What She Read and What She Wrote
Among the less-examined dimensions of Zitkála-Šá’s intellectual formation is the question of what she was reading — what texts, what traditions, what literary and political writing shaped the specific voice she developed.
She was educated in a literary tradition that was Anglo-American, and her reading would have included the canonical texts of English and American literature that were taught in the schools she attended. The specific literary qualities of her essays — the emotional precision, the controlled imagery, the use of first-person narrative to make the general particular — reflect the influence of the literary tradition she was trained in.
But she was also reading the political writing of her own era — the muckraking journalism, the reform literature, the political essays that were part of the Progressive Era’s documentary and advocacy culture. The specific form of her political writing — clear, evidence-based, aimed at a general audience — reflects this influence as much as the more purely literary influences in her background.
She was also, necessarily, reading and engaging with the Native writing that was being produced in her own time. Charles Eastman, Luther Standing Bear, Carlos Montezuma — these were other Native writers and intellectuals who were publishing in the same period and engaging with some of the same questions. The Society of American Indians, which brought many of these figures together, was a space where the questions she was working on were debated and discussed.
What she wrote — the essays, the stories, the political reports, the editorials — was shaped by all of these influences in ways that produced a voice that was distinctively her own. The literary skills of the Anglo-American tradition, deployed in service of arguments and perspectives that the Anglo-American tradition had not accommodated, produced a body of work that was genuinely original.