Zitkala Sa, Helen Hunt Jackson, and "Noble Savage"

Seeing how this is the first post on this blog and I'm not entirely sure as to what is expected of me here, I'll just quickly summarize what I have read in an effort to get something on paper to prove that I read the articles.

Zitkala Sa was an Indian woman who was educated by white men in the late 1800's who later acted as an advocate for Woman's Rights and Native American Rights, as well. She lived in the early 1900's as well, and she wrote an autobiography. The autobiography is of her as a child and she frequently speaks of her mother's hatred of the "Paleface" white men that were making life difficult for the Native Americans back then. Around this time, the Federal Government "closed" the frontier, which meant that they were no longer just giving out land out west. The government was also corralling Native Americans into reservations to keep them in check, and then established educational programs to essentially "kill the Indian" in them and to "keep the man". She fell into a coma and passed away in 1938.

The Helen Hunt Jackson excerpt was from her book "A Century of Dishonor." She was born in 1830 and died in 1885, only 4 years after her book "A Century of Dishonor" was published. When "A Century of Dishonor" was published, the federal government passed the Dawes Act to help investigate into the security an well being of those Indians on a reservation. The Dawes Act was also responsible for breaking Tribes apart and sticking Indians together with small family units instead of communities, which is ironic because the Dawes Act was meant to help the Tribes stay strong as a whole. We tried to inject our culture plan into theirs and it didn't work.

The "Noble Savage" is a derogatory term that was adapted in the 1800's to describe the Indian people. It was meant to imply that the Indian people were simple, but that is only because we never took the time to get to know their culture. To me, calling an Indian or a native of a specific Geographic area a "Noble Savage" is like calling a lion a "big kitty". You are just devolving the true nature of the jungle cat to a level that you are willing to accept and ignoring all of the other parts that make up the whole. Frankly, it's downright insulting and I certainly wouldn't want somebody calling me that.

~Kyric NeonSilver (Richard Hassinger)