The Literary Context: What She Was Publishing Into
When Zitkála-Šá’s essays appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, the magazine was one of the most prestigious literary publications in the United States. It had published Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Mark Twain, Henry James, and W.E.B. Du Bois. The editors of the Atlantic Monthly were not easily impressed, and publication in its pages was a genuine marker of literary significance.
The fact that a twenty-four-year-old Yankton Dakota woman was publishing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 was, by any standard, remarkable. The magazine’s editors — William Bliss Perry was the editor at the time — recognized the quality of what she was submitting and chose to publish it, and to publish it as a series of three connected essays that read together as a sustained autobiographical account.
The specific moment was also significant. The late 1890s and early 1900s were a period of significant literary production in the United States — the realist and naturalist movements were producing some of their most significant work, and the literary culture was engaged with questions of American identity and American experience in ways that made her perspective relevant to the larger conversation.
She was also publishing at a moment when the question of what to do about “the Indian question” was a live political debate. The allotment policy was in effect, the boarding school system was at its height, and the voices arguing both for and against the assimilation project were active in public discourse. Her essays entered this debate as a different kind of voice — not a policy paper, not a reform proposal, but a personal account from someone who had lived the experience being debated.
The literary quality of her writing was what made the political impact possible. If the essays had been written in the language of advocacy rather than the language of memoir and art, they would not have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and would not have reached the audience they reached.