1. America After The Civil War:1865-1900
• Recent research has found that the
death toll in the war, long put at just
over 618,000, was probably about
750,000.
• Transpose the percentage of dead that
mid-19th-century America faced into
our own time: Seven million dead, if
we had the same percentage.
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• The nation was literally and
figuratively scarred: soldiers that
survived often had lost limbs (leading
to one early problems with drug
abuse), families and cities had been
destroyed.
• The institution of slavery, however,
was put to an end in America.

2. So what would this new America look like?
• The question of who counted as
American now shifted as 4 million
slaves were now free.
• In addition, over 26 million
immigrants entered the country
between 1870-1920.
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• Many of these immigrants were
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was suspicion about the possibility of
integrating them into the American
national body, as this political cartoon
from 1880 demonstrates. The caption
reads: “The mortar of assimilation and
the one element that won’t mix.” This
element wasn’t a freed slave, but an
Irishman. (Recall captivity narrative-
more afraid of French-Catholics than
natives!)

3. “Go West, Young Man!”
• Many new immigrants concentrated in
cities. For instance, this image of the
Five Points in lower NYC (where the
film Gangs of New York is set-see clip).
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• This was the poorest part of the city and
had been that way for most of the 19th
century.
• What to do with all these new people?
Poor people without hope and money in
the cities?
• A famous reformer and influential
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newspaper owner, Horace Greeley
(pictured to the left), encouraged
migration from the cities to the
American “frontier”: “Go West, Young
Man!”

4. But this American frontier, or “West,” was
the homeland of Native communities
• One Native nation was the
“Sioux,” (a term coined by
French-Canadians), which
included three major groups: the
Yankton, Lakota, and Dakota.
Zitkala-Sa was Yankton.
• For much of the 18th and 19th
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century the Sioux were more
powerful, and more feared by
other tribes, than the American
military.
• As American settlement, and the
transcontinental railroad, cut
further into Sioux territory
(pictured on the left), there were
increasing skirmishes between the
tribes and settlers

5. The Allotment Act (1887)
• An effort to incorporate American Indians
into the national body via citizenship
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• Policy that moved to dissolve tribal
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• Legislation aimed to dissolve tribal
ownership of land and give (or “allot”) 160
acres to individual heads of household and
sell off remainder of land
• Arguments that this would help protect the
land (encouraging Native people to
understand private-property) seemed shallow
as Natives lost about 2/3rds of their land base
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(90 Million acres)
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• The educational arm of the policy moved to
get American Indian children to study at off
reservation boarding schools. Zitkala-Sa was
part of this generation of children to move
away from home, learn English, and negotiate
a new world for her people

6. Colonial Education:The
Boarding School Project
• “Kill the Indian and save
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the man” Richard Pratt-
Carlisle Indian School
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• Children forbidden to
speak Native tongue
• Long hair was clipped
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• Forbidden to practice any
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traditional
cultural/religious practices

7. The English Language-Colonial
Oppressor and Tribal Liberator
• The English language has been the... tongue of colonial discoveries, racial
cruelties, invented names, the [false representation] of tribal cultures... and the
unheard literature of dominance in tribal communities; at the same time, this
mother tongue of [colonialism] has been a language of invincible imagination
and liberation for many tribal people in the [contemporary] world. English, a
language of paradoxes, learned under duress by tribal people at mission and
federal schools, was one of the languages that carried the vision and shadows
of the Ghost Dance, the religion of renewal, from tribe to tribe on the vast
plains at the end of the nineteenth century . . . . English, that coercive
language of federal boarding schools, has carried some of the best stories of
endurance, the shadows of tribal [survival and resistance], and now that same
language of dominance bears the creative literature of distinguished [Native]
authors in the cities . . . . [whose] literature could be the new ghost dance
literature, the shadow literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance.
(105–6) Gerald Vizenor

8. Zitkala-Sa (1876-1938)
• Was part of this boarding
school generation
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• The autobiographical
stories we read (published
in Atlantic Monthly in
1900) described her youth
and boarding school
experience to a white-
middle class Northeastern
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9. Writing questions for you to
answer on Facebook!
• Although Zitkala-Sa is writing her autobiography, she takes
dramatic license to make her readers sympathize with the
plight of American Indians. Consider:
• Do you see any similarities between her writing strategies (and
criticism) and that of Harriet Beecher Stowe? Consider, for
instance, our discussion of the way Sentimental fiction worked,
emotionally, on a reader.
• How does Zitkala-Sa describe her youthful education with her
mother compared to her boarding school education? How might
a Northeastern reader (who has read Thoreau and Emerson)
react to her description of a “natural education” compared to the
boarding school education?

10. Writing questions for you to
answer on Facebook!
• Although Zitkala-Sa is writing her autobiography, she takes
dramatic license to make her readers sympathize with the
plight of American Indians. Consider:
• Do you see any similarities between her writing strategies (and
criticism) and that of Harriet Beecher Stowe? Consider, for
instance, our discussion of the way Sentimental fiction worked,
emotionally, on a reader.
• How does Zitkala-Sa describe her youthful education with her
mother compared to her boarding school education? How might
a Northeastern reader (who has read Thoreau and Emerson)
react to her description of a “natural education” compared to the
boarding school education?