Dis/engagement. Zitkala-Sa's Letters to Carlos Montezuma, 1901-1902

Ruth Spack

During the period when Zitkala-Sa wrote and published OM Indian Legends and several stories in popular magazines such as Harper's Monthly, she also corresponded regularly with Carlos Montezuma, a physician in private practice in Chicago to whom she was secretly engaged. This study is an attempt to provide a biographical, historical, and sociocultural context for their correspondence. The collection of their letters, stored at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, is incomplete, primarily because almost none of Montezuma's survive. Nevertheless, it is often easy to guess what Montezuma said, for Zitkala-Sa frequently repeated his ideas before responding to them. On one level, the letters simply reveal the personal relationship between these two future leaders of the early twentieth-century Native rights movement. But they also furnish clues to the reasons why Zitkala-Sa published controversial writings and provide insight into a pivotal time when Zitkala-Sa's life's focus turned from the arts to activism.

While an occasional letter contains merely a description of Zitkala-Sa's daily routine, the majority are filled with deep-felt statements on marriage, patriarchy, writing, culture, education, and the power structure of the United States at the turn into the twentieth century. As Zitkala-Sa reflects on her relationship with Montezuma, she acknowledges the importance of her mission as a writer, her feminist ideology, and her determination to devote her life to helping Native people. Furthermore, she strengthens her philosophical and political stance on issues that pertain to Native/European American relations. The letters capture the moment when Zitkala-Sa gives up the idea of pursuing a literary career, but they leave no doubt that Zitkala-Sa has taken ownership of the English language and that she intends to use it to challenge the assumptions of European American ways of knowing.

Life Before Montezuma

In 1884, at the age of eight, Zitkala-Sa (nee Gertrude Simmons) left the Yankton Agency in Dakota Territory to attend White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker-mn institution. The institute's relation to American Indian education began in 1882, when its Board of Trustees voted to redress the school's financial difficulties by accepting federal funding to educate Native students ("White's Institute," 1883, 19). White's Institute had been founded twenty-two years earlier as a school for poor children by the Society of Friends, with funds donated by a wealthy Quaker entrepreneur, on land purchased from Meshingomesia, chief of the Miami (Winger 6). Now, ironically, it was time to fill the space formerly occupied by indigenous people with indigenous people. To achieve that aim, the Quakers followed the pattern of other schools in sending representatives directly to the reservations to recruit students. Gertie Simmons, as she was then known, was eager to go east with the missionaries. As she would later write in "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," the Quakers were viewed on the reservation as "that class of white men who ... carried large hearts" (45).

The Quakers' compassion was limited, however, at least from the perspective of Native parents. Zitkala-Sa apparently went to White's Institute voluntarily, with her mother's permission (her French-American father had abandoned the family before her birth). Nevertheless, files from the school indicate that most parents were unaware that the agreement on which they had "put their mark" gave the school the right to keep the children for three years, with no vacation (Parker and Parker 36). In this arrangement, White's Institute was typical of boarding schools in the late nineteenth century whose underlying assumption was that it would take that long for Native students to absorb mainstream culture and to learn to speak English. But, against the wishes of most parents, this process was subtractive rather than additive, to borrow the terms of linguist Wallace Lambert. Students were expected not to become bicultural but rather to substitute the Christian majority culture for their own. They were to learn English not as an additional language but rather as the only language worthy of acquisition. Ostensibly designed as part of a humanitarian effort to ease Native children into participation in European American society, these schools actually functioned as colonial institutions that ignored or denigrated Native cultures and languages.

Zitkala-Sa had some exposure to schooling in her own language. Her entrance record at White's Institute indicates that she attended a Yankton Agency (Presbyterian, bilingual) school for two years (Zitkala ga File). Between 1887 and 1891 (between her two terms at White's Institute), Zitkala-Sa lived in Dakota Territory and at some point attended the bilingual Santee Normal Training School at the Dakota Mission in Nebraska, whose missionaries led the fight against the Indian Office's English-only role in the 1880s. In 1891, she returned for her second term at White's and remained until her graduation in 1895, the year the government withdrew funding and the school terminated its Indian program. From 1895 to 1897, she attended Earlham College, a Quaker-mn institution in Indiana, where she excelled in her studies and won first prize in the college's oratorical competition and second prize in the State Oratorical Contest. After two years, she left Earlham, partly because of ill health and partly "for the sake of moneymaking," as she wrote to a former mentor at White's.(1) In the summer of 1897, at the age of twenty-one, she was hired by Richard Henry Pratt to join the staff of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first and most famous off-reservation English-only boarding school created exclusively for Native students (established in 1879).(2) Zitkala-Sa was already a somewhat experienced instructor, having been music teacher for the primary grades at White's Institute, while still officially a student, and for local farm children during the two summers following her graduation from White's (Parker and Parker 60, 72; Tatum 332).

Zitkala-Sa remained at the Carlisle School for eighteen months, during which time she traveled out west to recruit children for the school. Despite her apparent complicity with the Carlisle mission and her apparent adaptation to a European American lifestyle (see illustration), Zitkala-Sa actively defended her cultural heritage in an effort to correct misperceptions about Native people. At opening exercises of the school in September, 1897, she gave a talk on "The Achievements of the White and Red Races Compared," which, according to the newspaper's editor, was an effort to show that "the history of the Indian has been wrongly written, and that their motives as a people have been misunderstood."(3)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

However, misrepresentations of Native life followed Zitkala-Sa to Carlisle. On the front page of the same issue of The Indian Helper that announced her hiring, readers of the Carlisle newspaper could learn of the "transformation of the Carlisle children from barbarism to the ways of a civilized race."(4) Zitkala-Sa's revisionism notwithstanding, Richard Henry Pratt continued to show disdain for the Native past and to express a desire to eradicate Native culture, symbolized by what he called the "hideous costume of feathers [and] paint" of "the reservation wild man":

   It is this nature in our red brother that is better dead than alive, and
   when we agree with the off-repeated sentiment that the only good Indian is
   a dead one, we mean this characteristic of the Indian. Carlisle's mission
   is to kill THIS Indian, as we build up the better man.(5)

At the end of 1898, Zitkala-Sa left the Carlisle School to study violin at the renowned Boston Conservatory of Music, her tuition and expenses at the Conservatory paid by the office of the commissioner of Indian Affairs.(6)

Pratt soon discovered that "THIS Indian" was even harder to kill than those who arrived in paint and feathers. At the beginning of 1900, Zitkala-Sa published three semi-autobiographical pieces in the Atlantic Monthly, including "An Indian Teacher Among Indians," a scathing indictment of an unnamed boarding school that looked suspiciously like Carlisle, headed by a principal whose appearance was uncannily similar to that of Richard Henry Pratt. Despite protestations from Carlisle, Zitkala-Sa continued to publish works that were critical of government boarding schools and that paid respect to Native life, especially to the important role of women in traditional Sioux practices. (See Spack, Smith.)

Life Before Zitkala-Sa

Carlos Montezuma was often called upon to tell the story of his being born as Wassaja in Arizona to a Yavapai (Mohave-Apache) family and then being captured and sold by Pimas to an Italian immigrant, Carlos Gentile, in 1871, at age six or seven.(7) Legally adopted and renamed by Gentile, Montezuma traveled with him to Chicago, where he attended public school. Believing that Montezuma needed maternal care, Gentile sent him to New York to live with a Mrs. Baldwin, who indeed treated him like a son, and who maintained a relationship with him as his "mother" throughout her life. In 1875, for reasons of poor health, Gentile sent Montezuma back to Illinois, where he lived with a farm family for two years while attending school. When he regained his health, he returned to New York and studied with immigrants who were learning to become American citizens. He then went back to Illinois to be tutored for entrance into the state university, from which he graduated in 1884. In 1889, he completed his studies at Chicago Medical College and obtained a license to practice medicine.

Initially finding private practice unsuccessful, Montezuma entered the Indian Service and worked as a physician at the Fort Stevenson Indian School in North Dakota, the Western Shoshone Agency in Nevada, the Colville Agency in Washington, and finally the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, from 1893 to 1896, where he consolidated his relationship with Richard Henry Pratt, with whom he had been corresponding. Even after he left Carlisle to open a private medical practice in Chicago, Montezuma remained devoted to Pratt and supportive of the school's assimilationist philosophy. He was a frequent and honored guest at the school, identified as a living example of the successful assimilated American Indian. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, he began to lecture publicly, expressing his views on the "Indian problem," especially to criticize the Bureau of Indian Affairs' continued promotion of the reservation system. Montezuma viewed the reservation as a "demoralized prison; a barrier against enlightenment, a promoter of idleness, beggary, gambling, pauperism, ruin and death" (Montezuma, "Indian Problem").

Romance, Feminism, and Friction

Carlos Montezuma had already left the Carlisle School by the time Zitkala-Sa arrived and, to the best of my knowledge, did not visit the school during Zitkala-Sa's tenure there. The two apparently met when they traveled together in the northeast with the Carlisle Indian School Band in March and April, 1900, Zitkala-Sa as soloist and Montezuma as caretaker for the boys in the band. She was twenty-four years old at the time and he approximately thirty-six. Even if they had not met before, Zitkala-Sa certainly must have known of Montezuma, given his fame in Carlisle circles. It is likely that Montezuma knew of Zitkala-Sa as well, for The Indian Helper, to which he subscribed, regularly reported on her accomplishments. By the time the Carlisle Band went on tour in 1900, Zitkala-Sa had already published in the Atlantic Monthly.

Montezuma was a backstage observer of Zitkala-Sa's dramatic performances, one of which the President of the United States himself attended, and thus was well aware of her sensual appeal. According to newspaper accounts published in the cities where the band toured, Zitkala-Sa's recitation of the famine scene from "Hiawatha," in a costume of beaded and fringed buckskin, was so emotionally charged that there was "recourse frequently to handkerchiefs." Her rendition was "enthusiastically applauded," and she was "compelled to return to the stage to bow her acknowledgments."(8) Despite the warm reception, the band was disbanded when sufficient funds could not be raised for their planned trip to Paris. Zitkala-Sa and Montezuma apparently crossed paths again several months later, for the first letter in the collection (February 9, 1901) refers to an "unexpected meeting in Chicago." Perhaps that is when they (re)kindled their romance.

Carlos Montezuma was not Zitkala-Sa's first fiance. According to an April, 1899 article in The Indian Helper ("Thomas Marshall" n. pag.), she was engaged to Thomas Marshall, a Lakota from the Pine Ridge Agency who had graduated with her from White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute. After their graduation, Marshall headed to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania and Zitkala-Sa to Earlham College in Indiana. Apparently they were reunited when she went to Carlisle to teach. Marshall died of measles suddenly in 1899, while a student at Dickinson College, shortly after Zitkala-Sa left Carlisle to study music in Boston. She refers to Marshall's untimely death several times in her letters to Montezuma, to express concern for the family left behind and disgust at the "Carlisle gossip" that Marshall had died of"a heart-break."

Not only is Montezuma not Zitkala-Sa's first love interest, he is also not her only admirer, which she is only too happy to tell him. In a March, 1901 letter, she lists several men whom she says "could give me as much as you could." Included in her list are:

1 a well known German violinist.

2 a Harvard professor--

3 a Harvard Post Graduate--

4 a Well-Known Writer of today

5 a man of a prominent New York family--

6 4 Western men scattered from Montana to Dakota

Zitkala-Sa lists this group of men partly to prove that "[r]ace has little to do in the man who is to win me." At this stage in her life, Zitkala-Sa desires much more than shared heritage in a relationship. Although her list of suitors appears to suggest that Montezuma has competition, in fact he fulfills a need that is difficult for a woman of her gifts to satisfy:

   I require food for the intellect and spirit quite as much as my meals each
   day. It pleases me to know you too are made that way (June 1, 1901)

Acknowledging that Montezuma is her intellectual equal, Zitkala-Sa appreciates the fact that they can "agree to disagree" (c March 1901). Because he understands the depth of her feelings, she finds his letters "a source of strength" (May 30, 1901), which allows her to "write freely" (April 12, 1901), a circumstance that results in an astonishingly frank and thoughtful correspondence.

Although the letters are filled with affection and humor, they more often record the clash between two people whom she calls, respectively, "stiff necked" and "will-ful" (ca April 1901). In one of the first letters, dated February 20, 1901, written in Boston, Zitkala-Sa makes clear to Montezuma that "I do not mean to give up my literary work." She has already arranged with Ginn & Company of Boston to publish Old Indian Legends(9) and has plans to spend time among "the old people" in Dakota in order to gather "their treasured ideas of life" for her book while she teaches at the government school at the Yankton Agency (April 3, 1901). Throughout the letters she worries that, since she is such "a strange impulsive creature" (March 9, 1901), she is ill-suited for the marriage that is scheduled to take place in November, 1901.

In early March, she begins what will become a lengthy attempt to shape their relationship in such a way as to protect her independent nature: "Let us trust that being each true to the inner man we may be philosophical enough to do what appears best for one another when the day arrives." But her words create strife. A letter later that month (March 19, 1901) reveals that she and Montezuma are planning their lives at cross-purposes. He wants her to move to Chicago, but she wants to write and teach among Native people, even though the "artificial tastes" she has developed in European American society have become her "second nature" (April 19, 1901); in fact, she is the first one to mention an engagement ring. She sees her plan as a "direct path to my high ideals ... a test of character," but he apparently accuses her of being an "idealist" (March 19, 1901).

Arguments about her own needs apparently having failed, Zitkala-Sa applies pressure on Montezuma concerning her familial obligations. On April 19, 1901 she tells him that, impelled by "instinctive love" and duty, she wants to go to Dakota to take care of her "feeble helpless" mother for at least a year. So that she can honor this commitment, she asks Montezuma to consider taking a government position in the west. She wants him to give up what she calls his role as a "missionary among whites" (a term Montezuma uses in his own lectures and writing), declaring it a "grander thing to live among the Indians" (ca April 1901). Clearly, this is not something Montezuma is interested in doing, for he had had unhappy experiences as an agency physician before he went into private practice. This argument, which becomes a test that their love ultimately fails, continues in the letters for months.

Perhaps unwittingly laying the groundwork for the breakup of the engagement, Zitkala-Sa challenges all forms of patriarchy and demands equal standing in her relationship with Montezuma. In March 1901, she is furious that marriage as he envisions it may limit her ambition:

      Were you planning a Charity Hospital under the guise of matrimony? There
   are plenty of Charity Institutions in the cities whither proper lack of
   pride and respect would take me! But for one life-time at least I am not so
   totally depraved as to accept charity--private or public!

Several times in the letters she declares that she is or will be financially independent and even resents the fact that he pays for her train ticket when she visits him in Chicago (May 1901). She fears that his vision of her role as wife is analogous to a desire for "a fine horse to draw your wagon!" (March 1901). She declares her independence repeatedly by stating that she has no interest in being merely a city doctor's wife, that she "would not like to have to obey another" person (ca April 1901), that she "like[s] roaming about too well to settle down any where" (May 7, 1901), and that she "know[s] so little about keeping a house in running order that the under taking [sic] is perfectly appalling" (May 30, 1901).

Without a doubt, the US government's goal of turning Native females into paragons of domestic virtue had failed in Zitkala-Sa's case. From the beginning, the Indian Service believed that after Native children were removed from the influence of their "savage home" and trained in "useful knowledge," they would return among their people and "produce a salutary effect upon the whole Indian population" (Hayt, 1879, 11). Richard Henry Pratt, head of the school where Zitkala-Sa would later teach, emphasized that this goal could be achieved only if the female students were transformed:

   Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working and industrious, providing
   by his labor food and clothing for his household, if the wife ... makes
   what might be a cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and
   squalor? (Pratt, "United States," 247)

To teach the future wives and mothers how to convert their "savage home" into a European American domicile, the staff at White's Institute, where Zitkala-Sa attended school, assigned the girls to half a day at domestic work that was largely irrelevant to reservation life:

   In the house the work is divided into eight departments, and is performed
   with much precision by eight divisions of girls, who pass regularly each
   week from one department to another in the following order: sewing, care of
   dining-room, dish-washing, cooking, baking, care of milk, laundrying, and
   chamber-work. (Coggeshall, 1885, 53)

To develop a middle-class, Christian "home," the girls of course had to repudiate the teachings and practices of their own mothers and grandmothers, thus breaking centuries of tradition (Lomawaima 231). And those working in the Indian Service knew that it was necessary to sever that mother-daughter connection, for, as Pratt put it, "[i]t is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children" (Pratt, "United States," 247). It is no wonder, then, that when female students in Zitkala-Sa's school were cast--body and soul--in the European American mold, it was considered to be among the highest possible achievements:

   "There is nothing," writes M. H. Bales, "we observe with greater pleasure
   than the improvement of the girls in womanly grace and virtue from year to
   year, and their constant training in household duties." ("White's
   Institute" 17)

In her graduation oration at White's, Zitkala-Sa condemned the inequality of women, saying "half of humanity cannot rise while the other half is in subjugation" (Parker and Parker 71), suggesting that she was unwilling to conform. Nevertheless, outwardly at least, Zitkala-Sa was a model product of nineteenth-century American Indian education. A photograph taken by noted photographer Gertrude Kasebier in 1898, during the time Zitkala-Sa was teaching at Carlisle, shows a graceful young woman in Victorian dress holding a symbol of European American culture: a violin (see illustration) As she gazed soulfully at the camera in the late nineteenth century, Zitkala-Sa must have warmed the hearts of observers like Merial Dorchester, special agent in the Indian School Service, who derived so much delight "from learning how like these girls are to white girls" (Dorchester 343). But as Zitkala-Sa gazes at us today, she has a different effect. For we now know that she was just beginning to realize that the traditional power and prestige of Sioux women, which "white girls" had never experienced, was being diminished by the very domestic culture she had been convinced to embrace. By the time she began her correspondence with Montezuma, she had determined to resist the subservient role of the European American woman.

Despite a congenial meeting in Chicago in May 1901, Zitkala-Sa and Montezuma cannot resolve the problem of their differing personal goals. She later makes clear that she has found another man "who claims all I can give by the laws of natural affinity" (October 1901), but Montezuma apparently continues to pursue her--and she occasionally responds with warmth--until June 1902, when she emphasizes that "another holds my regard." Her relationship with Montezuma ends on a remarkably vitriolic note after he discovers that she has lost the engagement ring. The one letter from him (July 29, 1902), a copy of which he kept in his collection, is chillingly formal:

      Madam:

      In reply to yours of 26 [word unintelligible], I would say the ring is
   over 60 years old and not purchased lately. A friend who was precious to me
   pressed it into my hands with her last words "never allow this ring be worn
   by another, unless it be the one." I have heard her to say it was worth
   over $90- on account of the cut and the genuineness make at value and not
   the size. It will be satisfactorily to me for you to replace the loss as
   per your letter of July 26". $7500 is the valuation.

      Carlos Montezuma

In the process of writing to Montezuma, Zitkala-Sa comes to the conclusion that she cannot attach herself to a man who wants to live a European American lifestyle and turns instead to another man, Raymond Bonnin (whom she never names), a Yankton Sioux whose life's mission is to work among and serve Native people. Ironically, in giving up Montezuma to marry Bonnin, Zitkala-Sa may have given up some of her personal freedom. Beginning in 1903, Zitkala-Sa and her husband work for the Indian Service on the Uintah Reservation in Utah. When she resumes her correspondence with Montezuma in 1913, after an eleven-year hiatus, she reveals the consequences of her changed circumstances:

   I am returning to Utah [from a trip to Illinois] because Mr. Bonnin insists
   upon it.... I fear I won[']t be able to attend the Indian Association even
   though it should chance to meet in Denver. It is not that I lack interest
   or even public spirit--but my duties seem to limit me to the home.

As to the break up with Montezuma, in May 1913 Zitkala-Sa appears to express regret:

   In all sincerity I want to say that you had a narrow escape--but you
   escaped. I was not worthy because I did not recognize true worth at that
   time.

Published Writing, Private Views

Zitkala-Sa's 1901-1902 letters to Montezuma are interesting not only for what they reveal about their personal relationship but also for the insight they provide into Zitkala-Sa's published writings and especially to her reactions to criticism of her work. Her reactions need to be understood within the context of the ongoing public debate regarding schooling off the reservation at the turn of the twentieth century. Large-scale off-reservation education, supported by the US government, was instituted in 1878 when forty-nine students, including Zitkala-Sa's own half-brother, were brought from Dakota Territory to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (Hayt, 1878, 473; Pratt, Southern 90). The goal was to teach English away from the parental influences that encouraged children to maintain their first language and heritage. Zitkala-Sa is sharply critical of off-reservation boarding schools, observing that it is "selfish and cruel" to force children to "abandon" their elders by sending them away to school (February 20, 1901).

While there are no letters extant from Montezuma to Zitkala-Sa concerning the schools, Zitkala-Sa is undoubtedly responding to Montezuma's unswerving support of off-reservation schooling, a view that he stated in public lectures that were reprinted to reach a larger audience. It is easy to believe that the following dialogue, imagined by Montezuma in an 1898 lecture, also takes place in his correspondence with Zitkala-Sa:

      Away with the reservations schools! Send all children to the most
   civilized communities, not in large masses, but scatter them in small
   classes over the United States....

      But this would be cruel to take little children from their parents and
   natural protectors....

      True, I know about that, because it happened to me....

      What right have we to take away a child from its Indian parents?

      I answer:

      It is done every day by the courts in the cases of white children whose
   parents are incapable of taking care of them. You can never civilize the
   Indian until you place him while yet young (and the younger the better) in
   direct relations with good civilization. When you do this with judgment,
   you will succeed and make him a useful citizen of the Republic. (Montezuma,
   "Indian Problem," emphasis added)

The arguments Zitkala-Sa makes in her epistolary debates with Montezuma help her to formulate her position and, in effect, serve as a warm-up exercise for her later journalistic writing. In an April 12, 1901 letter, Zitkala-Sa states that she finds it "heart rending to see a government try experiments upon a real race," "starving out life," making them "practically prisoners of war" (emphasis added). She uses virtually the same language in an article she writes while in North Dakota and that she publishes in the Boston Evening Transcript on January 4, 1902:

   At the present writing the police are not chasing Indian children over the
   prairie [to force them to attend non-reservation schools], but a new
   experiment threatens the life of the little district school. Within the
   last month Government rations have been withdrawn, saved to the aged and
   feeble.

      The experiment, I would believe, is intended to induce more desperate
   effort on the part of the younger Indian to extricate himself from the cell
   in which his race lies prisoner of war. But the actual effect upon the
   courage of the Indian who has already spent his last farthing to support a
   district school is rather depressing. It is with jealous eye I watch the
   district school lest a hard winter dishearten the parents and rob it of
   pupils who can find easy admittance into the Government school. ("Indian
   District" 17, emphasis added).

Zitkala-Sa knew that such ideas would cause controversy, for her 1900 assault on off-reservation boarding schools in the Atlantic Monthly had received sharp criticism, especially from the Carlisle school headed by Richard Henry Pratt. In a letter to Pratt, Boston journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin (in whose home Zitkala-Sa wrote the Atlantic selections) stated that Zitkala-Sa was "animated with no other feeling toward you than one of respect and full confidence," her only purpose being to do what was "best for her own people and their education" by righting "the wrongs of her race."(10) Pratt in turn assured Chamberlin that, despite the fact that "[t]here is a great deal of feeling throughout the Indian service against Miss Simmons for [her] writing ... my people and myself will submit to these aspersions without public protest or comment."(11) Nevertheless, Pratt went on the attack, printing caustic articles in the school newspaper, The Red Man. Although they praised Zitkala-Sa's writing style, the reviewers expressed concern that the "underlying bitterness of her story will cause readers unfamiliar with Indian schools to form entirely wrong conclusions," claimed that her critique was "too sweeping," and accused her of being "utterly unthankful for all that has been done for her by the pale faces."(12)

During her correspondence with Montezuma, the attack on Zitkala-Sa's work intensified, especially after she published "The Soft-Hearted Sioux" (March 1901), the story of a young Christian convert who has been educated in a mission school. After nine years, he is sent back to his tribe to preach Christianity, where he discovers that his father is near death. When he finally ceases his futile praying beside his father's sick bed in order to search for much-needed food, he discovers that he does not have the necessary hunting skills to achieve his goal. In desperation, he trespasses on a white man's ranch, kills one of the cattle, and takes its meat. Chased by the rancher, he murders the man but returns home only to find that his father has already died. Zitkala-Sa tells Montezuma that she has learned through the grapevine, as Montezuma had predicted, that Pratt has pronounced the story "trash" and Zitkala-Sa herself "worse than Pagan" (March 5, 1901). Initially she is unruffled by the criticism, saying, "Certainly people are welcomed to their opinions. I must cling to my own." She expresses pleasure that Montezuma understands the story. She even concedes that her most recently accepted story, "The Trial Path"--which focuses on a sacred tale told by a grandmother to her granddaughter, with no reference to European American Christian culture--is "purely Ancient history and won[']t bear hard on any one's pet causes." But by the end of the letter, she is in a fury. She calls Pratt "woefully small and bigoted" and mocks his "imposing avoirdupois." She declares that she will have "no dealings with him" and that she refuses to be "another mouthpiece" for Pratt, insisting, "I will say just what I think."

Zitkala-Sa is in danger of insulting Montezuma with such comments, given that he in fact is what she calls a "mouthpiece" for Pratt. Understanding that she is creating a situation that could force Montezuma to choose between his fiancee and his mentor, she is careful to warn Montezuma not to "stand too much for me" so that he can preserve his relationship with Pratt. She adds that she does not need him to vouch for her: "If my work does not stand on its own merit neither the King's horses nor the King's men can hold it long together" (March 5, 1901). She acknowledges that it is precisely this independent spirit that most offends Pratt, and she obviously takes delight in that result, declaring herself to "fear no man." Her self-admiration reaches its peak when she states that "sometimes I think I do not fear God." She later boasts that both the Atlantic editor and "an intelligent literary critic" have praised "The Soft-Hearted Sioux" and that "[o]thers say I am covering myself with glory," although she immediately chides herself for the boast and reiterates that even positive assessment of her work is irrelevant to her purpose (March 17, 1901).

The negative criticism, however, did have a profound effect on her, especially after The Red Man published a scathing review on April 12, 1901 in a front page article titled "`The Soft-Hearted Sioux'--Morally Bad."(13) The introduction to the review accused Zitkala-Sa of"pronounced morbidness" for her ingratitude to the "good people" who helped her along the way. The review itself called the story's presentation of Christianity a "travesty." Upon reading this, Zitkala-Sa says she feels "sick way in my heart" and even goes so far as to turn to Montezuma for a "word of courage," asking, "Shall I continues [sic] in my work or shall I keep still?" (April 13, 1901). She does not wait for his answer, however. By the end of this letter, she declares: "I rise. I lift my head! I laugh at the babble! I dare--I do!" By April 24, 1901, she has recovered from the nausea she felt when she first read the review, finding it "laughable" that "Col[.] Pratt cannot release the personal idea for the art of writing a historical story." She can now treat the affair with humor, calling Pratt a mole who, like all "Mole-hearted creatures" is "crude now in this particular stage of [his] evolution." She mocks the new name of the Carlisle School's newspaper, The Red Man and Helper, by calling it "The White Man and Kicker" and points out that calling the newspaper a Helper is a "farce."

Pratt's criticism will have the unintended effect of increasing Zitkala-Sa's literary output. It is clear that she has been struggling with the issue of spending time writing for "the so-called civilized peoples" at the expense of her familial duty (April 19, 1901). But she thinks she has found a way to fulfill both responsibilities:

      I think a word of cheer that I give my mother's heart--far more potent
   in a thousand years from today than the mere reaching a countless
   heedless--senseless!? herd of people.

      Still if there is the least good to be gained by this appealing to a
   multitude--it is a secondary matter not wholly unworthy of consideration.
   Is it possible then to combine these two? Is it within a single person's
   power to be loyal to a feeble helpless mother and still not the better able
   to appeal to a thousand mothers--or parents or in short the world--for
   being kind to those nearest first? I am going to try to combine the two. I
   am going to my mother because she cannot come to me. I can write stories
   and have them published in the East....

In late spring, 1901, she leaves Boston with the intention of gathering material for Old Indian Legends. She first spends time at the Fort Totten Agency in North Dakota, fulfilling her goal of interviewing some elderly people in order to recover the tales that she will translate for publication. This is a particularly happy period for her, for she has "a good time talking Sioux with the old folks" (ca June 4, 1901) and is able to collect "many fine old legends" (June 17, 1901). Her publishers write to her to request yet another volume of stories, even before she has finished the first, and she optimistically tells Montezuma that she will "gather all I can and do the writing when I am in our own home"; she even dreams of writing "many volumes of Indian Legends" (June 1, 1901). But she has not accounted for the difficulty she will encounter once she arrives in Greenwood, South Dakota and finds that she cannot get much work done, for she must function within the "hard conditions at Yankton" (May 30, 1901) and deal with her elderly mother, whom she has acknowledged is "cranky (like me)" (April 3, 1901).

Furthermore, after a Mr. Nichols (who is connected to "the organization") arrives unannounced from Chicago "without guide or interpreter--with no credentials"--for the purpose of "doing good" on the reservation, she has to give up much of her time to help him adjust to the unfamiliar conditions of the west and agency life (summer 1901). She manages to finish her book and correct the proof sheets, but "that was all" (late summer 1901). However, as she tells Montezuma on September 4, 1901, the anger that Pratt continues to stir within her apparently shakes her out of the emotional state that has kept her from writing:

      Col. Pratt has used his pull against me because my think is not his
   think--nor my ways--his ways! and just the hate of him frees me to work
   again even when I would most like to fold my hands.

In a flurry of activity in 1902, she publishes "The Indian District School: A Phase of Agency Life" in the Boston Evening Transcript (quoted earlier), "A Warrior's Daughter" in Everybody's Magazine, and "Why I Am a Pagan" in the Atlantic Monthly.

"A Warrior's Daughter" tells the story of a Sioux woman, Tusee, who risks her life to save the man she loves. After learning from returning warriors that her lover has been taken captive, Tusee sneaks into the enemy campground, disguises herself, murders an enemy warrior, cuts her lover's ropes, and carries him away on her shoulders. Recent analyses of this story have emphasized the extent to which it disrupts the traditional female role by focusing on a woman's strength and cunning (Smith 53) and subverts the Pocahontas myth in having a Native woman rescue a Native man rather than a European one (Spack 36). In the context of Zitkala-Sa's debate with Montezuma over the creation of a political organization of and for Native people, "A Warrior's Daughter" takes on new meaning. Significantly, the story is devoid of any reference to European American culture. The rescue of the Native man takes place without the intrusion of the Christian piety that has conventionally infused European American stories about Indian-white relations. This is not a surprising choice for a person who believes that Indians should establish and sustain their own organizations: "Let us not think of asking money of any white man. Let us have nothing to do with Charity from others" (May 13, 1901).

"A Warrior's Daughter" may also reflect Zitkala-Sa's own desire for a meaningful role in the incipient mm-of-the-century Native rights movement. Montezuma envisions separate associations for men and women, and this infuriates Zitkala-Sa. Just as she demands equal rights in marriage, she insists on equality for all women in the political sphere:

   For spite, I feel like putting my hand forward and simply wiping the Indian
   men's committee into no where!!! No---I should not really do such a thing.
   Only I do not understand why your organization does not include Indian
   women. Am I not an Indian woman as capable in serious matters and as
   thoroughly interested in the race--as any one or two of you men put
   together. Why do you dare leave me out? Why? Some times as I ponder the
   pre-ponderous [sic] actions of men--which are as tremendously out of
   proportion with the small results--I laugh. It is also more waste of minds
   than we pause to realize. It is as Emerson says--a game of "Puss with her
   tail"--no more! (May 2, 1901)

Zitkala-Sa understands that releasing Native people from the colonial grip of the US government cannot be achieved through male power alone. Like her character, Tusee, she has the "warrior's strong heart" (350) that is needed to function amid the gendered tensions within the Native community.(14)

In "Why I Am a Pagan," published in 1902 in the Atlantic Monthly, Zitkala-Sa returns to the tensions between Native and European American ways of knowing. She relates the conversation between a first-person narrator (perhaps Zitkala-Sa herself) and a "native preacher" who tries to encourage the narrator to attend church in order to "avoid the after-doom of hell fire" (803). Because this text is critical of Christian dogma and instead celebrates "the voice of the Great Spirit" (803), it is especially embarrassing for the European Americans who had taught Zitkala-Sa, for a major goal of the Indian schools was to "Christianize" the Indians. Christianity was the dominant religion of the United States, and missionaries, government officials, and philanthropists all encouraged Christian teaching in American Indian schools because of their belief in "its power as a practical element of civilization," to use the phrase of humanitarian reformer Herbert Welsh (21). To allow the continuation of Native religions was unimaginable, for these religions encouraged and strengthened the very values the schools were attempting to erase.(15) To understand the vehemence with which Zitkala-Sa confronts the "bigoted creed" and "superstition" of Christianity in "Why I Am a Pagan" (803), it is useful to examine the context of Zitkala-Sa's own Christian education.

The Quakers at White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute, which Zitkala-Sa attended as a child (1884-1887) and teenager (1891-1895), were actively seeking converts to Christianity:

   The religious instruction of the pupils is carefully attended to; an
   endeavor is made to bring them to an intelligent reception of the truths of
   the Gospel, a heart surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the
   formation of habits expressive of Christian discipleship. ("White's
   Institute," 1887, 18)

There was never a moment when students at White's were unaware of this mission, for it pervaded every aspect of the school, including the students' domestic and industrial work:

   The various factors of educational work are here intimately interwoven. The
   school room teaching, the home discipline, the industrial training, the
   social intercourse, the guarded recreations, the personal influence of
   officers, the reading of books, papers and periodicals; the effect of some
   outing, and much contact with visitors, joined to the daily moral and
   religious training, unite in quickening thought, moulding character, and
   fixing habits in pupils. (Hill, 14, emphasis added)

Believing their religion to be superior to Native spiritual practices, the Quakers made every effort to "raise the religious character of the pupils to a higher standard" ("White's Institute," 1892, 29, emphasis added). Students did not readily accept the notion that their spiritual values were deficient, however, and there was significant resistance to conversion. Despite their professed view that "[e]ach pupil is the object of loving regard," the staff at White's apparently pressured students until they succumbed to (the) Christian persuasion:

   Marcus Pearson, the present pastor, speaks encouragingly of the religious
   growth among them. He states that by the daily pressure of Christian
   influence, many of the new pupils who seemed incorrigible at first, have
   been restrained. (Coggeshall, 1886, 15; Bales 22)

The non-denominational Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where Zitkala-Sa's teaching responsibilities included lessons in Bible study, was openly complicit in the proselytizing project of the Christian missions.(16) Wary of having his school considered "Godless," Richard Henry Pratt assured the commissioner of Indian Affairs that he kept students in constant contact with religious folk who were "on the alert to advance the cause of Christianity" (Pratt, "Official Report" 408). Students were surrounded by Christians hoping to convert them:

   There are in the school representatives of nearly all the leading churches,
   both among the students and instructors, and, as far as these churches are
   represented in the town of Carlisle, their preaching, Sabbath school, and
   other services are attended by the students. In addition, a Sabbath school
   is regularly held at the school; also a Sunday service--undenominational in
   its character--and a students' prayer meeting weekly.... No pupils come
   here and go away ignorant of Christian truth and morality. (Pratt,
   "Official Report" 408)

In a May 1, 1902 letter to Montezuma, Zitkala-Sa refers to "Why I Am a Pagan" as "a little scribble," but she obviously recognizes its power to shatter the faith of the assimilationists. She revels in the image of Carlisle's "rear[ing] up on its hunches at sight of the little sky rocket! ha ha!". A close comparison of the language of the letters with the language of "Why I Am a Pagan" suggests that, at least in part, Zitkala-Sa is engaging in an act of personal revenge. Having heard that she is considered "'worse than Pagan'" at Carlisle (March 5, 1901), Zitkala-Sa now takes control of the word to use it for her own purposes in the public sphere. "Why I Am a Pagan" is the return punch to the men who are in the ring with her, including Colonel Pratt, whom Zitkala-Sa calls a "pugalist" (sic) in an April 19, 1901 letter (emphasis added) and a missionary whom she identifies in "Why I Am a Pagan" as the "'Christian' pugilist [who] commented upon a recent article of mine, grossly perverting the spirit of my pen" (803, emphasis added). Nevertheless, despite the personal revenge motive, it is clear from Zitkala-Sa's letters to Montezuma that her main purpose is to attack the hypocrisy of "the so called Missionaries and teachers in Indian schools":

   Oh--I wonder why God made such pigmies to blaspheme under the English
   language! They are intolerant, resentful--spiteful all under the words [of]
   Christ's teachings! (April 13, 1901)(17)

Zitkala-Sa's Ideological Stance

Through her correspondence with Montezuma, Zitkala-Sa establishes a position that challenges European American ideologies. She has become knowledgeable about European American ways of knowing not only through her own formal schooling but also through continued study, for she believes that "to be an all-round thinker" she cannot know only about her own heritage but is "compelled to study all races" (June 17, 1901). Using her Western education and her knowledge of Western civilization to reveal flaws in Western ways of thinking, Zitkala-Sa demonstrates that she is what Laura Wexler calls an "unintended reader": someone who has "read material not intended for [her] eyes" and who is "affected by the print culture in ways that could not be anticipated" (161).

In order to reject the European American notion of "civilization" and argue for the superiority of Native societies, Zitkala-Sa engages the rhetoric of European American social evolution theory, which had gripped the country in the late nineteenth century. US anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan popularized the notion that civilization developed in a series of stages and proposed that, over time, a society could advance from "savagery" (hunting and gathering) through "barbarism" (making crafts, cultivating crops) to "civilization" (developing a written form of language) (Bannan 788). Most educational reformers believed that the boarding school experience could speed up the evolutionary process (Welsh 24). In a June 1901 letter to Montezuma, Zitkala-Sa both borrows and subverts the language of the social evolutionists and reformers. If one is to accept their view of history and education, she mockingly argues, then it is not logical to expect the kind of rapid progress that a few years in Indian schools is designed to produce:

   Rome was a civilization quite superior in some things than this modern over
   here. Rome held captives and slaves the flaxen haired savages of Europe--
   From these self same slaves--springs the Anglo Saxon--

      If [Carlisle] declares the Indian a superstitious savage she must allow
   him centuries--as the other savages have required-- to mature to the
   prevailing customs. (emphasis added)

Having characterized the European American majority by using the stereotypic language conventionally used to characterize Native people, Zitkala-Sa questions what they have achieved with their civilization:

      The intellectual class of the so called civilized is a small minority!
   The majority are dredges--After so many centuries--if the Anglo Saxon can
   produce so ... small a flower--by what magic do you expect a primitive
   Indian race to become civilized--and not drudges!?

If these passages suggest that Zitkala-Sa accepts the savagery/barbarism/civilization paradigm of human development, other comments reveal her disdain for this theory:

      If the Indian race adapts itself to the commodity of the times ... it
   won[']t be because [of] Carlisle! but because the Indian was not a
   degenerate in the first place!

   I will never speak of the whites as elevating the Indian!

Although Zitkala-Sa obviously admires Montezuma, her letters reveal serious ideological gaps between them. In essence, the letters mirror the schism within the Native community between those who favored full assimilation and those who worked to preserve Native cultures even as they adopted European American ways.(18) Zitkala-Sa tells Montezuma that to be "masters of circumstances," Native people must "claim our full heritage" (February 20, 1901). She makes clear that she is perturbed by Montezuma's acceptance of his treatment by the white establishment, for, she says, they use him as an example of how education can turn an Indian into a person of worth (April 12, 1901). She exhorts him to reconsider this view and to recognize that it was his own character that led to his success:

   I resent Carlisle's talking of you as it does. Its talk--boast of you as a
   savage Apache and now an honorable physician in Chicago--the result of
   Education!! I guess if the character was not in you--savage or otherwise--
   Education could not make you the man you are today. It was not that you
   were Indian--nor that civilization was an irresistible power--but because
   in an unusual measure the Spirit of a Universal God was + is in you!

Likewise, Zitkala-Sa credits her own accomplishments to her inherent potential: "Education has developed the possibilities in me--Were they not there--no school could put them in!".

In June 1901, she envisions Native people as "intellectual artistic men and women," which she understands is not Carlisle's ultimate educational goal; and so she argues with Montezuma that if he persists in seeing Indians as primitives, he has "no right to expect so much--save the right of being disappointed." What she expects is that Native people will "compete with the highest-minded in every branch of pursuit of Today" because she "consider[s] the Indian spiritually superior to any race." This spiritual superiority is evident in "the Indian simplicity of dress and freedom of outdoor life," which she believes is "more powerful than that of the hot-house flower of which your large city can boast!". This superiority is also reflected in Native communities' "self respect and honor to keep unwritten laws," which, unlike white civilization's written laws, do not need to be "completed by inspiring fear of physical punishment." As long as government schools insist on manual and domestic labor and fail to support college education for Native people, Zitkala-Sa believes, they are simply training them to be "slaves to the plow" and thus consigning them to a "hell" on earth.

Zitkala-Sa's education in two cultures has provided her with a deep sense of irony, evident in the way she interprets both Native and European American life styles. In taking issue with the notion that Native people are inherently primitive, Zitkala-Sa reveals the falsity of claims against Native civilization. She defends Native dress by establishing its parallels with the European American notion of beauty:

      Morally the Indian in his own state is cleaner than those city-dwellers!
   If they did wear their birth day clothes--what of it! Do not painters or
   sculptors resort to the same nude figure when they wish to copy the
   greatest combination of graces? (June 1901)

Again, the themes laid out in Zitkala-Sa's letters to Montezuma find their way into her journalistic writing, for she discusses a similar topic in an essay titled "The Indian Dance: A Protest Against Its Abolition," published in the Boston Evening Transcript on January 25, 1902.(19) Zitkala-Sa here states that she "would not like to say any graceful movement of the human figure in rhythm to music was ever barbaric"; but she first mockingly draws on history to recall the barbarism of the European past as she imagines couples gliding over polished floors to the rhythm of orchestral music:

      The daintiness and exquisite web-cloth of the low-necked, sleeveless
   evening gowns must be so from the imperative need to distract the mind from
   the steel frames in which fair bodies are painfully corseted. It may be
   gauze-covered barbarism, for history does tell of the barbaric Teutons and
   Anglo-Saxons. It may be a martyrdom to some ancient superstition which
   centuries of civilization and Christianization have not wholly eradicated
   from the yellow-haired and blue-eyed races.(24)

Despite her insight into the destructive stereotypes that have become normative in European American discourse, Zitkala-Sa sometimes slips into deplorable uses of language in the letters to Montezuma, showing the extent to which she herself had internalized such prejudices. For example, toward the end of their relationship, when she and Montezuma are embroiled in an argument about the return of the engagement ring (which she has lost) she accuses him of writing "wickedly--in the manner of some low Italian day-go" (June 23, 1902). Writing of her own mother on August 11, 1901, she says,

   I have been needlessly tortured by mother's crazy tongue till all hell
   seems set loose upon my heels--and I feel wicked enough to kill her on the
   spot or else run wild.

      You sensible folks whose nerves are caste (sic) iron and are not
   susceptible to the influences of others['] idiosyncrasies--have not
   sufficient imagination to know how excruciatingly painful it is to a
   sensitive wretch to have "to grin and bear" all the yelping ferocity of
   human brutes. (emphasis added)

The use of the word brute to describe her mother is startling, given its history in relation to Native/European American interactions. Nineteenth-century European American traders and travelers typically compared Native women to "beasts" and "brutes" (Weist 31). For all of her high ideals, Zitkala-Sa was capable of lamentable statements in her private writing.

Nevertheless, overwhelmingly, Zitkala-Sa's letters to Montezuma show her to be a woman of conviction, one who not only espoused a pro-Native philosophy but also lived it. Throughout this period, 1901-1902, she used her literary skills and her friendships with the literati in Boston and New York to publish stories and articles that venerated her Native heritage and that called attention to the rights of Native people. Given her connections, talent, intelligence, and facility with the English language, she could have established a life among European Americans in the east. Yet she chose instead to go west to fulfill a mission to help the most destitute. What she wished for Montezuma (May 13, 1901), she accomplished for herself at this time: "As I think of you I desire for you only life's best gifts. I wish you to leap forward not so much in what is generally termed civilization but into true nobility!"

Zitkala-Sa did not give up the idea of pursuing a literary career until she married Raymond Bonnin in 1902, after which she spent fourteen years on a Western reservation teaching and doing community service. In 1916, she returned east and ultimately became editor of the journal of the Society of American Indians (SAI), the first communal organization of Native intellectuals. SAI's mandate was to correct injustices perpetrated against Native people, primarily through their integration into European American society (Warrior 7). In an ironic parallel to the criticism of her literary output at the turn of the twentieth century, Zitkala-Sa's political writings became a subject of controversy at the turn into the twenty-first, especially among Native scholars. Betty Louise Bell points to the assimilationist rhetoric in Zitkala-Sa's journalistic writing, particularly in articles published in American Indian Magazine in 1919 (67). Robert Allen Warrior argues that Zitkala-Sa's promotion of citizenship for indigenous people hindered efforts to maintain Native sovereignty and that her anti-peyote campaign stood in the way of Native religious freedom (10). Yet it is important to note that even though Zitkala-Sa subscribed to some of the tenets of SAI, she actively attempted to transform the society into an organization that lobbied for tribal self-determination. Furthermore, as Warrior acknowledges, Zitkala-Sa moved away from the politics of SAI and remained a Native fights activist long after the organization folded and other members abandoned political work (19-20). In 1926 she and her husband even founded their own pro-tribal political organization, the National Council of American Indians, which aimed to strengthen pan-tribal alliances in order to empower Native people.

Zitkala-Sa's letters to Montezuma provide crucial insight into her thinking before she became a member of SAI and help to explain her ideological differences with other members of the society. From the time she began writing, Zitkala-Sa continuously contested reform agendas that would have the effect of allowing European American views to erase Native ways of knowing from the American cultural and intellectual landscape.

Notes

(1.) Gertrude E. Simmons to Susan Unthank, April 25, 1898. Susan B. Unthank Collection, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis.

(2.) The Indian Helper 9 July 1897: n. pag. During the first summer, Zitkala-Sa assisted with the clerical work and played piano for chapel services. She became a teacher when the school session opened in October.

(3.) The Indian Helper, 24 Sept. 1897: n. pag.

(4.) The Indian Helper, 9 July 1897: n. pag.

(5.) "Wants Indian Stories," The Indian Helper 18 Mar. 1898: 1.1

(6.) A.J. Standing to Miss Gertrude Simmons, January 23, 1899, Pratt Papers.

(7.) Details of Carlos Montezuma's life are taken from his own autobiographical essays: "From an Apache Camp," and "Light."

(8.) Excerpts from the newspaper reviews were published in the Carlisle weekly newspaper: "Our Band on the Road," The Indian Helper Mar. 30, 1900: n. pag.; The Indian Helper Mar. 23, 1900: n.pag. Although Zitkala-Sa was a classically-trained violinist studying at the one of the most prestigious conservatories in the US, no mention is made of the reception to her violin playing at these concerts. Newspaper critics apparently preferred to reinforce a stereotype of the Native woman. They were undoubtedly influenced by the costume, which Pratt had carefully planned:

   I think well of your using a buckskin dress if you can get one that will
   serve. It is more than likely I would borrow one from the Smithsonian. Will
   drop a line to find out. My recollection is that I purchased several for
   them years ago.

Richard Henry Pratt to Zitkala-Sa, February 24, 1900, Pratt Papers.

(9.) Zitkala-Sa had a publishing agreement with Ginn & Company in early February, 1901. Old Indian Legends was published as a trade edition in October, 1901 and as a school edition in February 1902. Janet McCarthy, permissions editor at Silver Burdett Ginn, kindly supplied me with this information.

(10.) J. E. Chamberlin to Maj. R. H. Pratt, March 9, 1900, Pratt Papers.

(11.) Richard Henry Pratt to J. E. Chamberlin, March 20, 1900, Pratt Papers.

(12.) "School Days of an Indian Girl," The Red Man Feb. 1900: 8; "Two Sides of Institution Life," The Red Man June 1900: 1; "Zitkala-Sa in the Atlantic Monthly," The Red Man June 1900: 2. The latter review was reprinted from The Word Carrier, the newspaper of the Dakota Mission.

(13.) The review was reprinted from The Word Carrier, the newspaper of the Dakota Mission.

(14.) Fifteen years after she wrote this letter, Zitkala-Sa became the secretary of the Society of American Indians, which Montezuma helped to establish, and editor of its publication, The American Indian Magazine. In 1926, she and Bonnin created their own organization, the National Council of American Indians, of which she became president, a post she held for 12 years until her death in 1938.

(15.) In addition to the different spiritual values that Christianity would impart, Adams argues, Protestantism also promoted material advancement as a marker of success, which was anathema to the communal sharing that characterized Native life (6).

(16.) The Indian Helper, Oct. 1, 1897: n. pag.

(17.) If "Why I Am a Pagan" creates problems for Pratt, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly is enchanted by it, as he reveals in a letter to Zitkala-Sa in April 1902:

   Thank you very much for sending to the Atlantic your little paper on being
   a pagan. This is certainly a good time of year to indulge [in] pagan
   instincts....

      You will receive a tiny check for the article in the course of a few
   days. We find that it is only two pages long so the proceeds will not
   enable you to [live] in as much luxury as the pagans of olden times were
   wont to do.

Editorial Pressed Letter Book. Note: I have added the words in brackets to fill in words that are unintelligible in the letters.

(18.) Although at this time Montezuma did not believe in focusing on the Native past, he later restored his connection to the place of his birth. Iverson, Montezuma's biographer, believes that Zitkala-Sa ultimately may have influenced Montezuma's thinking (38).

(19.) This essay was reprinted in the Carlisle School's The Red Man and Helper on August 22, 1902 under the title, "A Protest Against the Abolition of the Indian Dance." In opposition to Zitkala-Sa's very point, the editor of the Red Man prefaces the essay by stating that "[t]here are two sides to every picture" and arguing that "the savage dance is the greatest possible hindrance to Indian progress."

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--. "Impressions of an Indian Childhood." Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1900): 37-47.

--. "The Indian Dance: A Protest Against Its Abolition." Boston Transcript 25 Jan. 1902: 24.

--. "The Indian District School: A Phase of Agency Life." Boston Trancript 4 Jan. 1902:17.

--. "An Indian Teacher Among Indians." Atlantic Monthly (March 1900): 381-86.

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--. Simmons, Gertrude E. Letter to Susan Unthank. 25 April 1898. Susan B. Unthank Collection. Indiana State Library, Indianapolis.

--. "`The Soft-Hearted Sioux'--Morally Bad." Harper's Monthly (March 1901): 505-09.

--. "The Trial Path." Harper's Monthly Magazine (Oct. 1901): 741-44.

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Ruth Spack is Associate Professor of English at Bentley College in Massachusetts. Her most recent book, America's Second Tongue: The Ownership of English and American Indian Education, 1860s-1900s, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2002.

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