A History of American Literature

298 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

found herself watched by the “scornful and curious eyes” of the other, white

passengers. At school, shortly after her arrival there, she was forced to have her “thick

braids” cut off, even though her mother had taught her that only cowards or

mourners have short hair. It is a powerful paradigm of the humiliation and confusion

she experienced, as she was rudely introduced to the manners and beliefs of the

white world. Bonnin found herself lost, unmoored in the old Indian world of the

West, whenever she returned there, she tells the reader. But she was equally adrift

and lonely in what she had believed would be the new “wonderful land” of the East.

It was not a wonderful land at all, but a bleak one inhabited by “a cold race whose

hearts were frozen hard with prejudice.” Bonnin never lost this sense of being a

stranger in two strange lands, an alien living between cultures. Her aim, like

Eastman’s, was somehow to mediate between them: by explaining to whites the

Indian need for justice, by revealing to anyone the power and necessity of the Indian

traditions. So, in 1901, she published Old Indian Legends. “I have tried,” she wrote in

the introduction to this book, “to transplant the native spirit of these tales – root and

all – into the English language, since America in the last few centuries has acquired

a second tongue.” And twenty years later she produced a larger, revised work,

American Indian Stories, in which she used both fiction and autobiography to

pursue her project of transplanting one culture, translating one language, into

another. The first Native American woman to write her own story without

assistance, Bonnin stood, not only between Indian and white societies, but between

the oral culture of the Indian past and the literate culture that would dominate its

future. As her work on Indian legend suggests, she firmly believed that the political

rights of future generations would be on shallow ground if they were not securely

rooted in the remembrance and reverent rehearsal of the older, oral traditions.

To that extent, she was trying to build a bridge between separate generations as well

as divided cultures.

Mary Austin (1868–1934) was born into a typical Midwestern family in Illinois.

But like José Martí, she saw it as her mission to turn American culture away from the

Anglo-American traditions of the east coast and toward the Native American and

Indian traditions of the Southwest. Like Gertrude Bonnin and Charles Eastman, she

saw herself as a mediator between cultures. She collected, preserved, and encouraged

the continuation of American Indian and Hispanic folk arts; she published studies

of American Indian songs in The American Rhythm (1923); and collected Indian

songs and original poems in Children Sing in the Far West (1928). Like many region-

alists of the time, she saw place as a profound determinant of character. Moving to

California at the age of 18, living after that in New Mexico (where she continued her

study of the Indians), she wrote continually and lovingly about life and landscape in

the West: a region that “if it had a history,” she said, “nobody could recount it” – and

where the “plants had no names” that her “Middlewestern botany could supply.”

And like many writers of the period, especially female ones, she wrote about the

condition of women and how to change it. “There was something you could do

about unsatisfactory conditions besides being heroic or a martyr to them,” Austin

observed, “something more satisfactory than enduring or complaining, and that was

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