American Indian stories and cultural narratives

Zitkala's story reminded me of the beautiful song in the Disney movie of Pocahontas where Pocahontas tells her white lover that even though he may consider her a 'savage' she knows far more in her particular way than he ever will. Value constructs of knowledge differ from culture to culture, and even the definition of conceptual truth changes within one culture from one generation to a next. What we may believe in one year, may be shown to be mistaken in the coming year or more, and similarly, as we develop and as our cultures changes, we pass through certain experiences that make us revise our original opinions and see yet another form of 'truth' that is so contrary and different to the past. Being ego and ethno-centered, our reality may seem the best and truest one and we may perceive others from diverse cultures to be alien and misinformed. Oftentimes, we forget that humanity is a wide, heterogeneous race; that we are far more similar than distinct; and that people can never be categorized. Zitkala's story indicates how both native Indian and White individual often seem to forget that truth.

Zitkala is a remarkable writer, and her Western education, financed her by the White race, serves as tool for wreaking her revenge upon a white race that she considers barbarous, patronistic, and simple. As well as decadent and false.

As far as she sees it, the White race has caused her nation deliberate and endless suffering propelled by their supremacist sentiments and drive towards power. The same people that influenced them to turn towards God and not to kill likewise murdered arbitrarily and plundered at random (violating another of their 10 commandments "Not to steal").

Her Western-educated brother had lost his job due to his efforts to right White settlers' injustice upon the Indian settlers: "The Indian cannot complain to the Great Father in Washington without suffering outrage for it here. Dawee tried to secure justice for our tribe in a small matter, and to-day you see the folly of it." This ubiquitous, almighty 'Great Father in Washington ' had sent a White person in his stead who had 'taken away his pen'. And just as similarly, Indian scholars and individuals of merit were replaced in their various positions by White individuals who, ineffective though they may be, had to feed their fair wives. This injustice and arrogance, Zitkala saw, were deeply entrenched characteristics of the White race.

They passed through the Indian schools marveling at the fact that Indian children could actually absorb knowledge:

Many specimens of civilized peoples visited the Indian school. The city folks with canes and eyeglasses, the countrymen with sunburnt cheeks and clumsy feet, ... Both sorts of these Christian palefaces were alike astounded at seeing the children of savage warriors so docile and industrious. (web)

And their response, as Zitkala saw it, was their self-congratulatory attitude that it was they who had persuaded and enabled the Indian to learn, as well as that it was their philanthropy that had accorded a primitive race something of the progress of Western civilization.

Complacency and feelings of superiority have always got the so-called White, Western-race into trouble from their occupation in Middle Eastern countries to invading communist regions, such as Vietnam, whom they felt assured would willingly kow-tow to their ideology and instantly absorb Western values and opinions. The problem is that these attitudes are not so much deliberate and intentional as more psychological and, oftentimes, unconscious, implanted there by both socialization and by our limited experience with the world.