After the civil war and zitkala sa

America After The Civil War:1865-1900

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• Recent research has found that the death toll in the war, long put at just over 618,000, was probably about 750,000.

• Transpose the percentage of dead that mid-19th-century America faced into our own time: Seven million dead, if we had the same percentage.

• The nation was literally and figuratively scarred: soldiers that survived often had lost limbs (leading to one early problems with drug abuse), families and cities had been destroyed.

• The institution of slavery, however, was put to an end in America.

So what would this new America look like? • The question of who counted as

American now shifted as 4 million slaves were now free.

• In addition, over 26 million

immigrants entered the country between 1870-1920.

• Many of these immigrants were Catholic, both Italian and Irish. There was suspicion about the possibility of integrating them into the American national body, as this political cartoon from 1880 demonstrates. The caption reads: “The mortar of assimilation and the one element that won’t mix.” This element wasn’t a freed slave, but an Irishman. (Recall captivity narrative-more afraid of French-Catholics than natives!)



“Go West, Young Man!”• Many new immigrants concentrated in

cities. For instance, this image of the Five Points in lower NYC (where the film Gangs of New York is set-see clip).

• This was the poorest part of the city and had been that way for most of the 19th century.

• What to do with all these new people? Poor people without hope and money in the cities?

• A famous reformer and influential newspaper owner, Horace Greeley (pictured to the left), encouraged migration from the cities to the American “frontier”: “Go West, Young Man!”





But this American frontier, or “West,” was the homeland of Native communities

• One Native nation was the “Sioux,” (a term coined by French-Canadians), which included three major groups: the Yankton, Lakota, and Dakota. Zitkala-Sa was Yankton.

• For much of the 18th and 19th century the Sioux were more powerful, and more feared by other tribes, than the American military.

• As American settlement, and the transcontinental railroad, cut further into Sioux territory (pictured on the left), there were increasing skirmishes between the tribes and settlers



The Allotment Act (1887)• An effort to incorporate American Indians

into the national body via citizenship

• Policy that moved to dissolve tribal allegiances and create American citizens (culturally, linguistically)

• Legislation aimed to dissolve tribal ownership of land and give (or “allot”) 160 acres to individual heads of household and sell off remainder of land

• Arguments that this would help protect the land (encouraging Native people to understand private-property) seemed shallow as Natives lost about 2/3rds of their land base (90 Million acres)

• The educational arm of the policy moved to get American Indian children to study at off reservation boarding schools. Zitkala-Sa was part of this generation of children to move away from home, learn English, and negotiate a new world for her people





Colonial Education:The Boarding School Project

• “Kill the Indian and save the man” Richard Pratt-Carlisle Indian School

• Children forbidden to speak Native tongue

• Long hair was clipped

• Forbidden to practice any traditional cultural/religious practices





The English Language-Colonial Oppressor and Tribal Liberator

• The English language has been the... tongue of colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, the [false representation] of tribal cultures... and the unheard literature of dominance in tribal communities; at the same time, this mother tongue of [colonialism] has been a language of invincible imagination and liberation for many tribal people in the [contemporary] world. English, a language of paradoxes, learned under duress by tribal people at mission and federal schools, was one of the languages that carried the vision and shadows of the Ghost Dance, the religion of renewal, from tribe to tribe on the vast plains at the end of the nineteenth century . . . . English, that coercive language of federal boarding schools, has carried some of the best stories of endurance, the shadows of tribal [survival and resistance], and now that same language of dominance bears the creative literature of distinguished [Native] authors in the cities . . . . [whose] literature could be the new ghost dance literature, the shadow literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance. (105–6) Gerald Vizenor

Zitkala-Sa (1876-1938)• Was part of this boarding

school generation

• The autobiographical stories we read (published in Atlantic Monthly in 1900) described her youth and boarding school experience to a white-middle class Northeastern audience





Writing questions for you to answer on Facebook!

• Although Zitkala-Sa is writing her autobiography, she takes dramatic license to make her readers sympathize with the plight of American Indians. Consider:

• Do you see any similarities between her writing strategies (and criticism) and that of Harriet Beecher Stowe? Consider, for instance, our discussion of the way Sentimental fiction worked, emotionally, on a reader.

• How does Zitkala-Sa describe her youthful education with her mother compared to her boarding school education? How might a Northeastern reader (who has read Thoreau and Emerson) react to her description of a “natural education” compared to the boarding school education?

Writing questions for you to answer on Facebook!

• Although Zitkala-Sa is writing her autobiography, she takes dramatic license to make her readers sympathize with the plight of American Indians. Consider:

• Do you see any similarities between her writing strategies (and criticism) and that of Harriet Beecher Stowe? Consider, for instance, our discussion of the way Sentimental fiction worked, emotionally, on a reader.

• How does Zitkala-Sa describe her youthful education with her mother compared to her boarding school education? How might a Northeastern reader (who has read Thoreau and Emerson) react to her description of a “natural education” compared to the boarding school education?

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After the civil war and zitkala sa