Her Death and the Work That Survived
Zitkála-Šá died on January 26, 1938, in Washington, D.C. She was sixty-one years old. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, an honor that reflected her lifetime of public service and her husband Raymond’s status as a veteran.
The burial at Arlington was significant as a recognition of her work, but the work itself was the more significant legacy. The essays, the stories, the opera, the investigations, the political advocacy, the organization-building — these were the substance of what she had done, and they outlasted her in ways that continued to matter.
After her death, her work went through a period of relative obscurity. The literary canon did not readily accommodate Native American writers in the mid-twentieth century, and the political organizations she had been part of did not maintain a prominent public presence. For decades, she was known primarily within the specific academic and advocacy communities that focused on Native American history and literature.
The recovery of her work and her significance began in earnest in the late twentieth century, as Native American studies developed as an academic field and as scholars began to examine the full range of what Native people had produced in the way of literary and political work.
American Voices, an anthology of American literature published in the 1990s, was among the early mainstream literary collections to include her work. The subsequent decades have seen increasing academic attention to her writing, reprints of her major works, and the production of scholarly studies that have analyzed her place in both Native American and American literary history.