American Literature’s Overlooked Corners
The recovery of Zitkála-Šá’s significance is part of a broader project of recovering what American literature actually was in the period she was writing.
The conventional narrative of American literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focuses on writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and the naturalists and realists who are typically discussed in introductory American literature courses. This narrative is not wrong — those writers are significant. But it is incomplete in its omission of writers like Zitkála-Šá, who were also producing significant literary work in the same period and whose work expanded the range of what American writing was and who it was for.
The existence of Native American literary production in this period — including Zitkála-Šá, but also Charles Eastman, Luther Standing Bear, and others — is evidence that the story of American writing in the Progressive Era was more diverse than the conventional account acknowledges. These writers were engaging with the same American society and the same American political moment as their more canonized contemporaries, but from perspectives that the canon did not accommodate.
The specific experience Zitkála-Šá wrote about — the boarding school, the double alienation, the negotiation between worlds — was one that many thousands of Native people shared in some form. She gave that experience literary expression in the most prestigious venues available to any writer of her time. The fact that this work was subsequently overlooked in the construction of the American literary canon is itself a historical fact that tells us something about how the canon was constructed and whose experience it was designed to reflect.