Romancing kinship: A queer reading of Indian education and zitkala-Ŝa's American Indian stories

GLQ

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 27-59

  Rifkin, Mark ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33646695412     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-12-1-27     Document Type: Review

References (172)

1. Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995), 13.
2. By traditional I mean the ways that native peoples maintain their political and cultural distinctiveness against various modes of imperial intervention, integrating new beliefs and practices while envisioning a continuity between the past and the present. See Simon Ortiz, "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism," MELUS 8, no. 2 (1981): 7-12;
3. Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 1999);
4. M. Annette Jaimes, "American Indian Studies: Toward an Indigenous Model," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 11, no. 3 (1987): 1-16;
5. and Beth Brant, Writing as Witness: Essay and Talk (Toronto: Women's, 1994).
6. The concept of compulsory heterosexuality is borrowed from Adrienne Rich's essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," in Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: Norton, 1993), 203-24.
7. Cathy J. Cohen, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" GLQ 3 (1997): 440, 447-48, 453. For a fuller theoretical elaboration of this position with respect to African Americans in the twentieth century
8. see Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). For useful accounts of the intersection of nineteenth-century sexological discourses and racial ideologies and imageries
9. see Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000);
10. Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin's, 1998);
11. Mason Stokes, The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001);
12. and Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). For discussion of how Mormons ceased to be considered white due to their polygamous unions
13. see Nancy Bentley, "Marriage as Treason: Polygamy, Nation, and the: Novel," in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 341-70.
14. Michael Warner's introduction to the collection Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), vii - xxxi, is usually cited as the first publication in which the term heteronormativity appeared.
15. See Chrys Ingraham, "The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and Theories of Gender," Sociological Theory 12 (1994): 203-19. For the imposition of the family ideal in early federal Indian policy
16. see Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967);
17. and Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). For the impact of negative representations of native peoples' practices on institutionalized U.S. sexual norms, especially in terms of promiscuity and polygamy
18. see Nancy F. Gott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000);
19. Joan Smyth Iversen, "A Debate on the American Home: The Antipolygamy Controversy, 1880-1890," in American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race since the Civil War, ed. John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 123-40;
20. and David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
21. For discussion of the ways that American Indians served as prominent examples or models for sexological discourse in the late nineteenth century see Roscoe, Changing Ones, 167-200.
22. On transformations in residency and kinship in the nineteenth-century United States via marriage law and ideology see Cott, Public Vows, 24-131;
23. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
24. Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985);
25. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
26. Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002);
27. Paul A. Gilje, ed., Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997);
28. and Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
29. A growing number of scholars are taking up the question or concept of kinship as a vehicle of queer critique. See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004);
30. Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991);
31. Scott Tucker, The Queer Question: Essays on Desire and Democracy (Boston: South End, 1997);
32. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free, 1999);
33. Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001);
34. Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995);
35. and Freeman, Wedding Complex. This excellent body of work, though, tends to ask questions about how queers fit into kinship systems rather than seeing the question of kinship as undergirding the heteronorm separate from the queer/straight binary per se.
36. Roscoe, Changing Ones, 210.
37. For other scholarly work on gender diversity in American Indian cultures see Sabine Lang, Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures, trans. John L. Vantine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998);
38. Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1986);
39. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997);
40. Evelyn Blackwood, "Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females," Signs 10 (1984): 27-42;
41. and Beatrice Medicine, '"Warrior Women': Sex Role Alternatives for Plains Indian Women," in The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women, ed. Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 267-80.
42. To achieve such visibility is an important project on its own, given both the existence of heterosexism in native communities and the general tendency of the outside world to see native peoples as presumptively straight. See Brant, Writing as Witness;
43. Qwo-Li Driskill, "Stolen from Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic," SAIL, ser. 2, 16, no. 2 (2004): 50-64;
44. Craig S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 271-303;
45. Will Roscoe, ed., Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology (New York: St. Martin's, 1988);
46. and Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang, Two-Spirit People. In particular, I would like to thank Craig Womack for drawing my attention to this point.
47. For background on Bonnin see Dexter Fisher, foreword to American Indian Stories, by Zitkala-Ŝa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), v-xx;
48. Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris, introduction to American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, by Zitkala-Ŝa (New York: Penguin, 2003), v-xlvi;
49. Ruth Spack, "Dis/ engagement: Zitkala-Sa's Letters to Carlos Montezuma, 1901-1902," MELUS 26, no. 1 (2001): 173-204;
50. Susan Bernardin, "The Lessons of a Sentimental Education: Zitkala-Ŝa's Autobiographical Narratives," Western American Literature 32 (1997): 213-38;
51. and Ruth J. Heflin, I Remain Alive: The Sioux Literary Renaissance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). In the present essay I refer to her by her chosen pseudonym. Several critics have misidentified her as Lakota, possibly because her pen name is from that language.
52. See Jeanne Smith, "'A Second Tongue': The Trickster's Voice in the Works of Zitkala-Sa," in Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective, ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), 46-60;
53. and Ruth Spack, "Re-visioning Sioux Women: Zitkala-Ŝa's Revolutionary American Indian Stories," Legacy 14 (1997): 25-42.
54. Yankton is the Gallicized version of the name of one of the seven tribes of the Sioux, although Sioux itself is a misnomer - a French derivation of an Ojibwa insult for the tribes whose long-standing (ethnic?) alliance the term denotes. The Yankton are often included in the term Dakota, which also has been used to refer to all seven tribes, most notably by Ella Deloria. The terms Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota (the latter usually refers to the westernmost Sioux tribe, the Teton) often have been used to designate different groupings of the seven tribes, but these terms more properly refer to dialects of the language they all speak. For a good overview of nomenclatures and their philologies see Raymond J. DeMallie, "Sioux until 1850" and "Yankton and Yanktonai," in Plains, vol. 13.2 of Handbook of North American Indians, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 718-60, 777-93. I use Sioux when referring to this collection of tribes or to characteristics that apply to most of these groups, since it currently is the most common term among natives and nonnatives.
55. Scholars have disagreed about how to interpret Zitkala-Ŝa's political commitments, especially after she joined the Society of American Indians. For conflicting interpretations see Deborah Welch, "Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ŝa)," in The New Warriors: Native American Leaders since 1900, ed. R. David Edmunds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 35-53;
56. and Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Warrior tends to emphasize Zitkala-Ŝa's resistance to the Peyote movement and to overlook her intermittent residence on the Yankton reservation, her defense of the traditional government, and her resistance to the supplanting of that government under the Indian Reorganization Act.
57. Zitkala-Ŝa, American Indian Stories. Pages will be cited parenthetically.
58. As Patricia C. Albers asserts, kinship serves as the "primary idiom through which the Sioux and other Native Americans ordered their social relations of production, trade, war, ceremony, and recreation" ("Sioux Kinship in a Colonial Setting," Dialectical Anthropology 6 [1982]: 254). For broader discussion and theorization of the politics of kinship, especially as it is articulated with gender
59. see Eleanor Burke Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981);
60. and Jane Fishburne Collier and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, eds., Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
61. For discussion of the difference between kinship-based and capitalist economies see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from "The Tempest" to "Tarzan," enl. ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997);
62. and Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 73-100.
63. My argument here with respect to heteronormativity follows Laura Wexler's similar move with respect to the "culture of sentiment" ("Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform," in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 9-38).
64. For an exploration of this process of marginalization in relation to AIDS in African American communities see Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
65. Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 132. While the law "requires particular acts" and is shaped by the narratives it proposes, however, Krupat finds that it still "remains open to interpretation" (130).
66. Bentley offers a similar formulation in her discussion of the ways that late-nineteenth-century opposition to Mormon polygamy "helped to give American nationalism the structure of a domestic novel" ("Marriage as Treason," 343).
67. Adams, Education for Extinction, 61, 58.
68. Soon after introducing Indians to a formerly all-black school, Pratt received permission from Congress to open a school exclusively dedicated to Indian education in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This school became the model for the twenty-four off-reservation Indian boarding schools that opened across the country during the next twenty-five years. On Pratt and the history of Indian education more broadly see Adams, Education for Extinction;
69. Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
70. Joel Pfister, Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004);
71. Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904, ed. Robert M. Utley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964);
72. Frederick J. Stefon, "Richard Henry Pratt and His Indians," Journal of Ethnic Studies 15, no. 2 (1987): 87-112;
73. Robert A. Trennert, "Educating Indian Girls at Nonreservation Boarding Schools, 1878-1920," in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Routledge, 1990), 224-37;
74. Trennert, "From Carlisle to Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of the Indian Outing System, 1878-1930," Pacific Historical Review 52 (1983): 267-91;
75. Alice Littlefield, "Learning to Labor: Native American Education in the United States, 1880-1930," in The Political Economy of North American Indians, ed. John H. Moore (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 43-59;
76. and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, "Domesticity in the Federal Indian Schools: The Power of Authority over Mind and Body," American Ethnologist 20 (1993): 227-40. The Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (ARCIA) (Washington, DC: Office of Indian Affairs, 1869-1940) is another rich source, containing the commissioners' comments on education as well as reports by superintendents of Indian education and from the various boarding schools.
77. ARCIA, 1884, 186; ARCIA, 1888, xix. While the idea of acculturating native children through white bourgeois homemaking dominated the outing program in the east, the system out west often degenerated into a means of providing cheap Indian labor to the communities surrounding the boarding schools. See Trennert, "From Carlisle to Phoenix";
78. Littlefield, "Learning to Labor";
79. Adams, Education for Extinction, 162-63;
80. and Hoxie, Final Promise, 189-210.
81. Pfister, Individuality Incorporated, 12.
82. Adams, Education for Extinction, 173. The experiment at Hampton and Carlisle was championed by eastern reform organizations, and in 1883 they founded the Lake Mohonk Conference, an annual meeting at which the self-designated "Friends of the Indian" could gather to discuss the proper shape and direction of the civilization program - especially education. The most powerful figures in federal Indian policy, such as the various commissioners of Indian affairs and Senator Henry Dawes, were regular attendees.
83. On Morgan's background and influence see Adams, Education for Extinction, 61-64.
84. ARCIA, 1889, 93-114. Hereafter pages are cited parenthetically.
85. The term heterogender was coined by Ingraham to address the inseparability of contemporary Euro-American understandings of gender from a conceptual and institutional investment in heterosexuality ("Heterosexual Imaginary," 204).
86. For expressions of fear by those within the Indian education system of the threat of students giving in to "licentiousness" (especially polygamy) when they return home see ARCIA, 1884, 200; ARCIA, 1885, 220; and ARCIA, 1889, 335. In fact, legal marriage, as opposed to "marr[ying] in the Indian way," was a major criterion used by both Carlisle and Hampton to assess the success of former students. See Adams, Education for Extinction, 287-288.
87. Thomas J. Morgan, "Rules for Indian Schools," ARCIA, 1890, cli. Hereafter pages are cited parenthetically.
88. On how girls in the boarding schools resisted such superintendence see Lomawaima, "Domesticity in the Federal Indian Schools."
89. On students' forms of opposition more broadly see Adams, Education for Extinction, 209-38;
90. and Pfister, Individuality Incorporated, 66-78.
91. On allotment see Hoxie, Final Promise, 41-81, 147-87.
92. The allotment program caused native landholding to decline from more than 138 million acres in the early 1880s to about 52 million acres in 1934 (Adams, Education for Extinction, 344).
93. For an edited text of the Dawes Act see Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 170-73.
94. Students at boarding schools annually were required to commemorate the passage of the Dawes Act - referred to as Indian Citizenship Day or Franchise Day. For Morgan's original order on this point see ARCIA, 1890, clxvii-clxviii; for discussion of how the "holiday" was celebrated see Adams, Education for Extinction, 196-201.
95. For more on the process and importance of renaming in education and allotment see Adams, Education for Extinction, 108-11.
96. For an alternate reading of official renaming as compatible with certain native traditions see Pfister, Individuality Incorporated, 107-8.
97. Recent scholarship in queer studies has begun to explore what are formulated as queer philosophies of and relations to time and history. See Freeman, Wedding Complex;
98. Elizabeth Freeman, "Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations," New Literary History 31 (2000): 727-44;
99. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005);
100. and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). While demonstrating how self-consciously "queer" projects of individual and collective self-fashioning challenge dominant conceptions of reproduction, maturation, and generational differentiation, some of this work repeats the larger (and I think ultimately unhelpful) trend within queer studies of presenting "family" as an inherently normative and normalizing formulation against which to define queer-ness - in this case, queer temporality. Instead, I suggest that exploring the different logics of kinship and household organization present in different practices of family formation, and examining the ways that certain family formations institutionally are privileged as natural, yields a better sense of the political economy of the heteronorm while opening up potential lines of alliance organized not around resistance to reproductivity and blood relation per se but around the ideological soldering of child care, intimacy, and nurturance to a particular social framework (hetero marriage, the nuclear family, the bourgeois household). Rather than suggesting that because heteronormativity is justified as natural by reference to reproduction, we need to distance ourselves from reproductivity (or, in Edelman's terms, "reproductive futurism"), queer critique can challenge the equation of the creation of children with institutionalized marriage and privatized homemaking while also turning away from a developmentalist relation to the future (subtended as much by the civilizing mission as by heterosexism) and toward an engagement not only with the past (the nuclear family as marginal in human history) but with understandings of kinship whose orientation is grounded in the past (shared ancestors as the basis for expansive kin networks and flexible notions of relatedness based on shared experience). Moreover, the kind of temporality I am exploring here is not a self-consciously "queer" renunciation of reproductivity or of generational breaks but the work of tradition - the survival of native peoples and their cultures through the recirculation of stories, rituals, objects, languages, etc. that keep the past alive in the present and thereby sustain a sense of collective identity. 32. On Zitkala-Ŝa's autobiographical writing see
101. Bernardin, "Lessons of a Sentimental Education";
102. Charles Hannon, "Zitkala-Ŝa and the Commercial Magazine Apparatus," in "The Only Efficient Instrument": American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837-1916, ed. Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 179-229;
103. Patricia Okker, "Native American Literatures and the Canon: The Case of Zitkala-Ŝa," in American Realism and the Canon, ed. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 87-101;
104. Roumiana Velikova, "Troping in Zitkala-Ŝa's Autobiographical Writings, 1900-1921," Arizona Quarterly 56 (2000): 49-64;
105. Jessica Enoch, "Resisting the Script of Indian Education: Zitkala-Ŝa and the Carlisle Indian School," College English 65 (2002): 117-41;
106. and Wexler, "Tender Violence."
107. Bernardin, "Lessons of a Sentimental Education," 229.
108. Quoted Bernardin, "Lessons of a Sentimental Education," ibid., 215-16.
109. When referring to her people, Zitkala-Ŝa uses the term Dakota, and it is unclear whether she means all seven Sioux tribes, the groups to the east (excluding the Teton), or the Yankton specifically. My sense is that she is speaking from or about Yankton experience but that her comments are meant to apply broadly across tribal divisions. I therefore move back and forth between Yankton and Dakota, most often employing the latter term, given that it is the one she uses.
110. In fact, the stories probably are set less than a century prior to their publication. Bernardin takes Zitkala-Ŝa's statement at face value, claiming that "The Trial Path" is "set in the precontact past" ("Lessons of a Sentimental Education," 216). However, the story prominently features horses as a routine part of Dakota life, and horses themselves were introduced to the continent by Europeans and were not integrated into Dakota culture until the late eighteenth century. Moreover, the use of beads in "A Warrior's Daughter" suggests that it takes place no earlier than the nineteenth century.
111. See DeMallie, "Sioux until 1850";
112. Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians (1944) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998);
113. Herbert T. Hoover, in collaboration with Leonard R. Bruguier, The Yankton Sioux (New York: Chelsea House, 1988);
114. and Patricia C. Albers, "Symbiosis, Merger, and War: Contrasting Forms of Intertribal Relationship among Historic Plains Indians," in Moore, Political Economy of North American Indians, 94-132.
115. These stories also differ greatly from Zitkala-Sa's later writings, especially those in American Indian Magazine, which tend to speak to current affairs much more directly, often advocating for particular positions on political issues. See Davidson and Norris, introduction to American Indian Stories. I would argue, though, that we should neither see her earlier work, especially the versions of traditional tales, as somehow apolitical in light of her later participation in national organizations and public commentary on current events, nor read her later work and activism as the true expression of her politics in ways that make the earlier acts of storytelling simply a cover for an agenda that later becomes explicit. A more productive move is to consider the different kinds of cultural work performed by different genres and the sorts of commentary and critique enabled by them.
116. On the prominence of inter- and intragenerational kin making as a mainstay of Sioux social life see Raymond J. DeMallie, "Kinship and Biology in Sioux Culture," in North American Indian Anthropology: Essays on Society and Culture, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Alfonso Ortiz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 125-46;
117. James R. Walker, Lakota Society, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982);
118. and Deloria, Speaking of Indians. As these sources note, adoptees could be distinguished terminologically from blood relations but usually were not.
119. As Deloria notes, the Dakota words for "to address a relative" and "to pray" are the same (Speaking of Indians, 28-29).
120. See Heflin, I Remain Alive, 128-29.
121. At one time the Yankton possessed thirteen to fourteen million acres in what is now the Dakotas. In 1858, however, a headman named Struck by the Ree (who two years earlier had been appointed principal chief of the Yankton by General William S. Harney) led a party that negotiated a treaty selling more than eleven million acres to the United States, also creating the Yankton reservation. Three of the seven bands that composed the Yankton publicly condemned the treaty that authorized the transaction, because it was signed without their knowledge while they were out on their annual buffalo hunt. The terms of the treaty defined Yankton territory until the beginning of the allotment program in the 1880s. The Yankton were the only Sioux tribe that never went to war against the United States; thus "they have never experienced that chastisement which has served to make the Santees and other branches of the great Sioux family submissive and easily governed" (ARCIA, 1887, 65). On Yankton history see Renée Sansom-Flood, Lessons from Chouteau Creek: Yankton Memories of Dakota Territorial Intrigue (Sioux Falls, SD: Center for Western Studies, 1986);
122. Hoover, Yankton Sioux;
123. DeMallie, "Sioux until 1850";
124. DeMallie, "Yankton and Yanktonai"; and
125. Guy Gibbon, The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
126. Zitkala-Ŝa left for White's Manual Institute in 1884; returned to the reservation in 1887 and remained there until 1891; and then went back to the school for another three years before attending Earlham College for two years. See Fisher, foreword to American Indian Stories.
127. On White's see John W. Parker and Ruth Ann Parker, Josiah White's Institute: The Interpretation and Implementation of His Vision (Dublin, IN: Prinit, 1983).
128. ARCIA, 1887, 58. By 1885 Kinney had handpicked a ruling council, described as "the board of advisors," but the people on the reservation continued to look to and support traditional leaders (ARCIA, 1885, 59-60).
129. ARCIA, 1887, 56.
130. ARCIA, 1888, 65.
131. ARCIA, 1886, 100.
132. On the home-house connection see ARCIA, 1887, 58; and ARCIA, 1884, 58. On visiting see ARCIA 1885, 58, 62; ARCIA, 1886, 94; and ARCIA, 1888, 64.
133. ARCIA, 1884, 60. The giving away of wives probably refers to the sexual sharing of one's wife with close friends as a gesture of intimacy. However, if the woman objected, divorce was a simple process, since she owned the tepee and virtually all the house-hold goods; she simply left her husband's possessions outside the tepee or, if they were living with his kin, moved back to her parents' band. See Raymond J. DeMallie, "Male and Female in Traditional Lakota Culture," in Albers and Medicine, Hidden Half, 237-65;
134. and Walker, Lakota Society, 40-44, 56.
135. ARCIA, 1886, 99; ARCIA, 1885, 60.
136. ARCIA, 1887, 60; ARCIA, 1888, 65. In fact, as prominent events in Yankton life, dances may well have functioned as spaces for coordinating opposition to U.S. policy initiatives, and this suggests an alternative motive for the official condemnation of them. See ARCIA, 1887, 59. The accusations leveled at dances usually appear in the context of the agent's admitted failure to control them.
137. ARCIA, 1887, 53. While the proper term for a man's marriage to more than one woman is polygyny, I use the term polygamy because it is more familiar and was used at the time.
138. ARCIA, 1888, 65. Many, if not most, of the cases brought before the Indian court set up by the agent had to do with illegal cohabitation and divorce. See ARCIA, 1886, 98; ARCIA, 1889, 174; and ARCIA, 1890, 72-74.
139. Moreover, the agent repeatedly emphasizes that education is the vehicle through which the Yankton will be elevated from their savage state. See ARCIA, 1887, 61. His reports include discussions of Yankton efforts to resist the removal of their children, to which Kinney responded by withholding annuities, including rations.
140. See Deloria, Speaking of Indians;
141. DeMallie, "Kinship and Biology";
142. DeMallie, "Sioux until 1850";
143. Hoover, Yankton Sioux;
144. and Walker, Lakota Society. Yankton and other Sioux tribes tended to be divided into kinship units called tiôspaye, comprising a shifting number of blood and other relatives. A variable number of tiôxpaye, themselves linked by more distant kinship ties, would combine to form a camp circle with its own council, whose rule for the most part was by persuasion rather than coercion. In this way, belonging to the camp circle as a geopolitical entity was defined by kinship.
145. This reading challenges Spack's contention that "The Warrior's Daughter" relies on "cultural and romantic language" instead of "political discourse" ("Re-visioning Sioux Women," 36).
146. While Tusee's choice to stay behind to rescue her lover is depicted as exceptional, the presence of women among the war party seems to be taken as fairly conventional: "Astride their ponies laden with food and deerskins, brave elderly women follow after their warriors"; "the war party of Indian men and their faithful women vanish beyond the southern skyline" (144). On Sioux women's participation in war see Medicine, '"Warrior Women'";
147. Blackwood, "Sexuality and Gender";
148. and Lang, Men as Women, 268, 275, 277-78, 304.
149. For brief readings that tend to focus on the story's gender dynamics, often in ways that underestimate the potential flexibility of gender identity among the Sioux, see Spack, "Re-visioning Sioux Women";
150. Spack, "Dis/engagement";
151. Okker, "Native American Literatures";
152. and Smith, " 'Second Tongue.' "
153. The reference to dances also recalls the attack on them led by the federal agent to the Yankton.
154. For discussion of "Why I Am a Pagan" and the revisions made to it under the title "The Great Spirit" in American Indian Stories, see Velikova, "Troping."
155. See Bentley, "Marriage as Treason";
156. Cott, Public Vows, 105-31;
157. and Iversen, "Debate on the American Home."
158. There is evidence that Zitkala-Ŝa was in fact a Mormon. See P. Jane Hafen, "Zitkala Sa: Sentimentality and Sovereignty," Wicazo Sa Review 12, no. 2 (1997): 41.
159. See DeMallie, "Male and Female"; and
160. Walker, Lakota Society, 53, 55.
161. On the traditional cultural role of the winkte see Williams, Spirit and the Flesh, esp. 31-86;
162. Medicine, "'Warrior Women'";
163. and Lang, Men as Women, esp. 57-255.
164. For discussion of winkte identity today, of its uneasy relationship to gay or queer identification, and of its uneven acknowledgment on reservations see the articles by Michael Red Earth and Doyle V. Robertson in Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang, Two-Spirit People, 210-16, 228-35;
165. and Lang, Men as Women, 311-22.
166. In fact, winktes often were married to non-winkle men and had similar relationships to them as their wives had. See Williams, Spirit and the Flesh, 100-101, 112, 118-19;
167. and Lang, Men as Women, 198-203.
168. "Homosexuality" as a concept, then, does not apply to this arrangement, since the relevant distinction was based not on object choice but on gender identity: two men could have a relationship with each other, but not two non-winkte men. For further theorization of this distinction see Lang, Men as Women, 3-55, 323-30;
169. and Roscoe, Changing Ones, 3-21, 119-36.
170. On white visions or fetishizations of native masculinity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
171. and Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). For a compelling discussion of how people who went through the Indian education system sought to "Indianize themselves," tactically deploying white images of native peoples to their own ends
172. see Pfister, Individuality Incorporated, 97-132.