Fire of Eden: Zitkala-Sa's Bitter Apple

Fire of EdenZitkala-Ša's Bitter Apple Catherine Kunce (bio) In the largely autobiographical "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" (1900–1901), Lakota Zitkala-Ša tells of missionaries enticing her to attend their mission school, promising the eight-year-old her fill of apples if she left her Yankton reservation. What appears to be a textual detail actually signals Zitkala-Ša's retelling of the Garden of Eden story. In casting her mother as God, her brother as Adam, the missionaries as the Serpent, and herself as Eve, Zitkala-Ša reveals the catastrophic consequences of forced relinquishment of her language, and subsequently of her culture. Fighting fire with fire through her subversive and extended metaphor, Zitkala-Ša articulates, through the oppressor's own language, the hypocritical and sadistic underpinnings of an attempted silencing of her native tongue. Zitkala-Ša ("Red Bird") was born as Gertrude Simmons in 1876 on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota. There she lived with her mother (her white father abandoned the family before his daughter's birth). Missionaries, following radical assimilation policies of the day, coaxed the young girl away from her home. She attended the Quakers' boarding school, White's Manual Labor Institute, in Wabash, Indiana, for a year and a half. While attending Earlham College, Zitkala-Ša excelled in debate. It seems deeply ironic that she would later teach at the Carlisle Indian School, where children were brutalized in order to "Kill the Indian and save the man!" (Davidson and Norris xvii). As a talented violinist and writer, the young woman made a big splash with East Coast society when she began performing and writing works for the Atlantic Monthly, which first featured [End Page 73] her autobiographical stories over a period of three months in 1900. Although after her 1902 marriage to Raymond Bonnin she never again wrote for the Atlantic, Zitkala-Ša continued to write, to produce an opera, and to promote Indian rights. Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris point out that conspicuously absent from Zitkala-Ša's autobiographical works is mention of the massacre at "Wounded Knee and the murder of Sitting Bull, [which] occurred while she was at home on the Yankton reservation on a school break" in 1890 (xii). But to decry the atrocity would have marked Zitkala-Ša as an enemy of the culture committing the atrocity. Additionally, other writings reveal Zitkala-Ša's cognizance of the importance of calculation in administering effective counterattacks.1 Jeanne Smith alludes to Zitkala-Ša's strategy, noting, "In order to fight back against the white cultural powers which threaten her, [Zitkala-Ša] [learns] that she must fight in their medium: spoken and written English" (55). So too does Zitkala-Ša fight back with allusions to a religion that justifies silencing Indigenous languages. Zitkala-Ša's frequently veiled yet persistent connecting of her own experience to the biblical Fall displays her ingenuity in reconciling her white audience's sensibilities with the more urgent need to instruct that audience about the cataclysmic results of religious hypocrisy. In short, Zitkala-Ša offers her white audience a brilliantly subversive recitation of the missionaries' own teachings. Before the invasion of missionaries, Zitkala-Ša enjoyed an Edenic existence, marred only by her mother's memory of white barbarity, which not only incurred the deaths of Zitkala-Ša's uncle and sister but defrauded Lakotas of their land. In spite of her mother's resultant taciturn and frequently somber demeanor, Zitkala-Ša at seven was "as free as the wind that [blows her] hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer" (8). As Martha J. Cutter observes, "Zitkala-Ša portrays a type of Eden, a world of perfect peace and cooperation between humankind and nature, a world where food is not earned by the sweat of the brow and language is not distorted" (n.p.). Untouched by cruelty, Zitkala-Ša was taught "no fear save that of intruding [herself] on others" (8). Drawing water from the river, roaming the hills, and playing with friends, the young girl lived close to the [End Page 74] land, her mother, and the local elders, one of whom, in his affection and respect of Zitkala-Ša, did not correct...