She Is Still Being Discovered
The current moment of recovery for Zitkála-Šá’s work — the 2022 Congressional Gold Medal, the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report, the increased academic and public attention to her writing — is not the end of a discovery process but the middle of one.
There are students in American literature courses who have never heard of her, who are still being taught a version of the Progressive Era that does not include her. There are people who know something about the boarding school system but don’t know the name of the woman who put it on the record in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900. There are people who have heard vaguely of the Society of American Indians or the National Council of American Indians but don’t know who helped found them or what drove their founding.
The work of making her more broadly known is ongoing. The academic scholarship has done significant work. The reprints of her major writings have made them accessible. The documentary work — the film about her life, the museum exhibitions, the educational materials — has expanded the audiences that can encounter her story.
But the full integration of her work into the mainstream understanding of what American literature and American political history were in the Progressive Era has not yet happened. The standard survey courses still need to be updated. The standard textbooks still need to include her. The monuments and commemorations of the Progressive Era’s reform culture still need to make room for the Native voices that were part of it.
She is still being discovered. She was always there.