Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-17-2024

Abstract

In American Indian Stories, Zitkála-Šá, also known by her Anglicized and married name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, describes her early life and tells allegorical fiction through short stories and an essay; her early childhood experiences growing up on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota, her first journey to “Red Apple Country,” the cutting of her hair, and the legends of her people are all detailed by Zitkála-Šá. American Indian Stories represents both the rich oral traditions of the Yankton Sioux as well as the tribulations of the assimilation process on Native children while simultaneously evincing the bewitching writing style of Zitkála-Šá. As any terrific book is simply an amalgamation of the words and grammatical structures which it contains, this study focuses on the grammar and usage in Zitkála-Šá’s writing and seeks to identify the most common sentence patterns, sentence structures, mood, voice, and verb tense she employed in her writing. The method utilized the Reed-Kellogg system of sentence diagraming to map a visual-spatial depiction of Zitkála-Šá’s writing patterns. The results show that Zitkála-Šá used mostly a mixture of complex and compound-complex indicative sentences in the simple past tense and active voice; likewise, the results demonstrate the author’s predilection for the use of adverbial clauses and participial phrases.

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