Zitkala SA’s American Indian Stories, a native American women voice

Abstract EN

Autobiography has been recognized as the tool with which marginalized writers can reveal gaps of experience ignored by hegemonic culture.

The text under study is Zitkala Sa’s American Indian Stories.

The Native American autobiography addresses the issues as identity and history re-writing.

However, it is important to note that it differs significantly from the Euro-American model and instead offers a new definition of the genre.

As Native American women who wrote from the margins of American dominant culture, Zitkala Sa’s autobiography exhibits subversive strategies designed to tell not only her life story but that of her community as well.

Her choice to focus on her community by mixing genres and voices in her narratives reveal her belief that self cannot be expressed in isolation.

Zitkala Sa has taken the colonizer’s tool—writing—and made it her own by combining it with her Native culture.