often dressed as an “Indian

Princess,” wearing braids down to her knees, and had a writing studio built as a Pauite wickiup behind her house. But her masquerade was far more elaborate than these previous writers as, influenced by various Tan-Indian” movements ranging from the

Ghost Dance to the CoUier-era Indian policies, Austin mingled native customs and beliefs with her own mix of essentialist feminism in order to claim a distinctly female American genius borne out of the western deserts and the legacies o f Indian, Spanish, and Anglo settlements.^^ In her book on American Indian poetry. The American Rhythm, Austin writes, “Words are perhaps the final evocation of the intelligence taking possession of the egerience and decorating it appropriately. It is here, in the verbal realization, that we come upon the common root o f aboriginal and modem Americanness” (AR 54). Her search frir a common A m erican origin, one which mingled Indian, Spanish, and Anglo cultures, became part and parcel o f her self-invention as a progressive female artist; interestingly, this American riiythm she sought is most clearly manifested in her own autobiography, Earüt Horizon, as it is here that Austin shows how such a quest began and what it meant in the context of female authorship and national identity.

IK Early in Earth Horizon, Austin stakes a claim on a heterogeneous American identic that is simultaneously unique and collective:

There is something in Mary which comes out of the land; something in its rhythms, its living compulsions, which dominates over her French, Scotch, Irish, Dutch, English, even the far-off traditional aboriginal strain, governing her own progressions, coloring her most intimate expression. It is the source of that roving mind’s eye that includes for her, in its implications, the whole American continent, and at the same time, in its rejection of the male ritual of rationalization in favor of a more direct intuitional attack, providing the key to her approach. (15)

Declaring a âmiliar American ancestry of mixed ethnic stock, with a dash of Indian,

Austin reaches deeper into her mind’s eye to find a more personal and unique tie to the

land itself a connection which becomes the defining principle of her artistic vision.

Austin casts such an awareness of nature’s rhythms as “intuitional’’ and female as opposed to the implied violence of male rationalization. Significantly, this assertion

comes as part of a discussion of Austin’s female forebears, pioneer women whose hardy

legacies Austin claims as essential to her own story: “Whatever in Mary makes her worth

so much writing about has its roots in the saga of Polly and Hannah and Susanna Savilla,

in the nurture of which she grew up.... It is to the things that the Polly McAdamses

discovered in their westward trek that Mary’s generation owed the success of their

revolt against the traditional estimate of women” (14-15). Austin asserts her place in a

sisterhood of strong and daring women by valuing what distinguished them fi'om men as

well as made them their equals; her concurrent move to place herself outside

conventional bourgeois society through assumed spiritual ties to a specific landscape and

native peoples d ^ e s a complex subjective position out o f which Austm writes, wherein

184 she imagines herself defined by the history of white American women in the middle west and by the landscapes and indigenous cultures of the Southwest. Much later in her autobiography, Austm writes, “There was a part for her in the Indian life.... She entered into their lives, the life o f the campody, the strange secret life of the tribe, the struggle of

Whiteness with Darkness, the struggle of the individual soul with the Friend-ofthe-Soul- of-Man. She learned what it meant; how to prevail; how to measure her strength against it. Learning that, she learned to write” (289).^ Her voice arises out of this tumultuous connection. By heading West, the aspiring writer finds herself working out her ambivalent relation to America through an identification with the Native and the dialectics of identity in a colonial as well as sexist context.

The “struggle of Whiteness and Darkness,” which likely refers to ethical and moral dilemmas of good and evil, nonetheless resonates with one of the central ambivalences of progressive white women’s reform work during this era. Austin transposes her personal search for spiritual meaning onto Pahtte culture, unintentionally replicating the racial anxieties at work in the Indian reformers’ debates over assimilating native peoples into mainstream American society. Her belief that she could so easily access the “strange secret life of the tribe” reflects the assumed colonial prerogative to complete access to the colonized’s private life, an attitude that surfaces, and at times is challenged, in the autobiographies of Eastman, Zhkala-Sa, and Arnold and Reed.

NGssionaries, teachers, and field matrons were sent to reservations to intervene in the private lives of Indian people; thdr mission was to disrupt and challenge traditional knowledge systems as advocates of whhe, Christian, middle-class mores. However, as

185 the earlier texts show, these agents found themselves in a contact zone that called their colonial %enda/%%ency into question.

The contact zone between the self and the other surfaces as a emergence point for the uncanny in Austin’s memom, where the repressed elements of one’s identity (both on a national as well as individual level) return for an accounting. Late in her autobiography, Austin writes about her time in New York City before she moved to

Taos. One peculiar anecdote about her residence there centers around her encounters with African-Americans. She describes how one day she wandered into a predominantly black neighborhood and immediately became disoriented; “Suddenly I saw three black men crossing the street toward me, black, and walking with the jungle stride. They were so black and so freely walking that I was frightened. 1 looked about, and saw first one and then another black man, and then black women, going up and down the street, walking and disappearing, coming out black as thqr came toward me, and losing the blackness” (346). Austin cannot contain her terror and sense of overwhelming darkness in this passage, so she transforms a story of what she cannot incorporate into an example of her own clairvoyance. She clanns that before she saw these men and thus could

“name” where she was, she looked around at the houses and saw “a singular effect of darkness, coming out of the doorways and windows, a light of darkness” (346). Austin sees this psychic experience as evidence of an open-mindedness on racial matters. At a dinner with James Weldon Johnson, she describes how she kept watching hhn, “and occasionally I would see that he was black, and then 1 wouldn’f’ (347). An interior

186 Voice laughs at her confusion, signifying her awkward awareness of the social construction of race, one she can sense more than articulate.

These scenes continue, until finally at another interracial gathering in Harlem,

Austin states, “I would look up and I would see that they were wearing their blackness, and then I would look again and they had laid it aside, the way people lay masks aside”

(348). While Austin perceives race as a mask, she also implies that one is more true or real than another; whiteness does not appear to be a mask one can don or remove at will, instead bearing an ontological integrity that is deeply troubled by close encounters with the Other.^ Her whiteness becomes the standard by which she judges her comfort level with those different fi’om herself. Significantly, she is disturbed by her sense of exclusion and masquerade on the part of “the blacks” she meets, despite her own “Indian” play back home. She fails to acknowledge that as a white person, she holds the social power to judge and control difference; it is her gaze that defines the others as black and then not black. However, Austin is frightened by her sense that her gaze is incomplete, and that there is much more to those she watches than she can understand or even see. She concludes, “I never went back to Harlem, popular as it became to do so. I did not wish to see them black, and I feared that with much looking, it might come upon me. I did not mean to go against the Voice” (348). Although Austin tends to be outspoken and confident when talking elsewhere m E arth H orizon about her political and artistic stances, she abruptly ends this chapter with a retreat from the hnpiications o f her own msight. She recognizes a common cause with artists such as Johnson and E.B. DuBois, but Austin cannot sustain the hnpiications of “crossing” over racial borders between

187 whites and blacks. Instead, she quickly moves from this incident to her move to Santa

Fe and then Taos, evading the question of what it means for her to be white and progressive in America at a time of racial segregation and injustices.

While she forever avoids Harlem, Austin resides comfortably on the racial frontier between whites and Native Americans, as she declares herself an asset to Indian causes while also claiming a bit of native blood for herself. Dependent on her Indian material, Austin does not want to lose her sense of the Native’s difference; rather, she wants to embrace that difference as central to her own American identity, a mask that she, a white woman, can don at wOl. In a strong and determined voice, Austin ecplains how she became involved in questions of Indian rights: T took to the defense of Indians because they were the most conspicuously defeated and offended against group at hand.

I should have done as much even without what I afterward discovered among them of illumination and reformation of my own way of thought. I am consoled by the certainty, which nobocfy denies me, not even the Government which I fought, of having been of use to them” (266). Her assertion of her effort’s efScacy illuminates an undercurrent of amdety about her relation to native peoples; her declaration seems wrought in the face of critics, of which Austin had many.^^ But her claim cuts much deeper for Austin than a concern about her political power, as she sees her work on behalf of Indians as reflecting her own “Amerind” identityWeed, she situates her work in relation to that of other

progressives, but makes an important distinction. Through reform work, Austin argues,

she learned:

Precisely what my contemporaries learned by seeing strikers beaten up by policemen; citizens deprived by violence of their constitutional liberties; the lowly 18S and underprivileged stripped of their economic opportunities. As for the other things that came to me by way of my Indian acquaintances, th ^ are the gifts of a special grace which has been mine ftom the beginning, the persistence in me, perhaps, of an uncorrupted strain of ancestral primitivism, a single isolated gene of that ftr-oft and slightly mythical Indian ancestor of whose reality I am more convinced by what happened to me among Indians than by any objective evidence. (267)

While elsewhere Austin is anxious about interracial mixing, both between whites and blacks, and whites and Indians, she also regularly hints at a mysterious aboriginal heritage in her own lineage.^ This “slightly mythical Indian ancestor” is precisely that, an invention which adds authority to Austin’s literary reflections on the desert, native peoples, and a hybrid American identity.

Moreover, Austin’s claim o f a mbced-race background literally embodies her views on race in the American West. Noreen Lape argues that Austin’s conception of regionalism allows her to mitigate the boundary of race, making land the “determining factor in the lives of people.”^ In fact, Austin makes this point plain in an essay on regionalist writing, claimmg that race is “but a pattern of response common to a group of people who have lived together under a given environment long enough to take a recognizable pattern.”^* Thus, her autobiography begins to trace out a history of the

“Amerind” body Austin envisions for herself. It is a story set far ftom the cities and the disturbmg eqieriences of racial and cultural dffi^ence Austin had in New York City in the 1920s. In the city, Austin is solefy and defontively white, able only to not “see” blackness rather than accept deference on its own terms. However—out West—Austin becomes open to a more fluid conception of the raced botfy, as she seeks a hybrid position for her artistic and sphitual self.

189 Mary Austin’s autobiography, like her life, is ultimately a search for meaning outside social and literary conventions. Her image of the Earth Horizon asserts her desire for a far-reaching perspective, one rooted in the land and a sense of belonging someplace, an experience Austin continuously sought throughout her life. And despite her travels, she always sought to find a sense of balance, a harmony between the interior and exterior landscapes that so absorbed her. In many ways, the Earth Horizon is

Austin’s theory of experience as a collective rather than solely individual phenomenon.

She writes early in her memoir

Experience is always significant and mysterious. .. . reciting in the heart that subtle sense of relationship to the earth horizon which is the nurture of the spiritual lifo. In this fashion «cperience may be carried about as an amulet, a fetish; neglected and dropped; dispossessed by death, it may be picked up and carried by the finder without loss o f its potency, its inherent capacity as of a seed to come alive from within and burgeon. This is a true report. At the Middle Place, where all influences of the Earth Horizon come to equilibrium, «perience «(plains itself flowers and fiuits to the holder. (33)

Experience is a creative act, an opening up to the world that is crucial for the artist to understand. Later, Austin describes her practice of prayer, which she develops through conversations with a Pauite “medicine man,” as part of her departure from mainstream

Christianity: “The illuminating point, the thing that Protestant Christianity had utterly failed to teach her, was the practice of prayer as an act, a motion of the mind.” Thus conceived, prayer eventually provides the answer “to the problem of creative activity” in

Austin’s lifo (277).

190 Austin returns to this motif in the conclusion of her memoir, linking her craving for the “wide arcs” of erperience to her sense of an American collective identity arising out of its disparate peoples;

I have known, to some extent, what the Earth Horizon has been thmlnng about. Measurably, its people and its thoughts have come to me. I have seen that the American achievement is made up of two splendors; the splendor of individual relationships of power, the power to make and do rather than merely to possess, the aristocracy of creativeness; and that other splendor of realizing that in the deepest layers o f ourselves we are incurably collective. At the core of our Amerindian life we are consummated in the dash and color of collectivity. (368)

At the last. Earth Horizon becomes central to Austin’s understanding not only of herself and of the natural world, but also of the nation. She imagines a new identity for all

Americans, defined by an understanding of a shared “Amerindian life.” While she hoped for an America that would value native peoples on their own terms, she also employed colonial strategies such as appropriation, categorization, and romanticization to support her personal struggle as an independent progressive female writer. Her activism on behalf of Native American arts and cultures, like her public support of feminist issues such as suffrage, grew out of this quest to understand her place in the nation’s horizons.

Like the other white women considered in this study, Austin was caught within the racist and sexist paradigms of her era, and her autobiography is a testament to both her triumphs and her pitM s in writing within and around the arcs of mainstream identity.

Native Formulations and Invented Lives

The writers and autobiographies in this study are far fi'om well-known today, although Zhkala-Sa and Mary Austin have clahned a position recently in the American literary canon as important regionalist writers fisr the American West. The stories of

191 Elaine Eastman, Mary Arnold, and Mabel Reed, published decades after they were written, remain mostly footnotes in the history of white women's work among Native

Americans. Nonetheless, each of these autobiographies provides a valuable glimpse into the relationship between progressive discourses of reform and national narratives of identity (especially in terms of race and gender) at the turn of the century. Like today, conflicts between individual experience and accepted national identities arose in many locales in America at that time, including Afocan-American struggles for civil rights, women's battle for political enfranchisement, and immigrants' quest to find success and happiness in the United States. Indian reform, shaped by white Christian advocates loosely organized as the “Friends of the Indian," is just one avenue for investigation of the questions raised by the good intentions and ethnocentric assumptions of many white progressive reformers. Still, it is an important one, as it cuts across defining American narratives o f conquest and territorial expansion, as well as traditions of romanticizing the

Native and the wide, open spaces beyond the narrow strictures of conventional middle class society.

The role of women, white and Native American, in both supporting and challenging the central aim of progressive Indian reform (assmiilation) has not received extensive critical attention. While a significant paper trail detailing the official work of women teacher, missionaries, field matrons, and nurses remains on record at the Library of Congress, their autobiographies o ffe r a crucial window onto the subjective process of

“modelmgf America. The memoirs by Eastman, Arnold and Reed focus mainly on their experiences working on Indian reservations, and th ^ necessarily must adcfress what it

192 meant to be a white woman both on and off the reservation in order to discuss how they went about their work of “reforming” Indians into Americans. E astm anuses her identity as reformer more uncritically than Arnold and Reed, confident that the fundamentalaim

o f allotment and assimilation, despite episodes o f violence like Wounded Knee, was the

right course. Arnold and Reed seem less convinced, both of their role among the Indians

and, more implicitly, of their own position in America as women committed to social justice and equality. The raced and sexed body emerges in their stories as a troublespot

in the national narratives of cultural homogeneity and progress. Eastman attempts to

reconcile her activist’s faith in an ideal America with her private struggles as a white

woman married to a Sioux man. Arnold and Reed both deploy and renounce their white

and female bodies, marked difierently by white and Karuk societies, depending on the

situation. Each of these writers rely on romantic notions of the native people they live

among in order to create new possibilities for their own American identities.

Zitkala-Sa’s autobiographical essays provide a necessary counterpoint to views

like Eastman’s that the Sioux must become almost “white” to survive. Writing as a

young woman for a predominantly white audience, Zhkala-Sa narrates an identity that is

Sioux and American, shaped both by her “Indian girlhood” and her life back East in U.S.

schools and colleges. Her sense of a lost relationship with her mother permeates her

memoir, creating an image of an ideal America rooted in indigenous cultures. This loss

of the mother resonates with Mary Austm’s search for home within the “Earth Horizons”

of America, as Austin sufi&red fi'om her mother’s continual rejections of her artistic

vision and cast the American landscape within a distmctly fominine symbolic.^ Like

193 Zitkala-Sa, Austin turned toward a conception of a new American identity as hybrid, shaped by the peoples and regions o f the American West. However, while Zitkaia-Sa more narrowly claims a Pan-Indian American identity for herself as a Sioux educated in white schools, Austin imagines that the “Amerindian” identity was one available to all

Americans, including and perhaps especially white Westerners like herself.

Wald concludes that “the task o f any official story of the nation is to enable a smooth transition, to accommodate revisions in order simultaneously to transform and preserve ' us. ’ It at once builds on and changes prior forms o f relatedness and reformulated concepts of personhood and home accordingly.”^® These women writers encountered and negotiated the “official narratives” of U.S./Indian relations as well as other stories that shaped their views of gender and race. They all wrote “unofficial” autobiographical accounts of their experiences living within these frameworks, exploring what it meant both to be American and become American on the nation’s margins.

They all sought to make a home in the American West, and their memoirs, like their reform work, reflect an effort to find one’s role in the nation by heading to its limits.

What th ^ discovered was not the familiar theme of individuality and lonesomeness prevalent in popular dime Westerns and movies, but rather the necessity of the collective, a communal identity shaped in relation to region, culture, and community which necessarily changes over time.

194 NOTES

^ Etienne Balibar, “TTic Nation Fonn,” Race, Motion, Class: Ambiguous Identities, tnms. Chris Turner (London: Verso» 1991) 95.

- Bickfy Martin and Chandra Talpade MohanQr, "Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With It?” Feminist Studies^Criticai StucSes, ed Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington. lA: Indiana UP. 1986): 196.

^ Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Marrative Form (Durham. NC: Duke UP. 1995) 7.

^ Wald 10.

^ Paul Smith has defined the ideological "subject” as a fixed subject position representing culturally legitimated models of identity. See Paul Smith. Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988) 103.

* For an outline of Austin’s feminist philosoplqr, see Austin. The Young Woman Citizen (NY: The Woman’s Press, 1918), a treatise arguing that newly enfianchised women must engage in the political affairs of the world

' For a discussion of Austin’s work in relation to other nature writers of the period and sentimental views of nature, see Peter Wild "Sentimentalism in the American Southwest: John C. Van Dyke. Mary Austin, and Edward Abbey,” Reaeûng the West: Mew Essays on the Literature o f the American West, e d Michael Kowalewski (NY: Cambridge UP, 1996) 127-143. For a discussion o f Austin in terms of the themes of conquest and the American West, see Richard Drirmon, Facing West: The Metaphysics o f IncSan Hating and Empire Building (Miimeapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. 1980).

* Austin’s mother went so far as to blame Mary for her daughter’s disability, writing, "1 don't know what you’ve done, daughter, to have such a judgement upon you” (EH 257).

^ For longer biographies of Austin, see Esther r^nigan Stineman, Mary Austin: Song o fa Ma^/erick (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989); Peggy Pond Church, Wind’s Trail: The Early Life o f Mary Austin (Sante Fe: Museum o f New Mexico Press, 1990); Augusta Fink, I-Mary (Tucson: U o f Arizona, 1983); T.M. Pearce, Mary Hunter Austin (New York: Twayne, 1965).

For example, writing about her father’s and older sister’s deaths, Austin moves between Mary and I- hbry and L as the achilt writer tries to make sense of the pain of these traumatic losses experienced so close togethm: She describes how I-^daryarrivedjust at the moment ofher father’s death, helping the vulnerable little girL Mary-by-herselfi endure the terrible loss. She notes, "For once Mary had nothing to Sty” (86). However; t k chapter emk with a reflection Ity the sixty-fiiur year old writer about the loss of hôrâther and sister Jennie so maity years earlien "In time I recovered finmnty father’s death.. .. But with Jennie it is not so. She is not changed or gone... .The loss ofher is never cold in me, tears 195 start freshfy at the mere mention ofher name. And I would not have it otherwise. She was the only one who ever nnselflessty loved me. She is the onfy one who stays” (87).

" Si(h)nie Smith, “The Autobiographical Manifesto.” Autobiography and Questions o f Gender, ed. Shirlqr Newman (London: Frank Cass, 1991); 190. On the «(pressions and repressions of the self as drvidôl in autobiography, also see Shari Benstock, “Authorizing the AntobiographicaL” The Private Self: Theory and Practice o f Women‘s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benst(x:k (Chapel HilL NC: Univ. o f North Caroline Press, 1988): 10-33; also chapter two, “Technologies of Autobiography” in Leigh GUmorCy Autobiographies: : A Feminist Theory o f Women's Self-Representation (Ithaca, NY: ComeUUP, 1994)65-105.

Austin argues, “For a long time it bad been the fashion to speak of the women who led the feminist revolt as though thqr bad been actuated by malice prepense against the «cisting order, but the truth is that hordes of them were animated by the bitter cfi^usion of being pushed out of the sacred ({tiarter for which they were bred and brought up. Nbbcx^ had wanted children more than Mary did; few intellectuals ofher generation have clung more obstinatefy to the idea of a home, a house, a garden, the âm iliar use of hospitality; few have sacrificed more to the fulfiUmemofthe pattern of man and woman working together for a converging point on the 5 rth Horizon” (274).

Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York : Oxford University Press, 1991) 101.

" Mark Hoyer. Dancing Ghosts: Motive American and Christian Syncretism in Xlary Austin's Work (Reno : University of Nevada Press, 1998) xxvii.

** See for example. The Land o f Journey's Enéng, which Austin argues is a book of prophecy, one concerned with the new race forged out of the hybrid experiences of the Southwest. She declares. “Anytxxfy can write fact about a country, but nobody can write truth who does not take imo accoum the sounds and swings of its native nomatclature” (vii). Austin, The Land o f Journey "s Ending (NY: Century Co., 1924). The ties Austin makes between Native American spirituality, which she tends to see in singular terms, and her method of pr^er is clearly articulated in her book Can Prayer Be Answered? (NY: Farrar and Rinehart. 1934). Here she chscusses the development ofher spiritual practice out ofher interviews with a Paiute “medicine man” as well as fiom trips to Italy and Catholic shrines.

See, for example, Austin's essay, “Why Americanize the American Indian?” Forum 82 (Sept 1929): 167-173. Here she criticked U S. efforts to “ecfaicate” Indian children in Anglo-American culture.

“The Folfy of the Officials,” original^ published in Forum 71 (1924). From A ustin's collected essors. Beyond Borders: The Selected Essays o fMary Austin, ed Reuben Ellis, (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996) 102.

Karen Langlois has written a detailed article on Austin's literary “marketing” of the American Indian She asserts that Austin's writing on Indians comprises a third to one-half of her published work, conchufing, “Without any formal training in anthropology or ethnologr, she repeatedly managed to (Bsarm her critics and market her wod: to the American reading public:” Karen S. Langlois, “M a^eting the American Indian: Miary Austin and the Business of Writing,” d U v in g o f Words: American Women in Print Culture, ed Susan Albertme; (Knoxville, TX: University ofTdmessee Press, 1995): 151. See also Noreen Groover Lape's article on the link between Austin's views on regionalism and her aptnopriation of native cultures, “'There w asapart for her in the Indian Life': Miary Austin, 196 Regionalism, and the Problems of Appropriation,” Breaking Boundaries: Mew Perspectives on Women's Regional Writing, eds. Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer (Iowa Ci^: Untversi^ (tf Iowa Press, 1997).

For an extensive stotfy of white Americans appropriating ‘^Indian” identities, see Philip JJDeloria, Playing Int&an (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1998).

^ See Lanigan's biography of Austin, pp. 93-96, for a description of Austin’s public persona while in Carmel. For a contemporary description of these activities, see the memoir by Arnold C ^the, As / Remember (New York: Rqmal and Ifitchcock, 1936). A traditional Pauite duelling as Austin encountered them in California at the century ’s turn was a conical structure made of willows and mud

For a discussion of the Ghost Dance and its leader, Wovoka (fade Wilson), as an influence on Austin’s early work, see Hoyer 1-18.

~ Austin defines the concept of’The-Frienttaf^he-Soul-of-Man” in Earth Horizon as "an outgoing act of the inner self toward something, not a god, toward a responsive activity in the world about you. designated as The-FriendrOt'^e-Soul-of-Man; Wakontb, to use a term adopWby ethnologists—the effective principle of the created universe” (276).

^ For a classic discussion on the pqrchic experience of racial masks, see Frantz Fanon. Black Skin/White Modes, trans. (Charles Lam Markmann (NY: Grove Press. 1967). especially “Th e Fact of Blackness.” He writes. “Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside— does not permit us to understand the being of the black. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” ( 110).

24 See Langlois 154-55.158, 160.

^ The term “Amerind” is Austin’s, used to describe the mixing of Indian, Spanish, and Anglo roots in the making of an American identity. Franz Boas and others criticized her use of the term, which appears extensively in The American Rhythm.

^ See, for example, her story, “A Case of Conscience” in which she writes about a failed interracial marriage between a white Englishman, Saunders, and a Shoshone woman, Turwhase. The foteofthe two seems inevitable as Austin describes it, stating at one point that Turwhase “of course, was hopeless. She had never left off her blanket, and like all Indian women when they mature, bad begun to grow fat” (171). In Mary Austin, Storiesfrom the Country o f Lost Borders, ed. Maqorie Pryse (New Brunswick. NI: Rutgers UP, 1987).

27Lape 125.

^ “Regionalism in American Rction,” Beyond Borders 130. Originally published in the English Journal 21 (1932).

^ For a treatment offemale figures in writing Iqr Zhkala-Sa andMary Austin, see Hoyer 50-66. Fora vivid description by Austin of the desert as female, see her piece “The LancT in Lost Borders, where she writes, “If the desert were a woman, I know well what like she would be: deep-breasted, broad in the hips, tawny, with tawny hair, great masses of it fying smooth along her perfect curves, full lipped like a sphinx...” (160).

“ Wald 299.

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