Cont(r)acting Whiteness: The Language of Contagion in the Autobiographical Essays of Zitkala-Ša

TLDR: The Atlantic Monthly published three autobiographical essays by Dakota Sioux author Zitkala-Ša that recount her experiences with Indian boarding schools in the last decades of the nineteenth century as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: I early 1900, ‘the atlantic monthly’ published three autobiographical essays by Dakota Sioux author Zitkala-Ša that recount her experiences with Indian boarding schools in the last decades of the nineteenth century.1 The essays are characteristic of The Atlantic Monthly in both their literary quality and the contribution they provide to the cultural construction of the “American experience,” yet they distinguish themselves by challenging preferred narratives of that experience. The January 1900 issue, in which Zitkala-Ša’s premier essay appears, leads with the first installment of another autobiography, that of William James Stillman, an artist and writer whose standard approach to the American success story confirms readers’ generic expectations and sense of national identity. Two chapters of Mary Johnston’s popular novel To Have and to Hold also accompany “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” but unlike Zitkala-Ša, Johnston prefers a literary account of Anglo-Indian contact “In Which an Indian Forgives and Forgets,” the title of Chapter 31. Barbara Chiarello observes that Stillman’s, Johnston’s, and other Atlantic Monthly contributions by Anglo Americans upheld the publication’s reputation as “a respected journal that reflected and (re)produced American ideologies” (9). “By appearing in the Atlantic,” Chiarello suggests, “Zitkala-Ša’s essays [too] may have done just that” but with the distinct purpose “to transform” (9, 8). To Chiarello, “resistance literature” like that of Zitkala-Ša “functions