deals with the author, Zitkala-Sa’s, retellings of old Native American legends, focusing
specifically on the trickster Iktomi. Representing the malleable nature of mankind’s
will to survive and thrive, Iktomi moves among these stories causing mischief that
helps to form many of the rules, laws, and guidelines that governed life for the natives.
These types of legends are common among “primitive” people as they try to explain the
mysteries of their world. What is interesting about Zitkala-Sa’s tales is that they deal
with a time when the world was changing from the gods and spirits and the beginning
of Earth to a time when men would walk and thrive on its surface. These tales precede
a section dealing with a change of a similar nature. The Native American folk tales
illustrate how a transformation in civilization occurs naturally and peacefully, as
man inherits the Earth from nature. The problem arises when people like Iktomi use
unorthodox or unethical methods to force the change in their favor. Zitkala-Sa shows
how such men end up changing the world in negative ways; in the case of stories about
Old Man Coyote or Iktomi, things like death, disease, and segregation occur as a direct
result of their meddling. To explain why the Great Spirit does not give food feely to
man, but makes him toil to receive it from the Earth, she tells of Iktomi’s deceptive tears
that “No longer moved the hand of the Generous Giver. They were selfish tears. The
Great Spirit does not heed them ever”. As man gradually assimilates himself to his
surrounding, he attempts to peacefully adapt, but, as Zitkala-Sa notes, some men ruin
things for everyone.
Zitkala-Sa’s second section brings the tradition of Iktomi’s tricky manipulative
nature and places it into the spirit of the white man who seeks to expand into the frontier,
displacing the natives in the process. Writing at the end of the era where this expansion
took place, Zitkala-Sa forces the reader to acknowledge the actual consequences of the
changes Cooper, Crane, and Brown were writing about and advocating. In her stories
the last remnant of her native people are tricked away from their homes in the interest
of “civilizing” them. Tempted with red apples and taken away by the very trains that
brought civilization west, Zitkala-Sa represents the final product of the white man’s need
to socialize the North American continent. Stripped of her name, her “savage” clothes
and her native language, Zitkala-Sa comes to a stop in the final product of American
expansion, a country where there is no longer any wilderness.
This is the ultimate transformation that many of books of the era advocated at
the time, though not one of them could have anticipated the results such a change would
have. Certainly James Fenimore Cooper, who portrayed honorable Natives among the
savage ones in The Prairie, would not have wanted the entire culture snuffed out, and
Charles Brockden Brown, in highlighting the insanity of natural seclusion during the
events of his novel, Wieland, must not have wanted his country to go insane with the
notion of destroying the mysterious wilderness around them. While the transformations
depicted in these works are generally beneficial to the characters, the actual changes that
occurred in our country because of these attitudes where anything but positive. American
Indian Stories closes with the Native giving up the last of his land, “The old chieftain
sighed, but made no comment. Words were vain. He pressed his indelible thumb mark,
his signature it was, upon the deed, and drove home with his son,” and giving in to the
futility of opposing the expansion of the white man.
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