Chugging along...

9 December 2023: Kind of pleased with myself for finishing my Zitkala-Ša entry today (one day ahead of schedule) and staying right on track to complete twelve entries this semester. Also making the day sweet, I managed to finish it after a lovely mid-day break to have brunch with friends and do a bit of Christmas shopping on German Street. 

"I certainly like this job you have given me..."

28 November 2023: I am working on my next entry and really loved this fun piece by Cari Carpenter, about (in part) the investigation Zitkala-Ša and a friend, Charlotte Jones, conducted into claims by “Princess Chiquilla,” who claimed Indian ancestry.

Here’s a great part (everything in color is directly quoted from the article): In a letter, Zitkala-Ša gives “ominous warnings about the mission's potential danger. Still we have to go on trying to show that the majority, a large majority of our race is morally clean and it is well to find out the "fakers," perhaps they are not real Indians. That sometimes happens. Then, knowing them, we need never be misled by anything they attempt to do. Be very cautious,—say nothing on this matter for publication. Just quitely [sic] secure information, but do not attempt to see them alone, always have a good friend with you.

Jones's response indicates her delight in this task: ‘I certainly like this job you have given me. One of my chief literary dissipations is to read good detective stories, and now I feel almost as if I were acting one’” (Carpenter 146).

Work Cited

Carpenter, Cari. “Detecting Indianness: Gertrude Bonnin’s Investigation of Native American Identity.” The Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 2005, pp. 139–59. JSTOR.

"These were my mother's pride..."

5 February 2020: “These were my mother’s pride—my wild freedom and overflowing spirits. She taught me no fear save that of intruding myself upon others." --Zitkala-Ša, Impressions of An Indian Childhood

Re-reading this today in preparations for a class on Friday. Maybe because it's been a long day and I am tired, but I found myself quite moved by these words, loving and elegiac both for the mother who raised her and the world that has disappeared. 

Slate's "The Vault"

 

Image source: https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:16630

Slate's "The Vault" is one of my new favorite blogs. Check out today's entry, featuring Emily Dickinson's manuscript fragments. And the subject of this one, from last week, is both fascinating and heart-breaking--it's the image of a pair of tiny handcuffs, used to transport Native American children to government boarding schools. I hope to use it this semester when I teach the writings of Zitkala Sa.