The Yankton Dakota World She Came From
The specific community and cultural tradition that Zitkála-Šá came from — the Yankton Dakota — deserves extended treatment, because understanding who she was requires understanding where she was from.
The Oceti Sakowin — the Seven Council Fires, commonly known in English as the Sioux — was one of the largest and most politically significant Indigenous confederacies in North America. The Yankton Dakota were one of the seven constituent groups of this confederacy. They occupied territory in what is now the eastern portions of North and South Dakota, and their relationship to the land of the Great Plains was both practical (the buffalo-based economy of the region) and deeply cultural and spiritual.
The Yankton Treaty of 1858, which established the Yankton reservation along the Missouri River, was signed under conditions of significant duress. The reservation encompassed a much smaller area than the Yankton’s traditional territory, and it was administered by federal agents who were supposed to serve Yankton interests but who frequently served other interests instead.
By the time Zitkála-Šá was born in 1876, the reservation had been established for eighteen years, and the specific conditions of reservation life — the dependency on federal rations, the presence of government agents and missionaries, the erosion of traditional economic practices, and the sustained pressure on cultural life — were the context within which she grew up.
Her mother, Ellen Tate’iyohiwin Simmons, was a woman who had lived through the transformation from the pre-reservation world to the reservation world — a transformation of enormous scope that had reshaped virtually everything about how the Yankton Dakota lived. She maintained connection to traditional practices and to the Dakota language, and she raised her daughter within a Dakota cultural framework even as the forces of the reservation system pressed against it.
Zitkála-Šá’s autobiographical writing about her early years on the reservation captures this world with a specificity that reflects her own memory of it and her commitment to making it real for readers who had never been there. The specific sensory details — the sounds, the smells, the feel of the place, the specific social world of the community — are rendered with care that reflects both literary skill and the importance she placed on preserving the memory of what she had come from.