The Recovery of Her Work
The academic recovery of Zitkála-Šá’s work has produced a body of scholarship that illuminates her significance in multiple domains — as a literary figure, as a political organizer, as a cultural advocate, and as a specific historical person navigating the specific challenges of her time.
The scholarly editions of her writing — the collection American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings published by Penguin in 2003, for example — have made her work accessible to contemporary readers in editions with scholarly apparatus that contextualizes the work for readers who are encountering it for the first time.
The academic studies of her work have placed it in the context of Native American literary history, of the history of American women’s writing, and of the broader history of reform and advocacy movements in the Progressive Era. These studies have argued convincingly that she deserves a place in the American literary canon that is much more central than the marginal position she had occupied for most of the twentieth century.
The recovery has also produced a more complete picture of the full range of what she did. The earlier scholarly attention to her literary work, which was primary and significant, has been supplemented by attention to her political and organizational work — the Oklahoma investigation, the National Council of American Indians, the suffrage advocacy — that shows a person whose public career was broader and more varied than a purely literary account would capture.