Titles: The Great Spirit and The Trial Path
Author: Zitikala-Sa
Type: Native American Stories
Culture: Siouan, Lakota, Native American
Sex: Female
Date Finished: 10th August 2010
TheGreatSpirit
This beautiful story is about a few, yet so many, occurrences in one of Zitikala-Sa’s many days. Telling first of how she loves, filled by her spirit, “to roam leisurely among the green hills”, admiring the natural beauty of the blue sky, the clouds, the river, the flowers and all of natures creatures. Reflecting on her ancestors, admiring a stone statue of “Inyan our great-great-grandfather, older than the hill he rested on”. She ventures upon the path to the Indian Village, where at a cabin she is met by her beloved dog, and comes to listen to a “native preacher”, though he speaks “strangely the jangling phrases of a bigoted creed”. She criticises the converted man and his converted people in the way they believe such Dogma and superstition, falsely believing they are separated in existence because of their beliefs, brought to them by missionaries. She knows her spirit; she is her spirit and is fully aware of her microcosmic place in the Great Spirit, praising the sun, moon and stars and all of God’s creatures.
For me, reading this story was a perfect experience, as I felt completely in tune with Zitikala-Sa’s experience and have shared similar feelings and thoughts, completely spiritual, “excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers.” Her way of living and experiencing is of the most pure kind, in that she lets what is in nature guide her, the nature of her spirit, the nature surrounding her, which to me is far far greater than any belief in any script; any religion; any set practice. The line “My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand.” Demonstrates that she is perfect and perfectly little in the greatness of existence, not afraid at how small she is, and always identifying with God; the Great Spirit; the infinite, like the sky.
TheTrialPath
This story, told by an old women sitting in a tepee to her people, is about the night upon which the old woman’s older grandfather died, at the hands of the younger grandfather. In a heated frenzy of disagreement, one brother killed the other. A messenger rushed from the grave site to sit by the side of the story-tellers father, unbidden. The chieftain decided that the father of the dead man should decide in which way the killer be tortured or killed. He decides the killer should have to ride a wild horse across a long distance, from them to the centre tepee, sparing his own life if he should succeed. The old woman was the lover of the killer, and she cried to him not to fall, to choose life and her. The killer rides the rampant beast, and successfully makes it to the centre tent, the horse conquered. The trial ends, but years later the grandfather dies and the horse is killed at the grave, and both are said to travel together in spirit to the next life. The people go to sleep.
Zitikala-Sa’s writing style in this tale is highly entertaining and runs as smoothly as Muddy Waters’ 1955 band, in my opinion. Her writing is filled with lovely Siouan imagery, which is poetic and brave in nature, and each sentence flows onto the next without hesitation, painting new details onto the same image. For example:
“It was an autumn night on the plain. The smoke-lapels of the cone-shaped tepee flapped gently in the breeze. From the low night sky, with its myriad fire points, a large bright star peeped in at the smoke-hole of the wigwam between its fluttering lapels, down upon two Dakotas talking in the dark. The mellow stream from the star above, a maid of twenty summers, on a bed of sweetgrass, drank in with her wakeful eyes.”
To me, reading this story is more like a film script in the way it paints for visual use, simple yet colourful and in perfect detail. The tepees, Dakota Indians and the metaphor: “The mellow stream from the star above, a maid of twenty summers, on a bed of sweetgrass, drank in with her wakeful eyes”, are extremely reminiscent of Siouan times, and generate a feeling that their tribe was deeply rooted in the moment of their time, bravely and creatively.