Abstract: Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical stories not only addressed a contemporary audience of mostly white, reform-minded readers, but also hail contemporary and future Dakota readers. On the one hand, she couches her life story in the language of living death and thus fulfils many contemporary readers’ expectations of Indian vanishing; on the other, she invests her stories with a (re)animating spirit in their development of a sustained relationship between the author, extra-discursive forms of communication, and the presence of untranslated cultural references that would be most (or only) legible to Dakota readers. The futurity Zitkala-Ša imagines in these early works not only extends into her later literary production but also continues to resonate many decades later in the work of other Dakota writers engaged in similarly revitalizing projects, including Ella Cara Deloria, Agnes M. Picotte, and Mona Susan Power.
Jenna Hunnef (Sun,) studied this question.