Her Literary Significance
Zitkála-Šá’s place in American literary history is now recognized as more significant than the neglect she experienced for most of the twentieth century would suggest.
The autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 are now understood as foundational texts in the tradition of Native American autobiography. They anticipated — by decades — some of the most significant developments in how Native writers have engaged with the boarding-school experience and with the broader dynamics of living between worlds.
The Old Indian Legends collection from 1901 was an early example of the work of preserving and transmitting traditional stories through the medium of published English-language books — a project that many Native writers and scholars have continued in different ways in the subsequent century.
Her political writing — the report on Oklahoma corruption, the editorials in the American Indian Magazine, the essays and lectures on citizenship and voting rights — represents a substantial body of work in the tradition of political advocacy writing that uses literary quality to reach a broad audience.
She was also a pioneer in the specific sense that she occupied spaces that had not previously been occupied by Native women: the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, the editorial chair of a national Native political magazine, the lobbying offices of Washington, D.C.
The critical attention she received during her lifetime was mixed. Some readers and critics recognized the quality of her work. Others received it through the filter of their assumptions about what Native people could produce, and assessed it accordingly. The full recognition of her literary significance came decades after her death, as Native American literary studies developed as a field and as scholars began to recover the work of writers who had been overlooked.