The Violin and What It Meant
The violin is a detail that appears in the biographical accounts of Zitkála-Šá and that is worth considering for what it reveals about how she navigated the world the boarding school had introduced her to.
The violin is not a traditional Dakota instrument. It is the quintessential instrument of the European classical tradition — an instrument associated with the most refined productions of Western art music, with the concert hall, with the aesthetic world of the Anglo-American cultural establishment. Zitkála-Šá was taught to play it, became skilled, and used that skill throughout her career.
At the same time, she was the person who collaborated on the Sun Dance Opera — taking the traditional Lakota ceremony that the government was suppressing and giving it operatic expression. The violin and the Sun Dance Opera are both expressions of the same orientation: using the tools of one tradition to preserve and transmit the values of another.
The music she made was not simple accommodation to Anglo-American culture. It was the deployment of Anglo-American musical forms in service of Native cultural expression. The Sun Dance Opera is a Lakota ceremony, in operatic form, composed by a Dakota woman who played the violin. The specific cultural work the music was doing was as complex as the cultural work the essays were doing.