Her Legacy in Native American Literature
The legacy of Zitkála-Šá in Native American literature is substantial and is acknowledged by the writers who have come after her, though not always explicitly.
The tradition of Native American autobiography — of first-person accounts of Native life that engage both with the specific reality of that life and with the Anglo-American literary conventions that shaped their telling — has Zitkála-Šá as one of its most important early practitioners. The autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 were doing, in 1900, what Black Elk Speaks would do in 1932 and what N. Scott Momaday’s The Names would do in 1976 and what many Native autobiographical works have done since: using the first person to make the specific reality of Native experience legible and significant to audiences that might not otherwise have engaged with it.
The tradition of collecting and publishing traditional stories — of making oral literature available in written English form — also has Zitkála-Šá as an important practitioner. Old Indian Legends anticipated the work that many Native writers have done in subsequent decades of preserving, translating, and transmitting traditional narratives through the medium of published books.
The tradition of politically engaged Native writing — of using literary and journalistic skills to advance specific political arguments about Native rights, sovereignty, and the failures of federal policy — has its own clear line of descent from Zitkála-Šá’s work through the Native rights writing of the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary Native political journalism and advocacy writing of the present.
Whether or not subsequent Native writers read her specifically — and many have — she was doing things that they would later do, in ways that anticipated the formal and political moves they would make.