A Divided Self but with a Double Vision: Zitkala-Ša's and Mourning Dove’s Authorial Experiences

The time span going from the second half of the 19th century up until the first decades of the 20th century is commonly referred to as a “transitional era” for Native Americans living in the United States. This label tends to be opted for especially because of the multifarious array of assimilationist policies pursued by the US federal government. The ultimate aim of assimilation was that of utterly despoiling Native people of their own traditional languages, cultures and religious beliefs and practices in order for them to end up leaning towards the main tenets of US hegemonic culture. The two Native authors this dissertation focuses on, Zitkala-Ša (1876 – 1938) and Mourning Dove (1884/1888 – 1936), happened to live and write precisely during this transitional era. Hence, they were to personally experience what it meant for a Native individual to try to balance the two main cultural spheres of influence that indigenous people all across the United States had to engage with at the time, namely Native traditions and Euro-American culture inculcated through assimilation. While living with such a divided self might have felt sorrowful and bewildering at times, both authors nevertheless managed to convert their own hybridity into a valuable resource, as proven by their own lives and literary contributions. Indeed, this strategic hybridity of theirs proved pivotal to their clever subversion of US hegemonic discourses, since this objective was accomplished precisely through the linguistic, cultural and rhetorical means Zitkala-Ša and Mourning Dove had been provided with by those same US dominant forces they were actually trying to counteract in their own literary output. This process of undermining can be clearly observed in the two works of literature addressed by this dissertation. These are Zitkala-Ša’s three semi-autobiographical essays "Impressions of an Indian Childhood", "The School Days of an Indian Girl" and "An Indian Teacher Among Indians" (1900) and Mourning Dove’s novel "Cogewea, The Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range" (1927).