The Language She Chose to Use and Why
When Zitkála-Šá chose to write in English and publish in mainstream Anglo-American venues, she was making a specific strategic and artistic decision that is worth understanding in its complexity.
Writing in English and publishing in the Atlantic Monthly meant reaching an audience that could not have been reached in any other way. The people who needed to understand what the boarding school system was doing were not, primarily, the people who were already inside the Native communities experiencing it. They were the Anglo-American voters, policymakers, educators, and cultural figures who constituted the political and social mainstream. Reaching them required English, and it required publication in the venues they read.
This was also, for her, a creative choice. English was the language in which she had developed her literary voice. The specific qualities of her prose — the precision, the emotional control, the imagery — were developed in the context of the English-language literary tradition she had been educated in. Whatever was lost in not writing in Dakota, the writing she produced in English was genuinely accomplished on its own terms.
The Old Indian Legends collection presents a different dimension of this choice. In that book, she was taking traditional Dakota stories — stories that existed in oral form, in Dakota, in the specific cultural context of the Yankton community — and transmitting them in English for an audience that would never encounter the stories in their original form. This was preservation through translation, and it involved the losses that all translation involves. But it was also a form of making those stories available to people who would otherwise have no access to them.
She was navigating, in her literary choices as in her personal life, the specific position of someone who had been shaped by two traditions that were in some ways incompatible and who was trying to find a path that honored both.