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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Ira Dworkin, Amy Earhart, Vanita Reddy, Alain Lawo-Sukam, the panelists at INCS 2023, and Eliza Alexander Wilcox for their constructive and invaluable feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Zitkala-Ša’s (Citation1900b) letter to the editor is also sandwiched between pro-assimilationist letters sent from boarding school supporters that all uniformly praise the newspaper for providing “enlightenment on the Indian question.”
2 Vizenor originally coined the term in his 1999 book, Manifest Manners. In Aesthetics of Survivance (Citation2008), Vizenor defines survivance as “an active resistance and repudiation of dominance, obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry” (11). “The practices of survivance create an active presence, more than the instincts of survival, function, or subsistence. Native stories are the sources of survivance, the comprehension and empathies of natural reason, tragic wisdom, and the provenance of new literary studies.” (Vizenor Citation2008, 11)
3 It is also important to clarify that it is not in my interest in this essay to generalize tribal identities in reading Zitkala-Ša’s anti-colonial resistance politics. In fact, she “moved between coalitions and alliances, between the West and the East, and between tribe and pan-Indian community” (Cox Citation2004, 173), which also further confirms Zitkala-Ša’s modern form of indigeneity. Rather, the terminology of indigeneity and Nativeness enables me to read Zitkala-Ša’s choice to frame her Atlantic Monthly stories as “Indian” experiences rather than tribe-specific testimony. By the token of this, my use of the terms “Native” and “Indigenous” tracks the racialization of Native peoples under the North American colonial states.
4 Consider the praise of Zitkala-Ša in The Indianapolis Journal that calls her “the pretty young Indian woman … who is much better looking than pictures of the average Indian” (quoted in Chiarello Citation2005, 7).
5 Ruth Spack (Citation2006) and Gayle Byrd (Citation2014) have previously compared Frantz Fanon and Gertrude Bonnin’s theorizations on colonialism.
6 In Dark Matters (Citation2015), Simone Browne contemplates this moment where Fanon describes “all this whiteness burns me to a cinder” as “the moment of fracture of the body from its humanness, refracted into a new subject position” (98). The contact with the white gaze initiates “making and marking” the body “as racial Other” (98).
7 Zitkala-Ša writes: “Though we rode several days inside of the iron horse, I do not recall a single thing about our luncheons” (88). Her not remembering the train ride except for the degrading feeling (along with the missionary throwing candies at upset Indigenous children as one would do to livestock) hints at the trauma of separation from family and home and racist humiliation. Importantly, it also connects this trauma to theft as colonial violence – theft of land, indigeneity, and memories.
8 Zitkala-Ša calls this “Iron Routine,” which is a title of her fifth chapter of “The School Days.”
9 It is unlikely that the “papers” here symbolize humanities education, as boarding schools often focused on industrial education. In light of this context, Vigil (Citation2022) writes, “for most Native leaders, learning to read and write was more important than training in blacksmithing and any other outmoded skills promoted by Carlisle” (203). This was the case for Zitkala-Ša as well, as she “embraced ‘dual citizenship’ and ‘rhetorical sovereignty’ as strategies that enabled [her] to situate Indigenous spaces as independent from the United States” (Vigil Citation2022, 204).
10 By calling Zitkala-Ša’s rhetoric the “uncomfortable third space,” I am evoking Kevin Bruyneel’s (Citation2007) theory of “a third space of sovereignty” – Bruyneel builds on Homi Bhabha’s Third Space theory and defines the third space of sovereignty as “a location inassimilable to the liberal democratic settler-state, and as such it problematizes the boundaries of colonial rule but does not seek to capture or erase these boundaries” (21). Instead, it refuses the imperial boundary “that frame[s] dualistic choices for indigenous politics, such as assimilation-secession, inside-outside, modernity-traditionalism, and so on, and in so doing refuses to be divided by settler-state boundaries” (Bruyneel Citation2007, l 21). Bruyneel additionally gives Zitkala-Ša as an example of Native intellectuals who practiced the third space of citizenship; see Bruyneel (Citation2007), 107.
11 See Carpenter (Citation2008), 23.
12 Hsu tracks the tendencies to denigrate smell from western Enlightenment thinking of human senses: “At least since the Enlightenment, smell has been framed as too immersive, imprecise, subjective, interactive, involuntary, material, promiscuous, and ineffable to convey aesthetic experience: as Kant puts it, smell is a vehicle of sensual ‘enjoyment’ rather than ‘beauty’” (Hsu Citation2020, 6). Erica Fretwell (Citation2020) additionally explains that the theorization of smell became more specified by “distinguishing between savage sensibility and civilized sensitivity” by the mid-nineteenth century in U.S. racial discourse (140).
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Hyunjoo Yu
Hyunjoo Yu (she/her) is currently teaching at the University of Puget Sound as a visiting assistant professor of race and ethnicity. Holding a Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, her research centers on critical race and feminist affect studies, delving into nineteenth-century sentimental culture and its biocentric representations of race. Additionally, she wrote and spoke on campus climate, reactionary pushback, and institutional roadblocks against classroom discussions on race, immigration, and imperialism.