A New Continent of Liberty by Hamilton Geoff;

Author:Hamilton, Geoff; [Hamilton, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO004020 Literary Collections / Asian / Indic
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

For Pratt, who no doubt spoke for much of Euro-America, Indigenous traditions represented a barrier to genuine civilization and were best discarded as Native peoples realized their full human potential in transitioning to Western modernity. Zitkala-Ša’s literary career, begun at the turn of the century, would directly challenge such assumptions in attempting not just to preserve traditional Native lifeways but to reconstitute them as part of an extraordinary reversal of the direction of cross-cultural education. Much more extensively and ambitiously than Winnemucca, she would, as a kind of missionary for the Dakotas, render the living, prophetic genius of Indigenous traditions in English so that a benighted Euro-America might yet learn from those it had long silenced.

With Old Indian Legends (1901) Zitkala-Ša revives a series of traditional Sioux narratives, ultimately enacting a stunning intervention into Euro-American culture itself. Writing to her fiancé, Carlos Montezuma, while researching the work, she explains that “while the old people last I want to get from them their treasured ideas of life” (qtd. in Fisher 229). Zitkala-Ša first transcribed the narratives she heard in the Dakota language and then translated them, often altering the content significantly, into English. As she explains in her preface, the re-creation of these legends inevitably varies to some extent with each oral performance, while nevertheless maintaining coherence and continuity as different storytellers “[restore] some lost link in the original character of the tale” (5). Breathing new life into this tradition of communal practice and narrative flexibility, she creates in her own retellings a series of cultural links. Zitkala-Ša’s aims extend, however, even further. Her intent, she explains, has been “to transplant the native spirit of these tales—root and all—into the English language, since America in the last few centuries has acquired a second tongue” (5). We do well to pay close attention to Zitkala-Ša’s language here. Her essential activity is not to translate but to “transplant”—moving essential elements of a “native spirit” into a new milieu where they might thrive. Moreover, she seeks a transplantation that would carry over that spirit “root and all,” bringing the entirety of its life-giving force, and thereby not simply preserve what is carried over but radically impact the environment into which it is carried. With the success of this project, the English language, and the broader nomistic world in which Native peoples might find a revivified place, would be transformed.

Following Occom, Apess, and Winnemucca before her, Zitkala-Ša challenges Euro-American readers by first reminding them of their own belated status on the American continent, which produced not a primary but a “second tongue.” She moves beyond these precursors, however, in setting forth a rich, alternative, potentially transfigurative mythopoeic system with its own distinctive assumptions about, for instance, the dimensions of communal obligations, the ontological status of the nonhuman, and the consequences of transgressing the natural order. Not incidentally, these legends were told to her, she reminds us, “Under an open sky, nestling close to the earth . . . [by] the old Dakota storytellers” (5). In

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