The Daughters Who Carried Her Forward
One of the dimensions of Zitkála-Šá’s legacy that is sometimes overlooked is the specific influence she has had on subsequent Native American writers and activists.
The tradition of Native American autobiography that she helped establish with the 1900 Atlantic Monthly essays has been continued and expanded by writers including N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and many others. These writers did not all explicitly acknowledge Zitkála-Šá as an influence — sometimes they did — but they were working in a tradition that her essays were among the first to establish: the tradition of Native writers bringing the specific reality of Native experience into mainstream American literary consciousness.
The tradition of Native political advocacy and organizational work that she helped establish with the National Council of American Indians has also continued. The National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944, continues to operate as the largest and most comprehensive Native political organization in the country. The organizational model — a pan-tribal advocacy group working in Washington to influence federal policy — is the model that Zitkála-Šá was trying to instantiate with the National Council of American Indians.
The specific advocacy issues she worked on — citizenship, voting rights, land rights, the boarding school system, corruption in the administration of Native resources — have continued to be central to Native political advocacy in the decades since her death.
She was not the only person who worked on these issues. But she was one of the most visible, one of the most articulate, and one of the most sustained voices in the long effort to make the promises of American political life real for Native people.