“Any Room Left Out There on the Frontier?”  1925: Zane Grey, The Vanishing American  What other Americans were “vanishing”?  American urban population doubling every decade  Protestant majority threatened by millions of Catholic & Jewish immigrants into cities  Emigrants move westward (now by RR)  Oklahoma territory invaded, treaty broken, Cherokees & related tribes forced into system of private property

An Icon – For Better or for Worse  Romanticization of Native American  James Fenimore Cooper  Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Remington  More realistic portrayals  Mark Twain, Horace Greeley  Popular Imagination: identification with landscape?  Symbol of “vanishing America” (Frederick Jackson Turner)  Anthropological interest at turn of century  Franz Boas, Elsie Clew Parsons, et al. collect “folklore”  Scientific and Social Scientific Approaches  What was it really like to be an Indian in 1491? What was it really like to be an Indian in 1491

U.S. Indian “Policy”  Contrast history of Eastern, Midwestern, Far Western & Southwestern Indian tribes during 19 th century  Removal, reservation, re-removal, rebellion?  “No council to be held with the Indians... The men are to be slain whenever and wherever they can be found” – Genl. James Carleton, Union Army in Southwest during Civil War  “The idea that a handful of wild, half-naked, thieving, murdering savages shouold be dignified with the attributes of a nation enter into reaties and claim a country 500 miles wide by 1000 miles long because they hunted buffalo, might do for a beautiful reading in Cooper’s novels or Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” but is unsuited to the intelligence and justice of this age or the natural rights of mankind.” – U.S. govt. official in 1868  Cultural pathways intact, disturbed, or destroyed?  Navajo, some Pueblo peoples & NW tribes only ones still “in place”  Creation of Bureau of Indian Affairs

Assimilation  Movement to “Americanize” Indians in “Indian schools”  Make Native American into Jeffersonian yeoman farmer?  “We must kill the savage to save the man!” – Richard Henry Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania  Zitkala-Sa taught at Carlisle School, later resented it  Accused of ingratitude  Her images of “Americanization” in Impressions of an Indian Childhood (1899)  Reflect experience of displaced rural worker in city?  Who is reading her in the Atlantic Monthly, and why “apples...”?  Is the “Indian” still vanishing?  Current demographics, social data  New Western History: Patricia Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest (1987)  Current cultural imagery  What does the “Indian” represent to the 21 st -century U.S.?

“Gertrude Bonnin” ( )  b. Pine Ridge, SD on Sioux reservation  White father (“Felker”)  Age 8: White’s Manual Labor Institute, IN  Santee School  Scholarship to Earlham College, IN  Violin scholarship to Boston Conservatory

Identity Politics  Took name “Zitkala-Sa” in adolescence  Used as pen name for Atlantic “Indian” articles  1902: m. Raymond Bonnin, mixed-blood Sioux w/BIA  Moved to Utah reservation  Civil rights activism  1916: moved to Wash DC  1926: founded National Council of American Indians  “Pan-Indian” identity  Citizenship, voting rights  Reorganization Act (1934)

Native American Writer, or American Writing About Natives?  Indian stories oral not text  Tribal traditions vary widely  Stripped of cultural context, are they real, or only romanticized?  e.g. is Pocohontas or “Hiawatha” an “Indian” story?